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New Kodak Super8


TomB_tx

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Before the usual piling-in of shrill, dramatic negativity, how about checking the service - you get the film back and can choose to also have it digitized.

 

One cartridge is about 2.50 minutes. You get the film back after a mediocre scan. Then what, either throw the film away or get into real life editing on the bench with a viewer, snips, and cement splicer? The market is not going that way.

 

An old 16mm camera and the attendant hassle of sound synchronizing is far, far more cost effective and the quality is higher - although I rather doubt a 35mm still photographer understands the Q word.

 

Kodak's fantasy is pure hype, lomography, bullshit. Remember, the hot shots who come up with this hype make money even if the project fails.

Edited by pico
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Probably the economics work differently in your educational system, over here the schools are state-subsidized and the cost of shooting materials would be a relatively minor aspect compared to bureaucratic overheads (the same in health services I fear :().

 

At $10 USD per minute, I hope your system has some quantitative intelligence.

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At $10 USD per minute, I hope your system has some quantitative intelligence.

 

$10 per minute is pretty cheap for a student to make a short film and learn all the skills of story telling, editing, and splicing. I've been to exhibitions of still photography where I've spent less than 30 seconds in front of a picture that cost thousands, took hundreds of rolls of film to achieve, and still isn't interesting, so I'm guessing quality and not quantity is similarly going to be the watchword in this case. 

 

 

Steve

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Price is more like $20-$30 per minute.

 

I can't see much benefit to anyone learning splicing for their future in film.  Even Hollywood productions are edited digitally. I see that Steenbeck is still in business thus some people must be splicing film. (Is that mostly for old footage for archives and restoration and to prepare new and old footage for scanning rather than for making a new finished film?) DaVinci Resolve is available for free and has editing and color grading capabilities one can only get digitally.

 

So what are the benefits of shooting on Super 8 and then editing digitally compared with shooting digitally lets say on a typical DSLR? The act of aiming the camera and directing the action will be the same but there will be a lot less choice of ISO, lenses, formats, stabilization systems, etc. than when using various digital options. (Try mounting this camera to your helmet.) Considering the final output is likely to be digital - who is going to project Super 8 film? - Will the scans somehow get information off of film that cannot be captured with a digital camera? 

 

50 feet of Super 8 at 24 fps will last 2.5 minutes.  According to the site, the cost of shooting and processing a half hour of Super 8 film seems to be about $600-$900 (Including whatever scanning they offer and shipping?)  You can buy a DSLR for that!  If you buy one of these for your teenage child, what kind of budget are you going to give for film and processing? Is it good to learn using a costly medium that takes a while to judge results or on a "free" one that you can experiment with as much as you like and instantly judge the results? Maybe this hybrid system also has digital playback. But how high is the quality of that? How many hours of filming does one need to shoot in order to get reasonably good at it?

 

And finally, aren't there a lot of Super 8 film cameras gathering dust that can be purchased cheaply. I have a Bolex Macrozoom I got years ago for $5. Yes without the sound capability and digital features but great for learning film if that is really your thing.  I wonder if the cost to design and produce this camera can really be justified in the market place.

Edited by AlanG
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If my understanding is right, the film is colour negative, not suitable for projection, even if you could find a projector. Seems to me that digitizing is the only practical approach to seeing the result.

 

It also seems to be quite expensive. Close to $20 USD per minute. 

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Before the usual piling-in of shrill, dramatic negativity, how about checking the service - you get the film back and can choose to also have it digitized.

And what are you going to do with a negative film? Film Blanc?

 

Seriously: If you want to project it you will have to do internegative duplication, quite an expensive process and I am not sure whether there are any labs left that can do it, especially on 8 mm film These processes were usually done on 16 mm film.

 

I think ease of video transfer is the reason that Kodak chose a negative process.

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@Plasticman, so where is this target market that is writing so enthusiastically about buying a very basic new camera to ultimately spend $20-$30 per minute on limited ISO mediocre quality digital footage?  Oh, and they also like that a lot of time goes by between filming and the possibility of using the footage. 

 

Since you don't seem to be able to tell us what is so compelling about this camera, please point me to where I can go to learn that from the enthusiastic potential users.

Edited by AlanG
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OK, I read that site and presumably that is a group of people who are already filming in Super 8. Is their target market existing users? I don't see any posts there explaining why filming in Super 8 is so compelling. One person wrote this,

----------------------

"50ft carts are soooo limited. The first and last ten or so seconds are always a mess so you basically have two minutes. And it's tough to do anything with sync sound that way. One take and your done. So I hope and pray they do 100 footers. If they do I am in. Guaranteed. 

 

The other issue is for sound you need a quiet camera. The Logmar is LOUD. As loud as my Nikon R10, if not louder. The Canon 1014 XLS is certainly quieter. The camera needs some really good sound suppression."

-------------------

 

100' carts seem unlikely to me. Consider the limitations and waste of having 2.5 minute carts. You have 30 seconds on your cart but have to replace it to be ready for the next take. You can't risk running out in the middle of a take. At the end of the day you have all of these carts with various size chunks left. What do you do, film random things with them?

 

Sound is recorded on an SD card so you'll have to sync that later with the film in your editor (without time codes?)  I'm not sure why the camera has an HDMI port unless it can also output digital video. What would be great is if it had an immediate video recording for your editing as a time synched proxy for the higher res files that then come later from film.  (Probably no way to sync these.) But it would take work to make the immediate video files worse quality than the scanned film images on the link below.

 

If this works to help Kodak, that is fine for me. But the real story at Kodak is that with the entire world exploding into all kinds of new technical directions, they could see it coming and had programmers and developers of all sorts but could not come up with great creative ideas and re-invision the company for a new reality as others did... Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerburg, Instagram folks, et all.  So now the company is looking for consumer salvation by going retro into a very tiny market? That is certainly the thing to do if they see themselves as a small niche company.

 

I went to the Logmar camera site and viewed this sample video. I can't see why I'd want to spend $20+ per minute to record something like this. I find it horrible unless showing a really dated crude look is your goal. So let's keep in mind the output we're talking about. Will the Kodak be better somehow? (Same film, unknown camera quality, maybe better scans?)  I can't see what client would ever hire me to produce footage like that other than for a time throwback effect.  Is there a big need for that? BTW I don't see single frame as an option on Kodak's camera so animation is out.

 

http://www.logmar.dk/sample-videos/

Edited by AlanG
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It's an interesting spectacle on a Leica forum to see people who are neither the target market, nor apparently understand the intended use-case for the product, complain about how expensive it is. :rolleyes:

 

Alvy Singer in Annie Hall: "There's an old joke: two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know, and such small portions." "

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Alan - the sheer energy you expend in your tireless campaign against film. Is it worth all your time?

This is an argument? Do you think that film sample at the Logmar site is very good?

 

Beyond that and the obvious inconvenience, I don't think my comments have much to do about film... more about the stupidity of Kodak over the years. If they had evolved the company into something larger and growing they could afford to do whatever they wanted with film for sentimental reasons and support a niche market of obviously misguided people ;)   Now it is kind of sad this is the best they can come up with and if this venture loses money it won't be around for very long since Kodak does not have deep pockets anymore.  Meanwhile 13 people took Instagram from nothing to more than a billion dollars in no time but all of the programmers and managers at Kodak couldn't come up with anything like that despite the fact they had a photo sharing and printing site. Is Super 8 Kodak's vision of their future?

 

Personally I want dye transfer back but am not holding my breath.

Edited by AlanG
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After Kodak's history over the last 10-15 years, we might reasonably assume that they feel they can find a market (they know it will be niche), and make some money. We might also assume that the people who made all the bad decisions in the bad old days are no longer in charge of much - I understand that Kodak has turned a corner and is profitable. 

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[...]The other issue is for sound you need a quiet camera. The Logmar is LOUD. As loud as my Nikon R10, if not louder. The Canon 1014 XLS is certainly quieter. The camera needs some really good sound suppression."

 

Sound is recorded on an SD card so you'll have to sync that later with the film in your editor (without time codes?) 

 

 

I agree with your post.

 

About the two issues above: silent camera works were very important before computer meaded suppression. One approach is to have the camera run with a dummy tape to get the camera's sound signature to subtract from the output.

 

Time codes have interesting solutions. One that impresses me is the dot-pattern used by livecribe's stationery. It is virtually impossible to find a repeating pattern even if you concatenated all the pages possible; the pages would combine to be larger than the area of Europe. By printing codes in the film the SD card could synch the film to sound without a clock.  And it would be inexpensive.

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After Kodak's history over the last 10-15 years, we might reasonably assume that they feel they can find a market (they know it will be niche), and make some money. We might also assume that the people who made all the bad decisions in the bad old days are no longer in charge of much - I understand that Kodak has turned a corner and is profitable. 

The past 30 years of Kodak has been one reorganization after another with constant replacement of top management and various new directions.

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After Kodak's history over the last 10-15 years, we might reasonably assume that they feel they can find a market (they know it will be niche), and make some money. We might also assume that the people who made all the bad decisions in the bad old days are no longer in charge of much - I understand that Kodak has turned a corner and is profitable. 

 

Assume nothing. That is how Kodak got into deep trouble.

Would buy Kodak stock now?

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