Super-8 Looks great on Movie Theatre Video Projection Systems...

[Mike Buckles]

Kewl...it's really fun to discuss this stuff with people who really film for a living...makes me feel like i'm in the presence of Hollywood royalty! [img]cool.gif[/img]

[Greg Crawford]

Have you compared the quality of "Film Stuff's" transferred and projected on the Big screen?

I've done Rank transfers and used Rogers service but never projected Film Stuff footage, onto the big screen. But at $12.00 a roll, you can't beat the price.

[Alex]

Getting Back on Topic here, sort of. [img]eek.gif[/img]

There is a growing popularity of the "shoot one cartridge of Super-8 film", hand it over to the film festival, and then see it for the first time at the actual festival screening.

Flicker may not have been the first, but they have definitely made this event popular, and many others are now doing it. But Flicker has taken the process one step further. Flicker made a high quality film transfer to video and then projected the video with an ultra-high quality video projection system in a theatre that seats six-hundred.

Before their last such screening, I had suggested to Flicker/LA that since they now had the films on Video well before the festival date, why not put the sound on the video BEFORE the festival.

They liked that small contribution of mine, and in the process, they have perfected the optimal way to create excitement for the "In Camera Edited Super-8 Film".

Other film festivals still show the original super-8 on a projector, with wild sound thrown in.
I don't mind the projection aspect of it, since it is film and many super-8 afficionado's want to project the film anyway.

It's the minimizing of the contribution of the soundtrack that bothers me. Sound can contribute half or sometimes more than half of the impact of the story/mood.

Normally, wild sound won't be as effective as planned sound. However, Wild Sound can be "wildly" entertaining, and the surprising "wild sound" result can be very good. Wild sound played while a film is projected can teach us that sound affects moving images in ways we hadn't considered, and as a result, wild sound can be very educational.

But at some point, planned sound should also be projected while showing the Super-8 festival films. Show the films with wild sound if necessary, but in addition, transfering the film to video and then adding the sound to the video makes a lot of sense.

As long as the video projector that projects the image is high-quality, the result is a video image that looks like film, because it came from film. The planned soundtrack usually enhances the film, and in the process, enhances Super-8.

[Alex]

HenrySuper-8 posted some pictures that had been transferred by Movie-Stuff,is that who you were referring to?

They looked really good. I doubt there is a huge difference. So that could be an excellent add-on market for movie-stuff transfer system. (Although the closer to real time, the better, from a festival point of view, IMO)

The film festivals that are serious about super-8 would own both a high quality video projection system and a movie-stuff transfer system, or would have an excellent relationship with the local film transfer house in their town.

Either way, it would take Super-8 to the next level. Although my film wasn't shown at the last flicker festival in LA because it wasn't finished until the day before the event, I managed to shoot 3,400 single frames and sync them up, in camera, to the Alphabet song.

I think that type of effort would have inspired many others. So the forumula of the in-camera shoot, develop, and screen at a festival is really a breakthrough. I just couldn't bear to spend a couple of days working on a project and then have it projected and possibly scratched.