When Schwarz Film Bern, one of Europe most venerable film labs, decided to acquire a digital film recorder, the company's technical management took a close look at the image quality of digital-to-film transfers passing through their lab on a daily basis – the quality of DEFINITY transfers caught their eye. Soon after, Schwarz Film became home to the second DEFINITY unit in service in Switzerland. Technical Director Dr. Laszlo Gloetzer looks back on the reasoning behind the company's buying decision:
From our point of view DEFINITY has the best cost effectiveness among the known units on the market.
Since then, few DEFINITY recorders worldwide will have seen a workload as high as the unit at Schwarz Film. Dr. Gloetzer on the company's DEFINITY use, which comprises dozens of feature films, and the choice of the right film stock:
In our daily work we expose mainly on original negative stock, mostly Kodak Vision2 5201, and sometimes 5242 Intermediate stock. Because of this excellent LCD device we have also always had excellent sharpness on original negative stock as well.
Critical to DEFINITY's success at Schwarz Film has been its compatibility with the Arrilaser laser recorder also available within the corporate group:
As we are a member of the ARRI Group Munich, we have had the opportunity to make several comparisons between the ARRI-Laser and the DEFINITY film recorder. We have experienced both excellent colour and contrast compatibility with DEFINITY.
This way, DEFINITY's exceptionally wide gamut translates into a maximum of creative and commercial flexibility. With the recent acquisition of Schwarz Film through Eglifilm Zurich, DEFINITY now works in with conjunction with Filmlight's Baselight grading and Truelight DI calibration systems. A proven combination, which makes it even easier to match DEFINITY's color space with that of the Arrilaser.