28Min Video to 16mm film Transfer
 

Hi.
Just a quick question.
It seems a lot of festivals still require a 16mm print for screening.
How much would a 28Min Video to 16mm film Transfer cost?

Thanks.

Without looking it up, a transfer to 35mm is around $300 per minute. Cheaper ones (that is, iffy ones) can be had for $200. I don't know if transfers to 16mm would be any cheaper.

Thanks Rob. hmm.. that's looking a little hefty.
What would the turnaround be? a week? 2?

It can be done in that time. Depends on the lab.

If your end product is to be film it would be cheaper and better quality to originate in film.

Check with Filmcraft in Detroit and DuArt in New York. They both do some pretty good deals that are significantly cheaper. A friend got a 40 minute doc transferred to 35mm for under $10K. I believe 16mm is quite a bit cheaper.

Most all festivals also accept video now, although some want it on Sony's HD format. We had a 30 minute short that showed at Tribeca in N.Y. in May, and the HD transfer from DVCAM only cost about a hundred bucks or so. It was a special festival deal from the dub house. My recomendation would be to not enter in festivals that want 16mm prints. That seems a bit of a waste to me.

I would second Bill and Rob's opinions here.

Steer clear of a film print if you can, it is pretty costly, and there
are plenty of festivals that will screen digital and tape formats.

Or, if you absolutely need a film print, and you have not shot yet, you should seriously consider originating on film, as Rob suggested. In the long run, it will cost you about the same, if not less. The difference is you'll be spending the money up front, but then you get the lattitude and look of film, so it may be worth it.


DVfilm.com has a decent amount of information on video to film transfers. I've never used their services, but Marcus VanBavel seems to be a very knowledgeable guy.


Good luck,

-Luis

Thanks for the reply and advice.

I've shot and almost completed the film. Running through the festival lists at the moment.

Bill, A showing at Tribecca is impressive. What other fests did you submit to and/or which ones would you recommend?

I'm hoping to get some audience in states, europe and asia festivals.

A HD dub does nothing to the image, does it?

The showing at Tribeca was not all that impressive when you know the details. It's called being at the right place at the right time. I'm on the board of a local festival here (Kansas International Film Festival), and we invited Stan Brakhage in a couple of years ago. We took the opportunity to bring him to our studio and shot an hour long interview, and it was a very good interview in which he set the record straight on some things and made some of his usual well-honed social critiques of various things ("...well, I don't hate anybody, but if I did I would hate Henry Kissinger.")

He wasn't in the best of health, and last year he died. So, our interview was the last formal interview he did. Tribeca was doing a Brakhage retrospective, and they wanted our interview. I cut it down to under 30 minutes and intercut a bit of his experimental painted on film footage, which he gave us permission to use, in between the segments. So that's what played at Tribeca. Some others have expressed interest in it, but it's simply an interview, not a real movie, and if you're not a film student or former film student you probably don't know much about Brakhage (even though Warner Bros. had an editing room named after him--he was a real pioneer).

My friend Ben Meade, who is president of the festival, is also a local filmmaker and teacher. He did a documentary that played on Sundance Channel last year and some this year, and they've expressed some interest in his newest one about our most famous serial killer. All I've done on those shows is some of the shooting and offering some editing critiques for the final edit, but we're working closely together on a documentary miniseries that we have hopes for...doing a pilot this fall.

About the HD dub...I have our HD dub that Tribeca's dub house did, but I dont' have any way to play it. Ben went to Tribeca and saw it projected and said it looked great (I was busy and couldn't go, dammit). It was shot 4:3 with a DSR500. The HD conversion turned it into 24 fps and cropped down to 16:9. If we had thought about actually doing a film of the interview, we would have shot it 16:9.

There are lots of festivals all over the country. Ours is a small one but we get great local press, and we've been expanding into more of a regional thing (www.kansasfilm.com). However, we don't have distributors sitting out in the audience looking for films to purchase. Yet. I'd recommend SXSW (South by Southwest) in Austin, TX, as an excellent festival that is still easier to get into than Sundance. Of course there's Slamdance. Toronto is probably the best in North America. And I like the Chicago International Film Festival.

Hey Bill.
Thanks for that honest and humble reply. Applaud your efforts regardless.

Had a peep at your kansasfilm website. Looks like it's going places. Very nice. Noticed you screened Greg Park's "Robot Stories" too. Seems very american-centric but i'd assume that to be a result of festival size and maturity.

Kinda wondering how a film like mine would fare with the audiences way way down in kansas. Haha. It's my first humble attempt. Niche - asian flavoured quasi-documentary with an attempt (successful i hope) at dry sardonic british humor. Might sit quite nicely in your "Think!" category shelf.

Am aware of Slamdance and Toronto (accepts only international 50+mins features - mine is a 28min short). Will have a peep at chicago now.

We have a fairly broad international mix this year, with Iranian, Afghani, Palestinian, French, Russian films, and some from other countries I can't remember off the top of my head. We don't do shorts, but sometimes have a compilation program that may involve shorts. There's another festival here in the spring, the Jubilee, which does mostly shorts. You might try that one next April.