The Possibilities of Transferred Footage

[MrObvious]

Hi everyone. I just wanted to say that I recently had the opportunity to color correct some of my Rank-transferred 16mm footage and I was blown away. Since they did a "best lite" transfer, basically they tried to retain as much information from the film as possible with very flat brightness and contrast. The result is that there are so many options in color correction.

In After Effects: I cranked up the color saturation, cranked up the contrast, and added a touch of brightness and it looks fricken fantastic. Rendered as a split screen (on the Avid) the original X-fer looks washed out and pathetic next to the beautiful crisp color of the effected footage.

So why am I babbling about this 16mm stuff? Because when I reviewed MovieStuff's WorkPrinter I thought the video looked a little flat compared to the original footage. Now I realize that's a good thing! I haven't done any work on the super8 footage but I know that it could look really good with a little tweaking.

Take it easy!

Marc S. (AKA Bloomsday)

[MovieStuff]

Hi, Marc!

Yeah, it's amazing what a little color correction and image enhancement can do. Matt Pacini turned me on to an amazing program called "Genuine Fractals" that is sort of a JPEG process in reverse. It analyses a lower res photo and fills in the missing detail by "faking it". The end results are stunning. I know it isn't really increasing the resolution but, to the naked eye, it looks just so much sharper that there is a "apparent" increase in resolution. The obvious application for Super 8 is something that I know he'll be experimenting with after I finish his WorkPrinter. I intend to also use it on our still photography business.

Roger

[Nigel]

It is amazing what a good colorist can do with your film while he Xfers it. You have more control than you could have ever tought. It helps to understand Printer Points too. Good Luck

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[MrObvious]

Indeed, a good color-corrected transfer would be the way to go if you had that kind of time, money, and access to facilities. There is no lab in St. Louis so I'm forced to send it out for unsupervised transfer.

I am still amazed at what you can do with a best-lite transfer in post. Cheap, powerful home video systems are a godsend to low-budget filmmakers.

Marc S.

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[Matt Pacini]

I'm hoping to set up my Workprinter from Roger, to be the next best thing.
I want to set it up, where after it digitizes the footage, it will automatically load the footage, frame by frame, and do color corection, enhancement, up-ressing, etc. for me.
It should be a really powerful system.
I can't wait!

Matt Pacini

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