Rank Turbo vs Sniper in PC Magazine!

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MovieStuff
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Rank Turbo vs Sniper in PC Magazine!

Post by MovieStuff »

Some time back, Jan Ozer (contributing editor for PC Magazine) sent us some Regular 8mm footage to transfer for an article about 8mm telecine for home video. He also sent the same footage to CinePost. We used the Sniper and they used their Rank Turbo. We used Matrox RTX100 for color correction and they used DaVinci. Here's the online preview of the article which will come out in this month's issue of PC Magazine.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1620686,00.asp

(you may have to copy and paste the url for some reason)

The type is small but our transfer is always in the upper left hand corner and CinePost's is in the upper right corner for comparison. The bottom images are always off the wall shots with different home cameras.

CinePost always does great work. However, with the obvious exception of their excellent wet gate on one shot, I think our Sniper unit faired pretty good but you guys can decide for yourself. :)

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Rank Turbo vs Sniper in PC Magazine!

Post by labrat99 »

Congratulations Roger. I think your results compare quite well with the Rank transfer. The magazine article ought to lead to a volume spike in your business.

Take Care.

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Post by Scotness »

Hey Roger well done - your transfers come up really well in comparison - except for the wet gate one - that'll have to be your next invention!

It's a good bit of publicity - you'll probably get inundated with transfers now 8O

Scot
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Alex

Post by Alex »

I know an associate editor of a national video magazine and when I offered to look into contributing a story about super-8 AND seeing if I could get Kodak interested in doing a Super-8 ad, Kodak wanted to know more, but the associate editor wasn't interested, even if I provided an ad buy!

Said Associate had a bad experience with Pro-8mm years ago and I think the residual effect remained. So I guess we can call that an example of burning a bridge that falls on the head of someone passing by underneath.

It's cool that Super-8 is being mentioned in a national computer magazine.
Alex

Post by Alex »

In my opinion, image 2 & 4 Moviestuffs was the best.

3 is a toss up between the Rank and Moviestuff.

The Wetgate is impressive in image one for the rank facility.
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Post by MovieStuff »

Scotness wrote:Hey Roger well done - your transfers come up really well in comparison - except for the wet gate one - that'll have to be your next invention!
I am considering it, especially after seeing what a terrific job CinePost did on that one piece of film. It was really cracked and they made it look like new. I've had a few ideas about how to do it but no time to experiment. At any rate, I was really pleased with the comparison in the article.

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Post by LastQuark »

Great! I subscribe to PC Mag so I should be getting the issue very soon.

I wonder what the result will look like with FilmGuard and Sniper? Still samples posted here before showed dramatic reduction in scratches.

Roger, do you still have the film you can experiment on? Just 1 frame with FilmGuard?
 
 
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Post by LastQuark »

MovieStuff wrote:I am considering it, especially after seeing what a terrific job CinePost did on that one piece of film. It was really cracked and they made it look like new. I've had a few ideas about how to do it but no time to experiment. At any rate, I was really pleased with the comparison in the article.
Please make sure it is something that will work on existing WP users like a plug-in module!
 
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Post by mattias »

cool, and congrats roger. as expected the sniper and rank footage have the same sharpness and show similar color fidelity, but the sniper has some excessive contrast due to the use of a video camera.

/matt
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Post by Scotness »

mattias wrote: but the sniper has some excessive contrast due to the use of a video camera.

/matt
How can that be avoided - is it to do with ccd's or the way video cameras process it once it has been imaged by the ccd in the camera? - I'm wondering if the direct imaging onto a ccd like done here would avoid this?

http://www.8mm.filmshooting.com/scripts ... 21&start=0





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Post by MovieStuff »

mattias wrote:cool, and congrats roger.

Thanks!

mattias wrote:as expected the sniper and rank footage have the same sharpness and show similar color fidelity, but the sniper has some excessive contrast due to the use of a video camera.
Well I'd hardly call it "excessive". In fact, I was really happy that they were so similar. (at least on my monitor!) :)

In actuality, the contrast is kind of arbitrary because we increased it ourselves during post. The original was actually quite a bit flatter but we punched it up to please our eye for the test without regard to what their transfer looked like. And if you look closely, the contrast is really only higher on our transfer in shots 1 and 3. But in shots number 2 and 4, you'll see that our image has more detail in the shadows and highlights than CinePost's. To be fair to CinePost, I'm certain that they could have made shot 4 look much better. Perhaps they didn't realize the intent of the test. They certainly cropped in much more than we did. In all, I was as surprised as anyone that our transfer compared so well in such a blind test.

But the use of a video camera does seem to accentuate the grain more, even with the detail turned down to the lowest setting. I suppose we could transfer with the detail turned off completely but it's so damned scary because it just turns to mush and you wonder if you'll ever get a sharp picture out of it later on!

Roger
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Post by mattias »

MovieStuff wrote:Well I'd hardly call it "excessive"
true. bad word, although it's what colorists say when it's just one digital step off. :-)

/matt
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Post by MovieStuff »

mattias wrote:
MovieStuff wrote:Well I'd hardly call it "excessive"
true. bad word, although it's what colorists say when it's just one digital step off. :-)
Ha-ha! Very true. Damned anal-retentive colorists! I choose to view "excessive" as being unacceptable rather than a distinction.

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Post by Basstruc »

Damned anal-retentive colorists!
Hé !!! :x
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Post by MovieStuff »

Basstruc wrote:
Damned anal-retentive colorists!
Hé !!! :x
But I say that with great affliction, I mean, affection!

XXXXOOOO Roger
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