Best recommendation for non-Rank transfer?

[King Ghidorah]

I'm shopping around for some super 8 to video transfers and I'd rather not pay top dollar for the Rank transfer. Does anyone here have a good recommendation for a transfer method that is second only to Rank? By that I mean one of high quality that doesn't cost the Earth.

[Alex]

Probably Film and Video Transfers in Northridge California is a good place to try.

[Scott Spears]

A friend of mine ran across www.posthouse.com who is offering $135 and hour for Rank Transfers. That's amazingly cheap and I don't think can beat for the quality you'll get.

Also, you can try www.moviestuff.com for his DV-8 machine which is supposed to give near Rank quality. I forget the rates, but they're reasonable.

Good luck.

Scott

[King Ghidorah]

Thanks, I'll look into those!

[Alex]

Well Scott, just what are MovieStuff's rates?

[Corey D.]

It's www.moviestuff.tv not com. It's $20 per 50ft.

Here a direct link to the Sniper transfer section - http://www.moviestuff.tv/transfers.html

[Scott Spears]

Corey,

Thanks for the correction on .tv instead of .com. It's been a while since I'd been to the site. Also, thanks for the rate update.

Again, I should say that I've never used a workprinter or DV-8 sniper, but the results I've seen, especially for the price, seem good.

I left out Film and Video transfers which does great work. http://www.thetransferstation.com/

Scott

[Alex]

$20.00 a roll equals about how much an hour?

[Scott Spears]

That's a good question, Alex. Working at a rapid pace and still getting good results with 16mm in a Rank Telecine, I've transfered around 20 minutes of finished footage in an hour, so extraplating for Super-8 shot at 24fps that would be around 7 rolls, so that would be $140 an hour give or take a roll. Again, I'm just guessing here because I've never used Roger's workprinter service so it could come in at only 5 rolls and hour ($100) or it could balloon to 10 rolls ($200). If the later is true, then a Rank transfer might be the better route. Either way, it's an unsupervised transfer by the client. My above example of 16mm was a supervised transfer by myself and the director.

These are just guesses on my part, so do your own research and see what you come up with.

Long live Super-8.

Scott

[Alex]

Well, you've compared Roger's transfer price to the cheapest place for Rank Cintel, but most Rank Cintel places charge more than $135.00 an hour.
The normal low cost range for Rank Cintel transfers will be between $150 to $250 an hour, other Rank Cintel places even charge between $250-$400 an hour, and the ultra high-end places charge even more than that and may offer even higher end transfers than a Rank Cintel.

Also, most Rank Cintel Transfer facilities probably have a one hour minimum. Since the workprinter transfer moves at a slower speed, (I don't know if the workprinter Roger uses is more souped up and goes at real time or not) there probably is more time to get the color corrected more accurately on the first few frames of the scene without having to actually stop the transfer to do color and brightness adjustments.

A three to one Film to Tape transfer ratio can be difficult to achieve if your film has several different locations or different camera set-ups on the same cartridge.