ANAMORPHIC: HELP!

[dogstarman]

I need to know exactly what the process is for dealing with anamorphic footage if you are planning to have it transfered. I mean, assuming you had a decent anamorphic set-up for your camera, exactly where in the process of the transfer do they unsqeeze your image?

And what places will do this work? Help is appreciated. I know absolutely nothing about this because I never even considered dealing with this issue, but now I have a chance to and want to know if it's something I should bother with or if it's a big headache that will mean I have to deal with a bunch of B.S.

Thank you all, please help.

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[8th Man]

Well I know that Pro8mm does it since they sell and rent the lens package. It's unsqueezed during the telecine transfer and I assume they have complete control over that process. Meaning if you brought in something shot with a 1.75X , or a 2X squeeze or whatever they can adjust it to come out correctly to the right letterboxed ratio.
I bet most of the transfer houses can do this. I seem to remember asking Yale about it and although I don't recall the specific conversation, I think they said they could do it.
I plan on renting the pakage for a weekend just to play with it. I think it could be really interesting.

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PRM

[Matt Pacini]

Actually, I would bet that most transfer houses DO NOT do this!
The reason is that they would have to have the exact type lens you shot on, for the transfer.
Or course, the obvious answer is, start calling around to find out.

The other option is to stretch the image in Adobe AfterFX after you digitize the footage.

Matt Pacini

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[avortex]

Don't worry, here's the solution:

-Shoot your film with the 16:9 anamorphic lens.
-Rank it as usual.
-When you edit the film with Premiere, you can use these excellents plugins to convert the anamorphic images into letterboxed ones. Here's the link:
http://www.mykaskin.freeserve.co.uk/...s/plugins.html

Both are free, so...go for them!



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[mattias]

huh? isn't that extremely redundant? ok, the motion settings in premiere 5 weren't easy to tweak, but in version 6 you can just check the 16:9 box? anyway, wouldn't it be hard to find a 16:9 lens for super 8, considering that the format is newer than the newest super 8 camera? you could use a video camera adapter i guess, but those are *expensive*.

/matt

[dogstarman]

I think there is some confusion here about 16:9 vs. cinema widescreen, Cinemascope or whatever you want to call it.

Cinemascope/ widescreen in most cases is full scope (2x) 1.75x or some varriation.
(Though I admit at the moment I have no idea what this appeture rate would be for Super8... any takers?)

16:9 was developed for television (read: VIDEO) and some people have insisted on shooting Super-16 in that aspect ratio...


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[8th Man]

Well it's true that the 16:9 term only seems to have started in relation to newer wider televisions and video related material but it's pretty close to the 1.85 projected film ratio that we see from most theatrical features. Super16 is a 1.66 ratio that when blown up to 35mm gets a tiny bit of cropping to become1.85.
Widescreen is a 2.35 to1 aspect ratio which realy gets you a really wide paying field to compose on and I think that's what you're looking for.
I believe it takes a 1.75x lens to turn the 3 by 4 aspect ratio of S8/16/35mm into 2.35 widescreen. I could be wrong about that, but I do know that's what Pro8mm sells.

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PRM