Cost of Shooting in Super 16

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prexdealer

Well-known member
Hi,

Spent about an hour trying to figure out the cost of shooting in Super 16. Anyone know of a recent article or breakdown I can read? I really want to shoot a little horror short I wrote. Just thought it might be cool in Super 16. Only about a 5 min short.

Thanks!

Well I found this http://www.colorlab.com/prices/pricelist.html lol if I just understood all the terms.

Still open to any input. Thanks!

Update: So basically aside from buying the film, the film gets processed and then transferred to video for editing and synching sound is that the proper understanding? Just reading this article http://www.matthewwagenknecht.com/the-actual-costs-of-film/. So maybe around 30 cents or so to process and transfer?
 
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Best way is to call these folks up and ask them what you'll have to do. They'll be able to explain it best and tell you what kind of deals they can give you.

Basically you'll have to buy the film stock, shoot it, it gets developed, you then get a transfer to tape or hard drive and then you can edit using final cut or whatever NLE you have from there. There's a number of different ways of doing this, this is just one simple way of getting film to be something that you can play with using your normal digital tools.
 
A little further to Ryan's post-

Once you've finished your edit, you will want to match back to the original 16mm negative. That can be cut and optically blown up to a 35mm print, or it can be scanned at HD or 2k resolution for a digital finish, which can then be output to tape, to BluRay, to a digital cinema package or to a 35mm print.
 
Something important to consider is what the shooting ratio has been for you on your previous projects. Some people are incredibly efficient and some shoot less so. Your five minute short might require 50 minutes of footage. Should be easy to look at your previous projects and determine your average shooting ratio.
 
arniepix said:
A little further to Ryan's post-

Once you've finished your edit, you will want to match back to the original 16mm negative. That can be cut and optically blown up to a 35mm print, or it can be scanned at HD or 2k resolution for a digital finish, which can then be output to tape, to BluRay, to a digital cinema package or to a 35mm print.
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Wow. So in my example I was looking at processing and transfer to video to edit. Is that video at least 1080? Or is it just good enough for editing but not much else. I didn't know that then I would need to edit the film to match and then export at 2k. Wow, quite a process! Thanks so much everyone for the info!
 
Last I checked, 16mm neg processed and transferred to a best light digital video format of your choice for editing cost about $50 per minute give or take a few bucks.
 
Chris Adler said:
Something important to consider is what the shooting ratio has been for you on your previous projects. Some people are incredibly efficient and some shoot less so. Your five minute short might require 50 minutes of footage. Should be easy to look at your previous projects and determine your average shooting ratio.
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Shooting ratio is probably the most important variable in the cost of shooting film. You should very carefully time out your script to a very close approximation of how long it will be. Then establish the shooting ratio based on your prior shooting experience. If you have never shot film, it is going to be a guessimate at best. I have shot film at varying ratios. I have shoot fictional narrative projects at about 4:1 but I have also shot acommercial at 120:1 (We shot a fashion show with an hour of film stock and cut a 30 second ad out of it. The ratio is really hard to calculate now in that we went back to the footage multiple times and recut more ads, but the original deal was for one ad.) For a first budget on a 5 minute short lets be safe and calculate 10:1. This number needs to be translated in to feet of film and total raw footage running time. So 10 times 5 is 50 minutes. 16mm film at 24fps runs at 36 feet a minute so 50 minutes of film equals 1800 feet of film. 16mm film comes in 100 foot daylight loading spools and 400 foot core mounted rolls, which is what you would want to shoot a fictional narrative short on (I have done mos parts of fictional narrative films with 100' spools. It is a pain having to change film all the time). So 1,800 feet of film divided by 400 foot rolls equals 4.5 rolls. Round that up to 5 rolls, so you now have 2000 feet of raw stock to purchase, process and transfer and or scan. Some transfer or scan services are billed as hourly. This makes calculating the final cost harder than does per foot costs. What I have seen before is that some transfer house say that to calculate transfer cost it really should be at running times x 1.5, which gives the facility time to set up and make some corrections during the transfer/scan. Lets do some calculations.

I had a hard time finding Kodak 16mm raw stock costs on line. I would suggest going to the Kodak website, request a quote and buying directly from them. http://motion.kodak.com/motion/Products/Production/index.htm
I found the cost of a 400 foot roll of Kodak Vision3 250D #7207 16mm single perf Color Negative film at the B&H website, so I am going to use that to calculate the costs, plus shipping to my location. http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/627355-USA/Kodak_8440638_Vision3_250D_7207_16mm.html

So 5 400 foot rolls of film, at $169.50 a roll = $847.50 plus $14.20 shipping = $861.70 for raw stock.

Process (Normal) 2000 feet of Super 16mm film, at $0.14/foot = $280.00

From looking at the costs at Colorlab, it look like the best way to go today would be for Tapeless Hi-Definition Transfers to Hard Drive. You will need to supply the lab a hard drive to the proper specifications. That is not calculated in the costs.
Tapeless Hi-Definition Transfers to Hard Drive at $300.00/ hour for 1.25 hours (50 minutes X1.5 =75 minutes divided by 60) = $375.00

Add it up and you get $1516.70 for raw stock, plus shipping, processing and transfer to an uncompressed HD digital file. I would add at least a 15% contingency ($227.51) to come up to $1744.22. Now this is at a very comfortable 10:1 shooting ratio. If you could shoot it with a lower shooting ratio, than it would cost less. The transfer costs at Colorlab seem to me to be a tad high. I would shop around for a transfer/scan.
 
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One of the most important things to keep in mind when pricing as well is to call the vendors. Most places will try to work with you, but keep in mind they're running a business. I once had 8000' of 35mm donated just by talking to the right people at Kodak. Just tell them what you need, and what you can afford. They will most likely do what they can to make it work for you.

David's breakdown is a great starting point. I find 10:1 a great ratio to keep you focused on what's important, without sacrificing much of what isn't. The transfer he's referring to would be great for a flat pass, letting you color it yourself, but if you want scene-to-scene transfer, you'd probably want a 3:1 transfer ratio.

One last part of it is the camera rental, but most places are willing to rent out their 16mm packages for extremely low rates these days.
 
Arthur Love said:
One of the most important things to keep in mind when pricing as well is to call the vendors. Most places will try to work with you, but keep in mind they're running a business. I once had 8000' of 35mm donated just by talking to the right people at Kodak. Just tell them what you need, and what you can afford. They will most likely do what they can to make it work for you.

David's breakdown is a great starting point. I find 10:1 a great ratio to keep you focused on what's important, without sacrificing much of what isn't. The transfer he's referring to would be great for a flat pass, letting you color it yourself, but if you want scene-to-scene transfer, you'd probably want a 3:1 transfer ratio.

One last part of it is the camera rental, but most places are willing to rent out their 16mm packages for extremely low rates these days.
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Yeah, the type of transfer is important to controlling the costs. You can get "One light", "Best Light" and "Scene to Scene" in regards to the color timing. The "One light" transfer, which I do not recommend, is that the timing is set to, usually, an arbitrary setting and that is used for the whole transfer. I think that this comes out of film work print timing where what you usually got were all of the timing lights set right in the middle, 25, 25, 25. Now this was useful with film work print in that it really let you know where your exposure and color was while you were shooting. I never did "One Light" when transferring film to video. A "Best Light" transfer is where the lab would go through the footage and make a decision as to where the timing levels should be set. This made work prints look better sometimes, but with film timing, the timing decisions were made by the lab and I didn't care for that. What I learned to do with film timing was to make sure that the very first shot on the very first roll at each location had my color and exposure reference so that the lab could set the levels to that and let it roll through the rest of the footage, which was done as "Best Light". When reviewing the dailies, I could look at the timing reports and know where each shot was in relations to the color and exposure reference shot and it made them look better, usually, than a "One Light" print. So the director would have more confidence that I knew what I was doing. I did this when I went in for high end transfers to video. Now, this takes great consistency when shooting. Most of the stuff I was shooting for high end transfers were commercials shot in one location and I was able to be very consistent through a shoot. If I were shooting film now for fictional narrative to be transferred, shot over multiple locations, I would do what I noted above and make sure that I got a color reference shot at the head of every roll in a new location and to economize (A little at least) I would talk the transfer house in go for a supervised transfer at a "Best Light" rate transfer letting them know that I was organized enough to make the timing based on the limited number of color reference shots that I would have documented and that this would actually make for a quicker transfer than having them have to review the footage and make the decision on what it the "Best Light". Of course, I would be willing to bet that a lot of the cut rate transfers/scans listed as "Best Light" are really "One Light" passes with maybe and adjustment made off of the first shot or two that is being transferred.
 
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BTW since youre looking at Color Lab, I'm going to imagine you are NYC based? The website isn't loading for me, so I apologize if its another color lab. Anyway if you're looking to rent a S16 package you should check out www.hitandrunproductions.com. They are based in Brooklyn, and are super affordable. when I lived in NYC I used them for virtually all of my camera and gear rentals!
 
Actually out of LA, I what was one of the few sites that had some costs. Thanks for the info. But it looks like unless I shoot on short ends/recans and get my shooting ratio down it just seems really expensive. :(
 
Many places will cut a deal for you since they are likely getting very little Super 16 work. I know that Postworks in NYC has cut deals with myself and friends in the past where the development was pretty much free, and we got a reduced price on the transfer. Just need to talk to the right people!
 
prexdealer said:
Wow. So in my example I was looking at processing and transfer to video to edit. Is that video at least 1080? Or is it just good enough for editing but not much else. I didn't know that then I would need to edit the film to match and then export at 2k. Wow, quite a process! Thanks so much everyone for the info!
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It can be 1080, but you will pay a little extra. More common is to do the initial transfer to SD tape, with window burns for timecode, keycode and maybe feet + frames.

Shooting film is more often an offline to online type of process with several steps. The cost of doing a "best light" transfer (where every shot is color corrected for it's best look) for an entire show can be quite expensive, and doesn't take full advantage of the flexibility that current technology and methods afford. So the common workflow these days is to to a SD transfer with window burns for your offline and then match back to the original for your choice of film or DI finish. The power & flexibility of the tools in the DI suite make the DI finish very compelling for most films that have the budget for it.
 
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