You might get a place to do a 3-sec film-out for free, assuming you do
the scanning elsewhere. The question really is what digital format to
transfer the Super-8 too. You aren't going to find traditional
pin-registered film scanners like the Northlight or Imagica or
Arriscanner that handle Super-8 (or even 16mm), so you'd have to
transfer it using a telecine, so then the question is whether to do an
HD transfer or an SD transfer.
Since 4K is considered ideal for 35mm scanning, and 2K for Super-16
(being half the physical width, a 2K of 16mm is the same as a 4K scan
of 35mm), so this implies that a 1K scan of Super-8 would also be
similar to a 4K scan of 35mm.
HD transfers are usually 1920 pixels across (1.9K) and an SD transfer
is 720 pixels across (.7K). So ideally you'd do a Super-8 to HD
transfer, and hopefully to keep your film-out simple, you'd shoot at 24
fps and transfer to 24P/1080 HD.
That's fine for a 3-sec. test. But the other problem is that you don't
want to transfer spliced Super-8 material, and I don't think you can
use keycode info and create an EDL with Super-8, so if you wanted to
eventually do a D.I. using HD, you'd have to transfer all your original
footage to HD and then create an edited master in HD for transferring
to film, and doing an HD post can be expensive (although there are now
some desktop solutions.) But HD telecine transfers are not cheap.
So the other alternative is an SD transfer, like the Digital Betacam,
which gives you only a 720 pixel across image for transferring to 35mm,
which may be adequate. But you'd want to edit in a way that you weren't
cutting up 60i with a pulldown, but do a true 24P edit, and then add
back a pulldown overall for a 60i/480 master (NTSC). Or transfer 1:1 to
25 fps PAL (50i/560), but then you'd have to be able to deal with PAL
tapes in your editing set-up.
David Mullen, ASC
Los Angeles
>> Stay informed about: DI to 35mm technology and Super 8mm Digital Intermediate 
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