35mm costs vs Red media storage

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EL_STUPIDO

Active member
I have not done these calculations myself as I am totally thick in every way. Stupid some would say. incredibly so.

BUT

Has anyone costed up how much it costs to shoot ONE MINUTE of 35MM FILM (with all the costs from stock to DI to whatever) VS. ONE MINUTE of RED CINE???? The projected storage costs??

Someone out there with skills with a bowstaff and mathematical skills must be doing the math on this?

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El Stupido
 
Well in the UK you can reckon on £0.75 per foot to include 35mm neg, processing and one light transfer to Beta (that's approx £300 per 400ft or 4:30 minutes). I think the math should be self explanatory... However, remember that an entirely digital workflow requires not just the transfer of the rushes to another drive, you should also archive to LTO or equivalent. So you need to factor in the cost of the LTO drive (~£2k), tape cost and the time of an assistant editor to do this.

More complex than it seems though a completely digital work flow should result in overall lower acquisition costs. That's why we ordered a Red anyway.

Ziggx
 
I can get very good deals here in LA but it's still un-godly expensive. I can purchase re-can's for about 20¢ a foot, develop for 25¢ a foot and transfer for about 11¢ so one minuet would cost me about $34. What a deal!
 
That works out to about $853 per 198 minutes [which would fill the 320gb drive @ 27.5MB/s].

Unless my 7:30AM math is wrong, which it may be.

Edit: for some reason I chose $4.30 per minute instead of $34.00... this was pre-coffee, people.
 
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No, you're 7:30 math is wrong; 198 minutes x $34 = $6,732.

35mm depends on where you're willing to compromise. You can buy short ends for a dime a foot, and processing at FotoKem, last time I did it, was 13.7 c/foot. So basically 25 cents per foot. 90 feet per minute, so $22/minute.

Then there's transfer, which can range from $150/hour to well over $900/hour. Assuming we're being cheap here, let's be cheap and use the $150/hour rate (and, again, I haven't bothered with film for a couple of years so it may be higher or lower); if you're doing a one-light transfer (which you probably wouldn't) you could get transfer for $2.50/minute, so total cost of $25/minute for stock, processing, and a finished un-color-corrected master tape to begin editing from.

That's the cheapest way to shoot 35mm and get it transferred for a cheap video edit, with no color correction done in the transfer suite. (Unless you're willing to go 2-perf/TechniScope, which can cut your stock and processing costs in half. That puts 35mm 2.35:1 acquistion at as low as about $15/minute). But 2-perf cameras are very rare, and you'd need a transfer facility that supports 2-perf, and those aren't likely going to be the cheap $150/hour places!

So, assuming we went ultra-cheap in this way, at the cheapest cheapest of all cheap methods, we're shooting short ends at 2-perf, getting discount processing, doing a one-light transfer to DV at that rare cheap place that just so happens to have a 2-perf gate... you're looking at somewhere around $900/hour. Or $3,000 to fill that 320GB drive. Or about $7,500 for all the stock, processing, and transfer to do a typical 6:1 35mm feature shoot. And that's about the cheapest any lunatic could even think about pretending to do it, and that assumes some outlandish assumptions, such as that you could actually find 25,000 feet of short ends(!) or that you could find a 2-perf $150/hour transfer house.

But, what do you do about distribution? If distributing it to theaters you'll need to spend the cash to blow up 4K footage to 35mm film, and that's gonna be some bucks. Blowing up HD to 35mm costs somewhere around $400/minute, you can expect 4K to 35mm to cost a whole lot more. A simple 90-minute blowup from HD will cost roughly $36,000; presumably a 4K transfer will cost at least that much and probably double. An answer print from your 35mm negative will cost a whole lot less than that.
 
But if you're shooting 2 perf, you'll either need some optical work done to blow up/anamorphize the image to 4 perf anamorphic or go the far more expensive route of a DI.

You can't really get away with just an answer print shooting 2 perf.

My goal in shooting with a Red is to have a product that will hold up when transferred to 35mm, should I get a distributer, or at least give me the option of generating my own HD DVDs/Blue Rays when the technology becomes available for self-distributuion.

I guess one question will be, when all these people show up with 4K features, how many distribs are going to have the capital to do the costly transfers?
 
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35mm Release?

35mm Release?

From an indie perspective I don't even worry about the cost of final transfer to 35mm for projection since I am only going to take that step if the project has a buyer/distribution scenario that will pay for it. I also look at the recent contract, reported in this forum, where the largest art house theatre chain in the US is buying 1,200 Sony 4k SXRD projectors. Since the big studios and their mega-budget tentpole pictures regularly fill up the multiplexes with their occasionally great but often formulaic product the art houses are the indies most likely channel anyway. Wavelet compressed RedCode 4k in, wavelet compressed J2K 4k out to the projector without ever involving celluloid. If your flick is a big enough hit to need 35mm release prints for wider distribution, once again other people's money will be at hand.

It's a new digital dawn.

Blair S. Paulsen
RedOne #19
 
Barry_Green said:
But, what do you do about distribution? If distributing it to theaters you'll need to spend the cash to blow up 4K footage to 35mm film, and that's gonna be some bucks.
Click to expand...
That's true - for now. However, as more and more theaters are investing in digital projection systems (even those who would choose death over digital acquisition agree that digital projection looks better - even for film), it will be an entirely different ballgame. Plug your little drive into the projection system and press "play." Just look at what Red has done in the last few months... they didn't blow anything up to 35mm at any of their screenings and I think it's more than safe to say that the quality is there, even for huge projection use.

Alacritymedia is right: we are unquestionably entering a new era.
 
I agree with Haakon.. Landmark is installing 4k projectors in the theaters now without even telling anyone now, where a few years ago there would of been press releases and big songs and dances... its gonna be a pretty standard method of operations soon to project digitally beside the classic organic.
 
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