I feel like using a few profanities here.. this is a bit of a rant letting off some steam, and a possible warning to others.
Just got out S16mm HD telecine back that we got done at a place in the warner studio lot and I'm not happy with it.
Originally it was $450 for our HD telecine for the hour, uncompressed 10-bit onto a drive we supplied, and get it back same day.
Anyway, they notified us like 2 days before they were increasing the cost to $1000 iirc (and we ended up only in there for 20 minutes), which included postage (postage was like $250) to their Brisbane office so they could capture the tape.
We didn't have have a choice to send it anywhere else after that, since it was already up there for processing and then delivered to the place for our arrival to supervise the telecine (nice and sharp on the telecine).
Anyway after he went through it, he put it out to tape, which ended up being HDCAM, not HDCAM SR, but HDCAM 3:1:1 8-bit 1440x1080
Which sucks, what I'd like to point out at this point, is when we got the footage back, I noticed that the gamma and white points he had set, suit when the camera is spinning up or spinning down (which exposes the negative more) and not when the camera was at speed (in our case, 25 fps), so the white point has been set for the brightest highlights 2+ stops above our useful footage.
Now if we were getting the uncompressed footage, this wouldn't be a problem, may even be not so bad with HDCAM SR, but that simple fact means we have vastly less information/bit distribution etc for our useful footage, he may as well have just run an auto-levels over the entire lot of the footage in one go and set black to minimum neg density, and white to maximum neg density.
Oh, and the footage went through a second stage of lossy compression during capturing at the Brisbane location, which just makes it worse.
For us it means, twice the cost, for an inferior service and end product (soft, noisy, simple grading after levels correction causes banding), and a wait of a week, instead of same day.
So, apparently, they no longer have the facilities to do a transfer at their Gold Coast presence (and the packaging they put the drive in must be made out of gold foil).
So I would just like to put that out there in case there happens to be even one of you out there on a production considering getting a telecine done on the Gold Coast - I'd say to you, consider if that suits your needs, and if it does, I'd say it'd be cheaper and less time consuming to shoot on HDV. If it doesn't - look elsewhere, courier to Sydney etc (will cost a lot less too).
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Just got out S16mm HD telecine back that we got done at a place in the warner studio lot and I'm not happy with it.
Originally it was $450 for our HD telecine for the hour, uncompressed 10-bit onto a drive we supplied, and get it back same day.
Anyway, they notified us like 2 days before they were increasing the cost to $1000 iirc (and we ended up only in there for 20 minutes), which included postage (postage was like $250) to their Brisbane office so they could capture the tape.
We didn't have have a choice to send it anywhere else after that, since it was already up there for processing and then delivered to the place for our arrival to supervise the telecine (nice and sharp on the telecine).
Anyway after he went through it, he put it out to tape, which ended up being HDCAM, not HDCAM SR, but HDCAM 3:1:1 8-bit 1440x1080
Which sucks, what I'd like to point out at this point, is when we got the footage back, I noticed that the gamma and white points he had set, suit when the camera is spinning up or spinning down (which exposes the negative more) and not when the camera was at speed (in our case, 25 fps), so the white point has been set for the brightest highlights 2+ stops above our useful footage.
Now if we were getting the uncompressed footage, this wouldn't be a problem, may even be not so bad with HDCAM SR, but that simple fact means we have vastly less information/bit distribution etc for our useful footage, he may as well have just run an auto-levels over the entire lot of the footage in one go and set black to minimum neg density, and white to maximum neg density.
Oh, and the footage went through a second stage of lossy compression during capturing at the Brisbane location, which just makes it worse.
For us it means, twice the cost, for an inferior service and end product (soft, noisy, simple grading after levels correction causes banding), and a wait of a week, instead of same day.
So, apparently, they no longer have the facilities to do a transfer at their Gold Coast presence (and the packaging they put the drive in must be made out of gold foil).
So I would just like to put that out there in case there happens to be even one of you out there on a production considering getting a telecine done on the Gold Coast - I'd say to you, consider if that suits your needs, and if it does, I'd say it'd be cheaper and less time consuming to shoot on HDV. If it doesn't - look elsewhere, courier to Sydney etc (will cost a lot less too).
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