Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Odd interframe marks on Frida?

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Posted by John Hawkinson (Member # 1135) on 03-20-2003, 05:27 PM:

Has anyone seen these peculiar inter-frame marks before:

(Hmm, it looks a little twisted, but it's basically just a thin white line).

They seem to show up every 5 frames on the tail of Frida's R4. I ended up with an uncut tail, and the first mark was between the last frame and the rest of the movie, and at first I thought, "Wow, are they trying to encourage projectionists to @b[cut the ID frame right here]?". But then I looked further and they seem to repeat every 5 frames.

What causes these?

--jhawk

Posted by Rachel Gilardi (Member # 1016) on 03-20-2003, 05:34 PM:

Took a peek of my print of Frida and didn't notice this, although I didn't get the best look.

Posted by Patrick McDonough (Member # 1363) on 03-20-2003, 07:10 PM:

When we had our copy I didn't notice anything like that. [Confused]

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 03-20-2003, 07:38 PM:

I do remember seeing it on mine. At first glance it looked like someone cut the negative, then decided to extend the shot, but those marks are clearly not negative splices. I don't have any idea what it is.

Posted by Tim Reed (Member # 137) on 03-20-2003, 07:40 PM:

It's a video retrace line.
[Razz]

Posted by John Hawkinson (Member # 1135) on 03-20-2003, 09:15 PM:

I haven't really had a chance to look at our print in detail (I wasn't the one inspecting it...), but we had a replacement reel 4, and both reel 4s have this at the tail...but not at the head. I'll try to look in more detail if I have a chance this weekend.

--jhawk

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 03-20-2003, 09:35 PM:

Shouldn't this be on a secure server?

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 03-22-2003, 06:23 AM:

Interesting. Was "Frida" done using digital intermediate?

Posted by Tao Yue (Member # 836) on 03-22-2003, 11:05 AM:

Frida was color-timed at EFilm:
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/students/filmtech/prieto.shtml

The Kodak article's reference to digital "squeezing" of Super 35 into anamorphic is a bit puzzling, though, given that the film is flat ...

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 03-22-2003, 05:33 PM:

That article was a reprint from the February 2003 issue of "Film and Video" magazine, reprinted on the Kodak website. Being a digital intermediate could explain such an "electronic" artifact in the frameline.

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 03-22-2003, 05:49 PM:

What would cause the artefact?

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 03-22-2003, 05:56 PM:

It appears that somehow the image was scanned onto the film with a slight overlap at the frameline.

Posted by John Hawkinson (Member # 1135) on 03-22-2003, 11:29 PM:

For the record, I looked a bit harder at Frida this afternoon. I saw the effect (every 5th frame) for most scenes on R4, but not all of them. I didn't see it on other reels.

In addition to Tao's Kodak link, there's also an article in American Cinematographer, Oct 2002. It doesn't spend much time on the digital side of things, but surprisingly it asserts that Frida was shot in "Anamorphic 1.85:1". I guess that might mean they shot with anamorphic lenses onto super 35 (for the extra width?! why?) and then digitally 2x'd it and framed it for 1.85:1. That seems totally bizarre though, so perhaps it's just an error.

Maybe they planned on doing Frida in scope and then changed their minds? I'd have expected that to be mentioned in some of the articles.

As for resolution, an SGI/EFILM press-release briefly mentions Frida, and goes on to suggest that EFILM is a 2k house. (Huh. I didn't know EFILM was a subsidiary of Panavision and Deluxe Laboratories...)

I'll agree that the fact that Frida is digital intermediate is simply too significant to overlook, and that it is probably related, since we don't know how the traditional process would produce this effect. I still don't understand why it would be so regular every 5 frames. I mean, it's not as if the telecine scans 20 perfs at once, right? [Confused]

Well, I guess we can chalk this up as one of those benign mysteries of life.

--jhawk

Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 03-23-2003, 12:29 AM:

Ads for Clairmont Camera (a rental house) used to tout the advantages of Super 1.85, claiming it made the release prints look as sharp as dailies. I doubt there were many takers since most filmmakers would rather not have their entire show have to go through an optical printer if it can be avoided.

BUT now that the age of the digital intermediate is upon us it would make sense to use the full width of the film since the conversion can be handled digitally.

Posted by Darryl Spicer (Member # 711) on 03-23-2003, 12:43 AM:

quote:
The filmmakers framed Frida in the standard 1.85:1 aspect ratio, in part to better represent the vertical architecture at the show?s numerous locations. "Titus [shot in Super 35 by Luciano Tovoli, ASC, AIC] is one of the best-framed movies I?ve ever seen," Prieto remarks. "The use of widescreen is just incredible, so going into Frida I thought Julie might want to use widescreen again. But a lot of our locations were vertical, and Frida?s paintings are vertical. Shooting in 1.85 enabled us to get closer to her paintings without cropping into them."

here is an excert from the artical that JHawk was talking about. I don't understand where they got the anamorphic 1.85 from when it says they used standart 1.85 ratio.

Posted by John Hawkinson (Member # 1135) on 03-23-2003, 09:22 AM:

OK, I buy your argument that a digital intermediate film might as well use the full width. And I guess, if you're going to do that, you would get the maximum possible benefit if you used an anamorphic such that the entire height of the frame could be used.

What's the full Super35 frame? Let's say 937x735? That's a native aspect ratio of 1.27:1, so so applying a 1.45x squeeze would get you 1.85:1 optimally. It seems unlikely that 1.45x anamorphics are commonly available, and if Frida used a 1.45x or 1.5x anamorphic, you'd think it would be Big News (tm).

Steve, do you have 1.5x anamorphics for these weird-ass dailies?

--jhawk

Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 03-23-2003, 10:36 AM:

Huh? Where are you getting this business about anamorphic photography? Super 35, as the term is customarily used, does not involve anamorphic lenses for original photography whether intended for Scope or Super 1.85 or anything else.

Super 1.85 means shooting the full width, composing the image to a 1.85 shape, and later a slight optical reduction and re-centering. Likewise one could do Super 1.66 or shoot a full 1.33 silent frame and convert to a 1.37 Academy sound frame.

So no oddball anamorphic projection lenses although I suppose if pressed I could whip out a couple of old Panatar prism units.

Posted by John Hawkinson (Member # 1135) on 03-23-2003, 12:06 PM:

Again, Steve, the American Cinematographer article asserts Frida was shot in "Anamorphic 1.85:1". (This is in the summary box at the end of page 4). Using oddball anamorphics is the only way I can make sense of that, unless it's simply an error (which seems likely).

The clincher against this (aside from Occam's Razor and sheer implausibility) is that they didn't know they were doing to do DI before they started shooting, and it seems unlikely they would have adopted a format that would have required them to do either DI or optical printing.

--jhawk