Thanks Rob,
I like to use 10 to make my mental math easier!
The 300 GB drive mechanisms are about $270 these days, making them much cheaper than the old DLT tapes that were the industry standard for file swapping only 2 years ago.
-Les

les dit re: rez
 

yo les,

i remember you writing on usenet that the most rez anybody will ever squeak out of 16mm color neg is about 1700 pixels across, and any more than that is just sub-sampling the grain.

obviously there's a big difference between 7245 shot at f8 on a sunny day through a $5000 prime, and 7279 shot at f2 with a filmschool bolex. so i assume grainier stocks shot under non optimal conditions can probably be scanned at less that 1700 wide. but how much less? 1k?

heres another question:

when you scan 16mm do you scan at 2k and then scale it down to 1280+ , or do scan a 1700 wide window out of a 2k area.

Hi Chaim,
As you know, film stocks are evolving along with video, and the newest stocks from Eastman are showing almost no grain. With super 16, we get the full 2K across and resize to a smaller frame as needed. As disk storage is so cheap now, it's feasible to deliver uncompressed frames to the client.
To compete with the HD transfers, the scanning rates have dropped well below 10 cents a frame. In fact, the cost more depends on if the film is being scanned as a cut negative, or in other words, keeping the amount of winding and reel swapping down to a minimum.
-Les