STUTTGART, GERMANY — Film production company Silbersalz Film has installed a Blackmagic Design (www.blackmagicdesign.com) Cintel Scanner in the heart of its new analog film processing laboratory. Silbersalz Film was founded by three cinematographers and specializes in creating tailor-made online campaigns for international brands.
Combining established analog film working practices with new digital technologies and workflows, Silbersalz Film is designing a smaller, more environmentally friendly film processor that relies on fewer chemicals to develop 16mm and 35mm film negative. The processed reels are then scanned in realtime using the Cintel scanner, and from there, 4K proxies are created.
“As creatives and DPs, we love the superior look that you can achieve with celluloid and so do our clients,” explains Silbersalz Film co-founder, Josua Stabler. “It truly is a wonderful medium, and that is why we have invested so heavily in analog.”
The production company began using DaVinci Resolve three years ago, and the color correction and editing tool now acts as a centralized hub for both analog ingest and digital post production. "In doing so, we have eliminated any need for roundtripping,” Stbler explains. “So, when it came to choosing a film scanner, Cintel was the obvious choice. It provides the perfect link, seamlessly bridging our analog and digital workflows."
The Cintel Scanner is currently located in the office lobby, and is connected over Thunderbolt to Silbersalz Film’s master editing suite. Every scanned reel is saved to a centralized editing RAID, after which, it is processed through Resolve to create ProRes 4444 proxies, which are immediately available for editing and color correction.
This combination of software and hardware is ideal for boutique production companies such as Silbersalz Film, explains Staber. "Most of the time we'll create a campaign from beginning to end, so the ability to do everything from one edit suite, using one program, creates a lot of efficiencies and speeds up our turnaround… Not only is it straightforward to set up and operate, regardless of your familiarity with film, but we have also been impressed by the quality of the final scans and the tight integration with DaVinci Resolve. We love the simplicity of both scanner and software.”