I know this is basic but....

[Daniel Meador]

I am giving serious consideration to shooting some exteriors on an upcoming project with super 35 film. I've not shot film before. After telecine is the footage considered RAW. Do you have full leeway in post. What about degrading in post? Any resources anyone might recommend? What about 16mm film? How would 16mm project on a 60ft screen as opposed to RED or even 35mm film? What about the weaving of RED footage with 35mm or 16mm. I also will be purchasing PL mount lenses. What is BEST ....... RED primes vs ZEISS super speed lenses on an ARRI film camera. How well do lenses designed for digital (CP.2, etc) interface with a true 35 mm film camera.

[Christopher Mills]

Only addressing the lens question.. why not rent and see what you like?
that way you could compare a few types before you buy.

[Daniel Meador]

Your right of course. But I live far enough away from rental stores that I'd be paying for 2 days total for just the shipping alone. It starts getting expensive. I'm buying a Scarlet in the next 1 week. If I can get away with buying either Zeiss CP.2 or a RED lens AND have that be workable on an ARRI film camera then I've kept my costs down. I will be doing documentary work and it's just not workable based on where I live to be constantly shipping cameras and lenses back and forth when I need them. I'm completely in love with the look of film. I've got to get some exterior shots on 35mm or 16mm. Even if it's just the opening of the film.

[Daniel Meador]

I really like the softness of the zeiss CP.2. I like the interchangable mounts as well. I like the full frame sensor that zeiss lenes accomodate. But I've heard good things about the RED zoom lens too. What to do. What to do. But these lens may not be best for film. I don't know. I may just have to bite the bullet and drive to Berekley and rent for the day.

[Robert Hart]

Daniel. sooner or later there will be someone better qualidied than I to comment but here's something in the meantime.

To my limited knowledge, telecine off the negative will have been inverted to a positive image and will have "normal" eye comfortable contrast and colour rendition applied or as they say these days, "burned in". Telecine is a real-time process. As far as I know 1920 x 1080 resolution may be as good as it gets for telecine. You can edit and distribute from your telecine recording or data file whichever you have had it delivered in.

If you are after the full dynamic range of film and its full potential of detail, then you have the film digitally scanned, which is a much slower non-realtime process, uses up a lot of data storage and is costly. You receive your scans as a series of DPX files which are RAW images. It is up to you or your post production people to edit and grade the images to their best from the full available dynamic range which has been preserved.

A telecine copy to do an edit assembly from is cheaper than scanning all the film. The method is to edit from a telecine copy then have scans done only of the film you actually have used in the edit.

There will be people respond who do this for a living and will give you a better answer than I. Heed their advice, not mine.

Super16mm film v/s 35mm film or RED footage on a 60ft screen? It depends what media your final product is exhibited from, ie., 35mm distribution print in film projector, or electronic file exhibited via a digital projector.

Super16mm might be said to compare with 2K digital cinema cameras and the RED 4K/5K camera family to 35mm film. If you have not shot motion picture film previously, I would favour hiring a camera operator rather than do it yourself. With film, you do not see what you are going to get. You won't know if you have wasted your money until you receive the telecine or scans. (Now all we have to wait for is Blackmagic or RED to release a low cost digital scanner.)

[David Kruta]

Be VERY CAREFUL using RED lenses on film cameras - many of them have extended rear elements which work fine on digital but could damage the mechanics of film cameras.

[Matt W.]

Intercutting Red and film is pretty hard, trust me I have done it... But if you are very technical on set and in post it's possible--and a good post house can pull this off for you if you want, but generally it's a matter of crushing blacks a LOT, changing hue and saturation a lot and with precision and control, adding some blur and halation, adding grain, and shooting VERY carefully with digital so as to not introduce too much noise but also avoid clippy highlights at all cost. I matched two color checker charts in Color based on vectorscope and RGB parade and then applied the adjustment as a secondary on all the red clips in a timeline consisting primarily of 35mm--worked reasonably well. For whatever reason I find matching daylight footage is more difficult than 3200K and night exteriors; you see so much of the image that the flaws show right through.

Degraining film is harder than denoising digital footage since there's more grain, it's more random, and you lose some character with it. Technically digital beats film by quite a bit and on a low budget it's 99% of the time the best choice--but film looks better when resources are infinite. If you've never shot film it will be a LOT slower or look worse. Metering can be a pain and you need to test every stock for over and under....I say this having only shot a bit of 16mm myself so grain of salt...

Film can't be RAW as such (it's chemicals, not data) and even the best scan will be a raster file with all the limitations inherent--but a lot of lattitude can be recovered in scanning. Tree of Life was overexposed and shot on 3200K stock even during daylight scenes--but I am sure they had a pretty good budget for the scan and grade. If you don't underexpose too much it should be VERY flexible, but at a cost.

Red lenses are better technically than are superspeeds but superspeeds are tiny and have a lot of character. Bokeh is rougher than with most cinema lenses and close focus is poor, but they are small and fast. Wide open they have a character similar to coma or a strong classic soft but retain good resolution...definitely a divisive lens with tons of character; red's lenses are technically better but kind of boring and huge. I like superspeeds a lot for their size, speed, and character, but they aren't "pretty" or technically great, really.

Don't mix business and pleasure unless you understand the risks and accept them....if you don't have much money or stakes are high learning to shoot film as you go is a recipe for trouble, however exciting it sounds. For a self-financed vanity projects maybe accept the risks and go for it, but if money is at stake and you're not willing to devote the extra resources and take the extra risks (for one you need a bigger crew on set and in post).... Still give film a try--pick up some literature and a 16mm camera; I wish I had the opportunity to do this, actually....I have never shot color negative anything very seriously.

[Nick Morrison]

If you are shooting doc work, and its mostly tripod based b-roll and interviews, you may want to consider stills glass to go with your Scarlet. It will save you $$$, and if you buy older, it can give you some of the character you are looking for from film.

In no particular order, I'm thinking about Nikkors, Leica R's, Contax Zeiss, etc.

Good luck, and have fun.

[Marc Wielage]

Speaking as a film guy for a long time, I think it's insane for a low-budget project to consider shooting film these days. If most of the project is going to be shot on Scarlet, just shoot the exteriors on Scarlet. Shooting on film is not going to buy you anything except more grain and a little more latitude (and tons of weave, in the case of 16mm). The Scarlet will look fine.

Shoot some tests first and see what it looks like on a big screen. Post can do anything you want, given enough time or money. Schedule a meeting with a post house in your area, ask for a tour, and see if they can give you a 30-minute demo of what they can do (or projects they've done in the past). Footage can be degraded as much as you like -- given scratches, noise, jitter, grain, glitches, anything you want. The sky's the limit.

[Stephen Williams]

Be VERY CAREFUL using RED lenses on film cameras - many of them have extended rear elements which work fine on digital but could damage the mechanics of film cameras.

Other than the 18mm prime which will only work with some 16mm film cameras, I have had all of the rest working on a 35mm Film camera, it's the Optimo rouge range that are a problem