How are rushes created for 70mm film
May 19, 2010 7:54 AM   Subscribe

I recently saw Cleopatra in 70 mm, and this question came up: How did they do rushes/dailies for 70mm?

In regular 35 mm shoot a quick print of the days footage is issued and projected for the director and the crew to check each evening. I just can't imagine (for Cleopatra or 2001) the director going into a huge unwieldy projection room to screen the bits and pieces of the day. Did they do a transfer to 35 mm? This also doesn't sound quite right since the rushes for Cleopatra were flown from Rome to LA every day, would there have been time?
posted by Omon Ra to Media & Arts (2 answers total)
 
You needn't have an enormous room or screen to view a 70mm film. It's all dependent on the focal length of the projector to the screen. The effect would have been similar to letterboxing on a standard tv. That said, we're talking about large studio productions. It's entirely possible that they had a 70mm screening room set-up. It was probably similar to theaters today that can show all sorts of different aspect films. It may have not been the enormous screen you're thinking of, though. The director and suits are looking for details and mistakes, not basking in the overwhelming aspect of being surrounded by the film. A lot of films through that era were made in 70mm, so I imagine the various studios built the necessary infrastructure to support it.

Flying the rushes from Rome to LA would definitely have introduced a bit of lag between shooting and reviewing, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't have done it. There would probably have been multiple sets of rushes run-off from the neg. One for local review by the director, and the one sent to LA for the suits.

There's a reason Cleopatra was an obscenely expensive film (at the time.)
posted by Thorzdad at 8:42 AM on May 19, 2010


On a huge-budget picture like Cleopatra, time wouldn't have been the issue. The lab probably had a dedicated machine for dubbing the 70mm negative onto 35mm workprint.

However, on a huge-budget pic like Cleopatra, the director probably did screen dailies in 70mm, because why not? You want to see what you shot. And 35mm may not show you glitches that are visible on the 70mm film you're going to eventually show.

You don't need a big theater to screen 70mm. You just need a 70mm projector. The size of the screen is a function of how far it is from the projector.

I just shot a short film on HD video. HD is tricky because makeup that looks convincing on regular TV looks like makeup on HD, and facial blemishes show up on HD that don't show up on regular TV. So the monitor in video village had to be HD. For budgetary reasons we're editing in regular NTSC and hoping we don't miss anything that will show up on the eventual HD cut. But if we had the dough, we would totally screen dailies and edit in HD.
posted by musofire at 8:47 AM on May 19, 2010


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