Solved Converting 16mm colour negative movie film to positive

I have a customer who is coming to see me tomorrow. She has a number of 16mm silent movies she shot 30 years ago. She want these movies digitised and made into positive images (they are in negative form at the moment)

Can Vegas Pro 13 handle this and what is the procedure? Many thanks in advance to anyone able to assist.

Hi Kiwihans

I have never heard of "negative" 16mm film being in the possession of a home user.
Back in the day when movie films got developed, they are processed into Positive Film Prints. I have only seen positive film reels in people's possession.

If your client actually has negative reels of 16mm film, it is going to have to be processed by a film lab first.
Where you would get something like that done today would be a mystery to me in 2015.
I have heard of Movie Archives using special equipment that can transfer any type of film onto video, but that is an very expensive process.

A few years ago I transferred my families Super 8 film into video.
I set up a projector and displayed it against a white wall in a very dimly lit room.
I also positioned a tripod with my Canon video camera, just behind the projector. Then recorded at 24 frame per second.
This video was then imported into Vegas Pro and that is when the fun began.
I set the White Balance first and then used all of the main Colour Correction tools to get the film/video looking as best as possible.

Regards
Derek.

Hi Derek: Thanks for the reply! You are quite correct. Only professional movie makers went for a negative source movie to make positive prints. The person I am dealing with was a professional movie maker of those days.

I regularly convert "old 8mm super 8mm/regular 8mm to digital format. For this work I purchased a Telecine machine from the USA. Yes, originally I projected these movies on a white card and recorded these using my digital camcorder. That's history now - the telecine machine footage is recorded directly from the projector gate and the resulting arial image is picked up by my HD camcorder. The end result quality has to been seen to be believed!

Just to come back, the movies I mentioned have already been processed many years ago but as I said they are in negative format. I have previously used Photoshop in conjunction with a scanner to produce positive prints - this is not so easy if you want high quality! I expect the same sort of thing with negative movie film....
Needless to say, I am not doing this as a hobby but as a business.
If you would like to see the work I am into have a look at: www.hansgeltonvideo.com

Regards, Hans Gelton