Summary

It's great to know the Avid as well as other platforms can handle the bookkeeping of edgecodes and let you worry about the creative side of things.

I must say however that going from film to digital and back to film seems a little backwards to me. Yes it looked fantastic but it was quite a bit of time and money to get everything scanned and dust busted (removing dust particles captures during the scan). Having said that, 35mm film still offers a great look and does have quite a bit of exposure latitude. I think the trend will be going to digital capture (RED Cinema, Panavision Genesis, Thompson Viper, etc) and entering straight into that DI environment. At the moment, however, if you going to do wide release there are still many theaters that only take film reels, so you will still need to film out.

It is worth noting that FilmScribe does a great job at creating lists for the traditional optical workflow (see earlier post for comparison of optical vs. scanning). In fact the "scan" option was added only recently. Cutting of negative and splicing it back together is on it's way out however and you can appreciate this by the fact that we work in NON-linear environments everyday. Scanning and DI is still pretty expensive though, so if you are going to shoot on film, finish back to film and have a limited budget you might look into your options for staying in an optical workflow.

Info on our independent film can be found at www.proudamericanfilm.com. We had a wide release, although it was a short release. BluRay DVDs will most likely follow.