16mm or DV?

S

sawlrafter

Carbonite Member
I just recently shot my film on a Canon XH A1 HdV... Although, I must tell you that I was not to eager with the cam, I been noticing that people nowadays like to shoot with DV instead of 16mm or 35mm.
Once again, I am planning on shooting my second film around February 2009, but before that, I want to know which camera should I used: A 16mm or Dv? I only have $15.000 as a budget.

If you can give me your opinion it would be grate... I had never shot with a 16mm before.
thank you kindly,
Sal.
 
Stay with DV, film is a pain in the ass to work with and develop, and 16mm is nearing inferiority as a medium.
 
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Sal,

If you are new to 16mm, I would go digital. Saying 16mm in inferior is simply uneducated. However - it is expensive and does require a good deal of finesse to get right.

A 400 foot core load of vision 3 give you 11 and one half minutes to work with. It costs ~ 140 dollars. Film development and processing will cost you another 150. Then you have the film back and telecined. You will need a first AC to pull focus since you have decent DOF with film. And a DoP who has worked with film. It's easy to mess up. The cameras range from a Bolex to the Aaton XTR Prod. The Prod has the option of a video assist. Which is nice to check focus and such.

You really need to know what you are doing. It's far from point and shoot. You need to expose properly and light properly. But the difference is astounding.
 
Hey Sal,
First off DV or even HD will be WAY cheaper.

I shot a 10 minute short on an old Arri BL 16mm. I shot about 1200' of Kodak Vision 2. That's 2 x 400' rolls of 250D, and 1 400' roll of 500T.

Each 400' Roll was I think about $100 - $160 new, but you could get it for less if it's re-canned, expired, or short ends. Any way a 400' roll of 16mm at 24fps is about 11 minutes, so you're looking at-least $10 a minute just for the stock, and that's the cheap part.

Next you'll have to pay for it to get developed, and telecinced. This is where you can spend a ton of money at a top-notch post house or try to sneak by with a one-light and some ghetto place.

The producer used FotoKem,.. which is supposed to be the best, I know he spent over $400 for the cheapest telecine, with a student discount.

The footage came back and looked like an soft DVX essentially. Also keep in mind you shoot 24FPS but will get a tape that has a 2:3 pulldown at 29.97, so you'll have 2 interlaced frames and 3 solid frames for every 5 frames, so you'll have to reverse telecine your entire film if you want it to be true 24FPS. Also if you don't want to sync the sound then you can pay to have it done, but I can't imagine why you'd want to pay when you can save the money and do it yourself.

That said, Filmmaking is an art. I can now be a snob noised elitest and say "I've shot on film",.. ha ha. It's also really cool, and really fun. But film is 10x the work as DV. The stress of changing mags, worrying about errently exposing the film, not knowing if your exposure is right, scarred of the film getting jammed, hair in the gate, and the cost of wasting time with bad takes is all exilerating. I was supprised to see that all my shots were exposed right, and no hair in the gate. We did run into some problems with the gate or matte box being in the shot.

My advice is get a good cast, a good DP, and a great crew. Spend your money on the production, not the film stock and expenses. The audience for the most part isn't going to know or care if the film is film, they'll want good story, acting, sound, cinematography, and music,.. in that order.

Ofcourse, this is all my opinion, so salt to taste. Hope that helps.

- Greg
------
The film we shot had horrible actors, a decent script and absolutly no budget. We threw it together in a week after all the funding fell through. Here's a link to the dailies if you'd care to check it out, but be warned, nothing in there is really worth watching.

http://www.isicreative.com/videos/pleasant_grove_dailies.mov
 
Honestly guys thank you so much for your help. Dewy-dB, those were great takes... I hope when you get it all done you can sent me a cut.
 
Also, I would suggest before venturing in film, get experience with film. Don't go into it full force. I'm learning on 16 mm bolex's, and although I love them, it's an art form in itself.

Although I would love to shoot a feature on 35mm one day, it'll still be a long way off.
 
The RED ONE has a whole new set of issues. I would hope if you went with a RED you would get a tech in there too. The RED is just like shooting on film - just you don't have the actual film to deal with. But offloading the memory cards which takes about 50 minutes a drive to offload on redundant drives. Plus, editing is still a hassle. I think it's getting better though.
 
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