digital workprints for master cutting of film

[Konton]

With everything moving to the digital arena for editing, and the price of a high quality transfer or optical blowup still expensive, I was curious if people would be interested in cheap digital workprints.

For this to happen all your film needs to be spliced on one reel. A cheap low quality transfer of your film is made at crystal sync 24fps. The transfer includes frame number information on each frame. A digital video file is then made of your footage. Your audio is "resolved" digitally and put in sync with your digital video workprint. You now can edit your audio and film at the same time with NLE equipment.

Once the editing is complete and your audio is perfect, you use the frame info to create a master edit list. This edit list is used to edit your master film. Once the master film is edited, you can either:

1) Have the film sound stripped and then transfer the audio to the sound stripe
2) Get a contact print made of your edited footage. Have that sound stripped and then transfer the audio to the sound stripe
3) Get a high quality transfer done of your edited footage and sync up the audio in whatever format is your final output

The only reason you would want to do this is to save money and make editing easier. Anyway please let me know what you all think.

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Konton the Grey

[MovieStuff]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Courier, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Konton:
A cheap low quality transfer of your film is made at crystal sync 24fps. The transfer includes frame number information on each frame.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Since super 8 has no frame numbers, how are the numbers on the video copy going to help when you go to edit your original film later on? I guess I'm not clear on the concept.

Roger

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Roger Evans
MovieStuff
http://www.afterimagephoto.tv/moviestuff.html

[Konton]

Super 8mm Gang Synchronizer with frame counter. You use it to actually find on your film where the cuts need to occur.

Of course you are right that without a way to to reference the frame numbers this is useless, but I see the frame counters come and go on Ebay all the time for around $20 to $50. I think there is a motorized one on Ebay right now.

Let me know if you have any other questions. You know if your Work Printer 1 or 2 did have a digital frame counter it could be used in the same manner to make workprints as Pedro asked about.

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Konton the Grey

[Matt Pacini]

Hey Roger, the coolest thing in the world would be this:
On the super-duper Super 8 camera you were talking about designing, how about exposing keycode of some kind on the film inside the camera?
Would that be the coolest, or what?
Or maybe SMPTE time code ever so many frames...
I know, difficult, with software issues, etc., instead of straight-ahead mechanical wizardry, but it's something to dream about.

Matt Pacini

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[Konton]

I agree. Then again I also recall reading a website where someone wanted to modify the camera to add an optical track. That would be cool too. The problem with all of that is you limit yourself to one camera. The nice thing about post-production equipment like the Work Printer or digial resolving software is that we don't limit ourselves to specific production equipment. We fix it all in post. Just an opinion.

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Konton the Grey

[#Pedro]

Printing digital or whatever info during shooting on the film, f.e. between the sprocket holes, would be cool and helpful for shure. But in practical editing you would be limited to 50 ft, on the next roll there would be the same frame codings as on the first. Only if you could set a kinda initial value or sth like that, individually for each roll you load, it would work. But once forgotten to manipulate this index printer when loading rolls, the confusion would be perfect again. What could help would be a coupling with the cardrige sensor that resets the footage counter. With every reset, the index preset would have to be increased, in order to distinguish each roll.
The work printer afterwards would have to regognize the coding in the sprocket area, as well as the master editor to find the frames to be cutted.
Pedro

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[MovieStuff]

This is where mag striped film would be SO handy. All the information for each frame could be put on the mag stripe and a simple reader could transform that information into visible numbers for use during film transfer to video and later on the edit bench. Life would be so sweet.

Roger

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Roger Evans
MovieStuff
http://www.afterimagephoto.tv/moviestuff.html

[Matt Pacini]

Yeah, but if you exposed SMPTE WITH the date, that would not only address all the problems Pedro just addressed, but also, you wouldn't need any special equipment.
You could just use the Workprinter, with it's enlarged gate, and widen your camera to include the extra information in each frame, and there it would be.
When you do your final edit, just crop the extra info on the side out.

No extra hardware or process needed!

Matt Pacini

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[#Pedro]

For master cutting, the only info needed is the frame number, to refer to the cutting list. And this frame number must be in parallel to the frame, not 18 frames ahead or sth else. And it must be extractable when the film is in pause position (not running). That?s why I don?t think that magnetic recording would be solution. The way would be optical printing of index numbers under or above the camera gate, that could be read out easyly. I know, that this is very complicated, thinking about the camera constructions, the place the claw mechanism needs, the neccessary frame for the film to garantee pan focus etc.

Therefore, printing the index numbers only into the working copy on video and counting them mechanically during master cutting, is the more realistic solution.

Pedro

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