15 years ago I cut a movie in Avid. It was shot on 16mm so I kept track of keycode to preserve the possibility of a film finish. I worked off of the dailies that were telecined to digibeta.
Now the producer is talking about re-scanning the film to HD.
The timecodes most certainly won’t match between the new HD files and the old digibeta tapes.
Is there any way to conform the film in Flame with keycode?
The old Avid project opened right up, I have all of my old bins handy.
@KuleshovEffect - what happens if you import the old ALE? and the old mxf files?
I haven’t got a flame open right now.
Let me fire up a machine.
I might be inclined to eyematch first frame of film to first frame of digibeta and match timecode. (by which i mean, if you have access to the digbeta, know the framerate and timecode, you could gang two reels - digibeta material in one reel, new scan in another reel, and copy timecode from old to new)
let me fire up flame
keycode is still an option, either for reformatting or conforming.
i don’t foresee you having any trouble?
the copy timecode/keycode is buried in the desktop tools under utilities ‘Copy/Duplicate’
time to turn the flame off again.
The keycode/timecode relationship will absolutely still be the same provided they were actually logged. Effectively you work in reverse, loading the ale’s to create a keycode database (if it’s a different house doing the final scan) and then cross referencing an Avid Cutlist or Edl against that database.
The dailies most likely have a punch mark at the start of each roll. You should be able to match the punch to the timecode on the digibeta then create a 29.97 to 23.976 conversion starting at that timecode. The trick would be to make the same conversion in the avid project. Each source would need to be recalculated based on the timecode of the punch, not just a conversion starting at 0.
It might. Since I’ve never seen the film and don’t know what stock it was on or how long it is or how many shots . . . It’s a bit of a judgement call. Since it’s probably selects and not the whole shoot, the difference between 2k and 4k cost wise might be negligible. It’s just drive space.
@cnoellert - you know me brother - highest res, highest bit depth, highest frame-rate, do all of the work, down res for delivery.
which is always unacceptable…
There would be little point to scan at 4k unless the goal was to subsample to hit the nyquist limit which can’t be more than HD and is most likely less.
If it’s S16 a simple 2k scan should be fine. Everything else is not resolving more detail but adding to the file size.
@cnoellert - in two years’ time storage and compute will be so cheap that you might consider archival, but the project is 15 years old already.
scan at 2k/hd, finish in a few days, deliver that thing, get some streaming checks from whatever streaming service, move on.
if you get big fat checks, make a 4k upres for archive.
if not, let hardware upscaling take care of it on playback.
also, denoising on 2k/hd will take 25% of resources.
We have free access to a film scanner that scans to HD, so 4k isn’t in the cards.
But due to the amount of work it would take to digitize everything, we’ll probably end up letting Topaz do the upres for us. I just wanted to make sure a film scan was possible, and perhaps it’s easier than I feared.
I’m excited to apply all the cleanup skills I’ve learned in the last 15 years!
