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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Why 'Dune' Was Shot on Digital, Transferred to 35mm, Then Scanned to Digital

It checks out. I mean, there's always more than one correct solution to any given problem. But that one is certainly one of the correct ones.

Sometimes it's just easier to use film than to try and emulate it.

Having said that I've always believed that digital does monochrome better than film does. It's not satisfying, but b&w is so easy to do in digital. You can, if you choose, just shoot camera b&w JPEGs and your result will be terrific. No need to sit in front of a computer to do pointless busy work.
 
huge article from December issue of ASC magazine...footage also was shot on film first.. .I just tested kodak 5222 for an upcoming job...wow!
 
Not sure I, or other cinematographers, would have taken the same path to get that look or even decided on the same look. Doesn't matter, they found the look they were after and created a pathway to achieve it. I thought the movie was very well executed in a visual sense.

I'll be watching it again in some way other than HBO Max because I had such a bad time with the audio via HBO max... I don't know if the sound mix for the movie itself is that bad or if the delivery was screwed up or what was going on. But it was borderline unwatchable for me with the sound levels being so wonky. That said, it was a visual treat and I felt they left off in a good place in terms of what I remember from the first book.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
I'll be watching it again in some way other than HBO Max because I had such a bad time with the audio via HBO max... I don't know if the sound mix for the movie itself is that bad or if the delivery was screwed up or what was going on. But it was borderline unwatchable for me with the sound levels being so wonky. That said, it was a visual treat and I felt they left off in a good place in terms of what I remember from the first book.
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I agree completely. The sound mix was horrendous, and the dialogue was about 5-6dB too low compared to the explosive music and sound effects. Very bad creative choices were made.

But I think the visuals were tremendous, beautiful sets, state-of-the-art effects, great lighting, fantastic color. Barely noticed the film grain (though it was there). Didn't love the film, but I liked it quite a bit.
 
Patrick Tresch said:
BTW digital doesn't have edges... poor sharpening process does introduce them.
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I think he was speaking more in general. Stress doesn't have edges, either, but there are lots of things that can 'take the edge off'.

AFAIK nobody sharpens anything in cinema, whether it's digital or film. Many photographers do and I don't understand it. Pointless busy work.
 
Batman was also shot on Digital, color corrected, scanned to 35mm and then rescanned to Digital and recorrected some shots that had lost too much resolution (they call it sharpness) and colors.


Karim D. Ghantous said:
AFAIK nobody sharpens anything in cinema, whether it's digital or film. Many photographers do and I don't understand it. Pointless busy work.
Click to expand...

Some 2k D-cinema projector do sharpen the image and introduce aliasing.
 
Like 15 years back this was a process we did on quite a few commercial productions just for the looks of things. The different print looks that you can achieve going to a celluloid positive is not always so easy to mimic and when shooting film then just taking the negative and scan it is kind of like using half the "color sience" that Kodak fuji and the other actually developed. The negatives are kind of invented in the way they are to be used to strike a positive from. Sure you can telecine it, digitally grade it and make something that everyone thinks looks great. But when, and I done this many times, take that result and compare it to a scan from a positive made from the same negative, a lot of times I'm sure even average Joe on the street would say the scanned negative looked more filimic better etc.

Example. Here is a commercial I did the post for from that era sometime around 2006 ish. The process went as follows:

The commerical was shoot quite low iso S35 film. Don't remember the film stock but Kodak something.
Offline edit from digibeta one light.
Then I scanned the selects using the Kodak 4k scanner I had back then as 4k cineon log files.
Did all the composting and VFX stuff in 16 bit 4k on Inferno.
When the vfx stuff was approved I took a odd bunch of film rolls, strange fuji stock and random way out of date Kodak rolls of different sorts and printed the commercials all 720 frames onto these different stocks of film to get a variety of different looking version of the flick. The digital to negative process took about 30 sec per frame so quite a time consuming process and the hassle of switching rolls in between and so on. And the printer we had back then had some problem with dust on the projector so a lot of late night looking down the printer with a flashlight and a air blower to make sure there would not be some static black dots on the end result...
The above negatives then went to the lab and got developed and then spliced together in a big reel.
The reel with all the different negatives we then took to the optical printer and struck a bunch of copies from that we then developed with all kinds of different processes, INR, bleach bypass, low contrast, high con etc. As I remember we even took the result of that and run it a second time trough the optical printer and did another round of weird processing so we got versions that had double bleach bypass, or INR and high con, etc.

Then we went back to the office and scanned a few test frames from each version of the different positives created and choosed one of them that we scanned in (again about 30sec per frame not to mention the time to get the material from the scanner station over the network into inferno etc.) then we pretty much just applied a cineon to rec709 lut and where super happy with the result... to us it looked smashing, like some sort of old kind of Bollywood filmic look.

The result was downscaled to Standard Def but we also made a celluloid cinema version from the selected print from the optical printer.

All the above could probably even back then be created straight in Inferno but still its something magical with how film handles highlight and how it breaks up during the optical process etc that is not so easy to mimic.

Here is a link to the film: https://www.filipengstrom.com/?pgid=j7k3t8r0-511650f0-27af-451f-994d-406bffacb639
 
Björn Benckert said:
Like 15 years back this was a process we did on quite a few commercial productions just for the looks of things. The different print looks that you can achieve going to a celluloid positive is not always so easy to mimic and when shooting film then just taking the negative and scan it is kind of like using half the "color sience" that Kodak fuji and the other actually developed. The negatives are kind of invented in the way they are to be used to strike a positive from. Sure you can telecine it, digitally grade it and make something that everyone thinks looks great. But when, and I done this many times, take that result and compare it to a scan from a positive made from the same negative, a lot of times I'm sure even average Joe on the street would say the scanned negative looked more filimic better etc.

Example. Here is a commercial I did the post for from that era sometime around 2006 ish. The process went as follows:

The commerical was shoot quite low iso S35 film. Don't remember the film stock but Kodak something.
Offline edit from digibeta one light.
Then I scanned the selects using the Kodak 4k scanner I had back then as 4k cineon log files.
Did all the composting and VFX stuff in 16 bit 4k on Inferno.
When the vfx stuff was approved I took a odd bunch of film rolls, strange fuji stock and random way out of date Kodak rolls of different sorts and printed the commercials all 720 frames onto these different stocks of film to get a variety of different looking version of the flick. The digital to negative process took about 30 sec per frame so quite a time consuming process and the hassle of switching rolls in between and so on. And the printer we had back then had some problem with dust on the projector so a lot of late night looking down the printer with a flashlight and a air blower to make sure there would not be some static black dots on the end result...
The above negatives then went to the lab and got developed and then spliced together in a big reel.
The reel with all the different negatives we then took to the optical printer and struck a bunch of copies from that we then developed with all kinds of different processes, INR, bleach bypass, low contrast, high con etc. As I remember we even took the result of that and run it a second time trough the optical printer and did another round of weird processing so we got versions that had double bleach bypass, or INR and high con, etc.

Then we went back to the office and scanned a few test frames from each version of the different positives created and choosed one of them that we scanned in (again about 30sec per frame not to mention the time to get the material from the scanner station over the network into inferno etc.) then we pretty much just applied a cineon to rec709 lut and where super happy with the result... to us it looked smashing, like some sort of old kind of Bollywood filmic look.

The result was downscaled to Standard Def but we also made a celluloid cinema version from the selected print from the optical printer.

All the above could probably even back then be created straight in Inferno but still its something magical with how film handles highlight and how it breaks up during the optical process etc that is not so easy to mimic.

Here is a link to the film: https://www.filipengstrom.com/?pgid=...d-406bffacb639
Click to expand...

That's alot of extensive work you mentioned their. I'm just getting more involved in FILM PRINT Emulation for Digital images with programs like DEHANCER and LOOK DESIGNER and from your post it seems I haven't even scratched the surface yet.
 
rand thompson said:
That's alot of extensive work you mentioned their. I'm just getting more involved in FILM PRINT Emulation for Digital images with programs like DEHANCER and LOOK DESIGNER and from your post it seems I haven't even scratched the surface yet.
Click to expand...

There is a lot of easy ways to mimic film looks. But some clients don't really care about costs and want the real deal and for sure don't want easy, then real film prints it was. :)

Film processing stuff was never my core thing, but when thinking back I realise I was quite deep into it. I started young as a edit box op and then moved on to fire and inferno and when I was in my early twenties me and my buddy started Syndicate and then shortly we also bought into a lot of DI gear. A 4k Kodak scanner with cineon, a Quantel Domino with Oxberry scanner and 2 Solitare digital film printers which we all used to do VFX shots for quite mediocre Scandinavian cinema productions and spitting out cinema / celluloid versions of commercials we did. All done as some sort of extension to the commercial / music video VFX work that we where normally doing. Back then digital to film was really a new field and atleast in our neck of the woods there where not many others doing it which had the upside that it was quite profitable but at the same time not really anyone there to ask how it should be done so that lead us to go experimenting quite a bit with what ever we print at the nearby lab. Exciting times it was no doubt, but I can't say I miss much of it, I don't think I touched film since shortly after the first Alexa came out.
 
Bjorn,

With all these guys charging for some of these less that detailed Film Emulation MASTERCLASSES, you should consider teaching one or more yourself with your experience.
 
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