DVX blown up to 35mm.

B

Barry_Green

Moderator
I finally got to screen my film print today!

The screen was 30' wide. I sat in the sixth row.

The footage was all shot in 24PA, thin line detail, using all the settings recommended by Marcus Van Bavel over at DVFILM.COM, who also did the transfer. Most of the footage used the anamorphic adapter, and some used the mini35.

The results were... well, kind of mixed. It was way, way, way better than "28 Days Later", but still not "blow-you-away-this-is-awesome" quality. Overall a somewhat soft image, lots of visible grain. It looked for all the world like a 16mm blow-up to 35mm. Which is good. I was hoping for more, but it was certainly on par with a 16mm blowup to 35mm.

Then I got up and went in the back of the theater, to the back row.

WOW!

What a difference! Instead of being 6 rows back, I was 15 rows back, and it looked PHENOMENAL! It looked like a real 35mm movie! That extra distance made all the difference, the picture didn't look soft anymore and the grain wasn't noticeable. It looked GREAT!

The mini35 stuff held up surprisingly well. It was noticeably softer than the anamorphic footage, but not tremendously so. The SoftScreen shot looked phenomenal as well -- it held up extremely well to blowup.

So. Conclusions.

First, if you're watching any DV-to-Film projection, sit in the back row! ;D

Second, it handily beat "28 Days Later" all around the bend. It was easily twice as sharp.

Even in the 6th row, I would classify the results as "acceptable". Barely, but yes, acceptable. It was okay. It looked like a 16mm blowup. Nowhere near as sharp as "Once Upon A Time In Mexico", (although from the back row it did look as sharp as OUATIM looked from the sixth row!)

If you knew you were going to go to a 35mm print, you should not originate on the DVX, you should originate on 35mm. There is quite a leap in quality.

If, however, your primary destination is television, and you're holding out a prayer that maybe, maybe you'll blow up to 35mm, then the DVX can deliver. Your print won't look as good as it would have if it'd originated on 35mm, but you won't have shot yourself in the foot either -- it will hold up okay on a blowup.
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

Thanx Barry this is really good news, I will also be looking at a DVX to 35mm blowup this coming week in Vancouver. I will report in.

At NAB did you see the Panasonic HD 1200 VTR. Any comments? I was curious about DVX squeeze mode to HD through the VTR.
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

Thanks for the great (and objective) report, Barry. I'm sure it was a thrill to see your footage on the big screen. One thing I'm wondering--do you think it would be possible to cut between mini35 and normal footage? Would the cuts be too jarring? Also, when you mention visible grain--is it digital noise you're seeing or is it grain from the film stock?

"Holding out a prayer"--I guess that's where we're all at, isn't it :-) It's heady stuff to think we're all potentially capable of producing an acceptable (if not optimal) film for theatrical release.
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

Thanks for the report Barry G. You sound really excited. Good for you. And your results jive with my feelings after seeing the "November" screening.
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

Well, to be honest, I was a bit more disappointed than excited. When it first popped up on the screen I felt like "darn." I mean, not that I expected it to be 35mm caliber, but... well, I was hoping it'd be better than I expected. And it wasn't. But it wasn't bad. Like I said, it was on the right side of "acceptable", and about equivalent to a 16mm blowup. Probably not quite as good as a S16 blowup from Vision2, but certainly directly competitive with regular 16.

I'll tell ya, though, from the back of the room, it looked awfully good. That extra bit of distance made all the difference in the world!

With or without its removable lens, IMHO my quick commercial shoots looked a LOT sharper than the XL1/PAL/Frame Mode "28 Days Later" with their expensive HD prime lenses. I was hoping it would be, because I found 28DL totally unacceptable. This was okay. Wasn't great, wasn't even very good, but it was okay. From the back of the room it was great though!

So, like I say, if you intend to make a 35mm print, the DVX is not the right way to go. Of course we all knew that, but I believe in going out and testing anyway rather than just accepting "common knowledge". And the tests fared better than I expected (just not as good as I hoped).

But if you did get picked up, I don't think any distributor would say "oh, forget it, we could never make a decent print from this" because they could. They could make a decent film blow-up.

As for intercutting mini35 vs. regular, unfortunately I didn't have any with/without footage directly -- I had with anamorphic vs. with mini35, so the mini35 was taking two quality hits: one from the softening of rephotographing the ground glass, and two was from being blown up even more (because it was 4:3 letterboxed). So there was a noticeable difference, like I say, but not as night-and-day as I was expecting. Could you intercut between them? I wouldn't try. You might be able to, might get away with it, but I think it would be noticeable.

I've been fortunate to see my work on the big screen a few times, at various festivals etc., but that was always 16mm, or once we had VX1000 footage blown up. This was the first time I'd seen the DVX. Much better than the VX1000 stuff, and about on par with the 16mm.
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

Hi Barry -

Thanks for the review. I have always thought that the DVX100 is a "16mm camera". Both in the way you approach it for shooting as well as its final results when viewed on 35mm.

Can you let us know the full path the project took from video finish, to uprez, any processing in between, at waht stage color correction was done etc.?

Thanks - Michael
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

Thanks Barry for the review. Was the footage from the anamorphic drastically different from the Mini-35? Was the lost of light apparent when using the mini-35? If you had to pick (image-wise, not DOF) between using the anamorphic or using the mini-35, which one would you choose?
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

[quote author=MichaelP link=board=news;num=1083285062;start=0#5 date=04/30/04 at 07:06:43]
Can you let us know the full path the project took from video finish, to uprez, any processing in between, at waht stage color correction was done etc.?

Thanks - Michael[/quote]

No color correction applied. It was straight from the camera. Most of the footage was shot with the anamorphic. The mini35 stuff also received no color correction, other than some custom white balancing at time of acquisition.

No post processing -- just edited in a Vegas 24P timeline. So it was the raw data in its most untouched form.

Output back to a 24PA timeline from Vegas, and sent to DVFILM. At DVFILM, I don't know what all they did. They up-rez to HD there, but I don't know what process they use.

I'm tempted to do it again using S-Spline Pro/PhotoZoom, but at $300/minute my appetite for running more tests is limited...
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

[quote author=Ernest_Acosta link=board=news;num=1083285062;start=0#6 date=04/30/04 at 09:10:03]Was the footage from the anamorphic drastically different from the Mini-35?
[/quote]
Well, yes and no. If you mean overall quality/softness of the image, I would say it wan't drastically different, no. Seeing them back-to-back the mini35 stuff was noticeably softer, but not drastically.

And only part of that would be due to the mini35, the other part would be due to the additional magnification necessary to put a letterbox image in the full 35mm frame. If I had been thinking (and I slap my forehead every time I think about this) I would have used the Panasonic anamorphic adapter in front of the mini35's still-camera lens! But I didn't think of it at the time.

Now, if you're not talking about image softness, but instead about the character or look of the footage, then yes, they're dramatically different because of the shallow DOF. However, there was less difference on the big screen than there is on the small screen. On the small screen the anamorphic footage looks more video-ish, the mini35 looks almost exactly like 35mm film. The mini35's ground glass, cine lenses and such all combine to add a softness and graininess that looks extremely filmlike, whereas the regular DVX footage just looks so sharp and crisp that it looks more like a hybrid of film and video. When we were shooting that spot we intended to shoot all the way through with the anamorphic and also with the mini35, but we started running out of time and I liked the look of the mini35 version so much more that we ditched the anamorphic for that.

Was the lost of light apparent when using the mini-35?
Click to expand...
I don't know what you mean by that. We lit the scene with enough lumens to get proper exposure when using the mini35, so it looked fine. We could have used less light (a LOT less light) if shooting without the mini35, but it wouldn't have looked the same.


If you had to pick (image-wise, not DOF) between using the anamorphic or using the mini-35, which one would you choose?
Click to expand...
Depends on what the target display format is. I wouldn't use the mini35 for a film blowup, I don't think. The anamorphic footage was definitely sharper, and if I had to sum up the appearance of the blown-up footage, I'd say the ONLY place I was disappointed in it was in overall sharpness. Latitude was fine, artifacts were fine, motion was perfect, but sharpness/resolution was a bit soft. The anamorphic footage was definitely sharper.

And having blown it up to that size, you get a lot shallower DOF anyway. Not mini35-type shallow, but because everything is blown up, differences in focus are magnified proportionally, so your image looks like it has shallower DOF on the big screen than it does on the small screen.

For a film project I'd probably go with the anamorphic. If you absolutely have to have a super-shallow background, you can always just slap a SoftScreen behind the subject for those shots.

For a direct-to-video release, if there was any prayer of getting a mini35 (and adequate light for it), that's what I would do. It looks phenomenal. It looks like 35mm film that's been transferred down to tape.
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

Thanks for the report Barry. Sorry you were dissapointed by the results, but as you admitted, it's probably a bit much to hope for a 35mm quality. You've already made some comparisons to other DV films, but I'm interested where it falls as far as this genre is concerned. You said it was literally twice as good as 28 Days later. I never saw this movie in the theaters, but it got a HUGE release. If studios thought this was acceptable, then I feel pretty good. I think most DV movies are lucky if they get any theater distribution at all before they go to video. I guess my question is: Have you seen anything originated in SD video that looked better than the DVX footage?

Also, off topic, but how do you handle your uprezzed S-spline footage? I was thinking I would uprez DVX footage and drop it into a DVCPRO100 HD timeline and see what happens. What do you think? The reason of course is the compression of DVCPRO100 would actually let me play the footage. My system would not be able to handle uncompressed HD as is. Sorry to digress. Thanks again.
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

[quote author=Zot link=board=news;num=1083285062;start=0#9 date=05/02/04 at 16:35:51] I guess my question is:  Have you seen anything originated in SD video that looked better than the DVX footage?  
[/quote]
Oh, not by a long shot! Not by a country mile! The DVX is by far the king of the SD crop, especially for film transfer. (With the given exception of the $25,000 SDX900, which I haven't seen film footage from but I've just got to believe it looks better, as well it should for 8x the cost).

Also, off topic, but how do you handle your uprezzed S-spline footage?  I was thinking I would uprez DVX footage and drop it into a DVCPRO100 HD timeline and see what happens. What do you think?
Click to expand...
I only did some tests with up-rezzing, I haven't done any significant project with it. If your system can play back DVCPRO-HD footage in real time, that would certainly be an interesting test.

In my up-rez tests, the DVX->HD footage was not as detailed as "real" HD, of course, but it wasn't so inferior in resolution as you'd expect -- it was very competitive!
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

It's a photo re-sizing tool, which does a great job of up-rezzing a standard-def image up to hi-def resolution. It's been renamed PhotoZoom.
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

i appreciate all the insight barry. thank you.

what exactly was it (commercial, short film, porno) that went out to 35mm?
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

Did any "average" people view the film print? By average, I mean someone with a less-critical, untrained eye, and without experience in different formats (DV, 16mm, 35mm). If so, what did they think of the footage?
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

Hmmm. There were about eight of us, I think. Me, a pro cinematographer, a cinematographer/camera assistant, a teacher at the university, an editor, a sound guy, a special effects artist, and a producer. So nobody who was anything like a "fan off the street", but I'm sure only three of us were really hypercritical on the image quality.

Everyone's overall impression was "that looks like 16mm", followed by a discussion of "what were your goals with this?" and I said "I wanted to see if it would hold up, such that an average person could watch this and not be distracted by the format" and the fairly universal answer was "yeah, it's good enough for that."
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

Barry, how much did the DVX footage take on the characteristics of the film stock? I'm interested in terms of how the raw footage looked on an NTSC monitor, and how it looked when projected. Did the contrast/saturation change significantly? Do you know what stock DVFILM used?
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

I don't know what stock they used, no. But it didn't look dramatically different -- what we saw on the screen was basically what I'd seen on the monitor, just softer and with a lot of grain.
 
Re: DVX blown up to 35mm.

Barry,

Did you use the Panasonic anamorphic lens ?

and...

What SSpline settings do you use (filter and image size) ?

thanks

Antoine
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top