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01-12-08-23_1.317.1 2.TIFF

Technical facts

Richard Downing

When I first encountered Guy’s project, there were some obvious and predictable challenges and one important, hidden (at first) serious impediment. The most pressing concern was how to scan a whole lot of 16mm film in 2021.

I immediately contacted my former employer at The Post Bangkok, where I’d worked until 2015. The Post Bangkok, during its heyday, was home to 2 Spirit Datacines, including a 4K model with direct output to DPX files.

I had supervised numerous film scans for our DI business, including scanning all of the 16mm original negative for a locally produced movie, one of the last big scanning jobs we ever did, and I knew the 4K Spirit was capable of superb quality from 16mm.

Alas, it was conveyed to me that the Spirit had not been powered on for around 6-7 years and it was likely to be much more expensive to bring it to working condition than the job was worth.

Other scanning options did exist in Bangkok but few with the necessary 16mm gate. Eventually I settled on the Blackmagic Cintel scanner at Kantana Post, which was the only option locally that could handle 16mm.

Another challenge was that the project had been embarked upon in 1998, an era of standard-definition, 29.97fps interlaced video. The original negative, shot at 23.976fps in 1998, 2001 & 2003 had been 1-light transferred to NTSC Betacam tapes and subsequently captured to QuickTime files.

These files contained 3:2 pulldown interlaced 720x486 video of the original 23.976fps film. I immediately figured that the way forward in the 3rd decade of the 21st century was to get the project into 23.976p as quickly as possible and conduct all post at 1920x1080 (at a minimum) or, preferably, 3840x2160 progressive.

To that end I had to call in my lifetime’s knowledge of interlaced video and Da Vinci Resolve to re-create a set of dailies files at 1280x720, 23.976fps. Great care was taken to ensure that 3:2 pulldown was correctly removed.

During this process the timecode was converted to 24fps. This left guy with the task of manually replacing his original NTSC shots with the new 720p clips one-by-one into a 23.976fps version of his timeline. Fortunately, he had a bit of time on his hands!

 

Around this time, the hidden booby trap was revealed.

During the cross-checking of QuickTime files to actual film rolls (which, incredibly, Guy had kept with him through several moves and ending up in Bangkok) we discovered that about 2 hours of film were missing.

Guy had done 2 trips to the reservation in 1998 and the footage of the first trip was not with us. There was no option but to use the NTSC QuickTime versions of this footage.

This situation introduced me to the vast world of machine-learning image enhancement.

 

I tested several options before arriving at a solution and then decided that the film scans could also benefit from some of the same process. It proved to be quite easy to over-do the enhancement so I set a guiding principle that the result still had to look like 16mm film, but maybe scanned on a perfect scanner.

Colour grading was done in DaVinci Resolve and, rather than do it myself, I engaged an experienced old-school colourist (thanks Pete!) since I knew that grading negative film is very, very tricky.

photo Abandoned homesite near Star Valley

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