Telecine, far from being "only used for transferring movies on 35mm film to DVDs or VHS", is still a critical part of the post-production process for anything that has been shot on film. (This is also a misunderstanding of the DVD mastering/authoring process, but that is a different node altogether.)

Almost nothing that is shot and released on film, and especially nothing that is shot on film and released on video, is actually edited on film in the modern age. Modern film editing is done almost exclusively on one of the various non-linear editing systems that are available, such as Avid Media Composer/Symphony or Media 100 (to mention two professional systems).

For this to be possible, the dailies (the footage shot) must be first tranferred to video (usually BetacamSP or DigiBeta)with timecode. This requires telecine.

State-of-the-art telecine systems, like the Spirit Data-Cine, can provide outstanding transfers.