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Most film effects are done at 2K (approx. 2048x1556) or 4K (approx. 4096x3112), assuming that you are doing "regular" 35mm. If you're doing CinemaScope, Super35, or VistaVision, the resolution will be higher (VistaVision work can be has high as 6K).

Check out Cinesite's website. Dig around in there, and you'll find a list of resolutions their film scanning and recording services support.

I don't know where people like you go to see movies. I hardly ever see problems at the theater I usually go to. I keep hearing about these "dirty, scratched up" film presentations, but I never see them. I guess I'm just spoiled. If the theater you go to does such a sloppy job, why don't you complain? Or try a different theater?

The heavily compressed (gotta love those MPEG2 artifacts, they really heighten the experience!), 720x480 images on DVDs are no match for even 16mm film, let alone 35mm. Hell, 35mm has higher resolution than even HDTV. Have a look at this resolution chart for movie special effects. The effective resolution of film is about 4000x3000 for a full-frame image. You really prefer 720x480 DVDs to that?

That's not even getting into the issues of color and brightness ranges, both of which are much greater on film than on video.

I've no doubt that digital video will eventually replace film, but it's not good enough yet. Those people who go around saying it's already better have probably just never seen (or don't want to see) a really high-quality film presentation. Properly done, film still provides much greater image quality than any currently existing video system. (Not to say that video won't eventually catch up, but it's got a ways to go yet.)

You could, theoretically, build a video camera with a very large linear range and then post-process the data to simulate being captured on a logarithmic-response sensor, but so far, no one has built a device like that. It wouldn't be too hard, though. It could even be done in-camera. Have the CCD sensor output data in a 32-bit-per-color-component linear scale, and then before recording it to tape, have a DSP or other chip convert that data into a 10-bit-per-component logarithmic scale. There are even existing file formats, such as Kodak's "Cineon", that would do nicely. A system like that, if it also had comparable resolution to film, say 4000x3000 pixels (see this resolution chart for more info about film resolution) might actually serve as a replacement for film.

The thing is, nobody's even talking about those things I just mentioned! Some people are actually ready to settle for plain-old HDTV, which is nowhere near as good as film, both in terms of brightness range and resolution.

Speaking of resolution, let's talk about that for a second. As I mentioned earlier, 35mm film has scannable info on it all the way up to about 4000x3000. On the other hand HDTV, which is what Lucas is using to shoot the next Star Wars movie, is only 1920x1080. Worse yet, those Texas Instruments DLP projectors that have been put into some theaters have so far been limited to 1280x1024 resolution. That's pathetic! Imagine if they installed one of those in the Mann's Chinese theater in L.A. -- one pixel on a screen that size would be as big as my head! Yet some people are so enamored with the word "digital" that they have been running around proclaiming that digital cinema has "arrived"! Ugh.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Episode II is going to suck in terms of picture quality. Episode I looked bad enough (the whole movie looked soft and fuzzy, due to the use of low resolution computer processing on nearly every shot), but Episode II is just going to look plain awful.

The camera they used is built by Sony (with lenses by Panavision), and captures images at 1920x1080 resolution at a 16:9 aspect ratio, the same aspect ratio as HDTV (basically, it is an HDTV camera). In order to form a 2.35:1 widescreen image, this will be cropped to about 1920x800. Compare that with this resolution chart for 35mm film scanning. 35mm film still has scannable information on it at resolutions up to 4096 x 3112.

Of course, the real resolution of Sony's video camera is effectively only about half of the stated 1920x1080, due to the fact that the images are color sampled in a 4:2:2 fashion, which means that every other pixel is just a black-and-white pixel, with the color sample from the adjacent pixel added in. That's not the same thing as true 1920x1080 resolution. And don't forget that the image data is heavily compressed in-camera 9at about a 7:1 compression ratio) using MPEG-2, just to make it fit onto the tape. Can't wait to see all those nice compression artifacts!

Finally, as you pointed out, there are slow-motion shots to consider. Well, guess what? The Sony camera can only shoot at 24fps! Therefore, the Episode II crew had to keep film cameras around for any shots that required slo-mo. Notice that they've been pretty quiet about that. You won't find any information about that on the official Star Wars website! It's a bit of a dirty little secret.

To be fair, shooting with video does have one advantage -- instant feedback. You don't have to wait for dailies to see if you got the shot right. Of course, with video assist systems on most film cameras these days, you can tell a lot already, even though the video assist playback doesn't exactly show you what the final product is going to look like. But when the video is your final prodcut, you know exactly what you're getting right away.

I know I'll probably sound like a Luddite with this post, but I'm really not opposed to video taking over film. It's just that the quality really isn't there yet. Until the resolution and color range of video is increased to match that of film, it just won't look as good. I think George Lucas is getting ahead of himself in deciding to go with video today. However, I think he's so anxious to be known as an "innovator" that he's decided to just do it anyway, quality be damned. Oh well, that's my take on it anyway.

(Note: Sorry if this comment shows up twice, slash seems to have eaten it the first time, yet it's still complaining about it being a duplicate.)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Episode II is going to suck in terms of picture quality. Episode I looked bad enough (the whole movie looked soft and fuzzy, due to the use of low resolution computer processing on nearly every shot), but Episode II is just going to look plain awful.

The camera they used is built by Sony (with lenses by Panavision), and captures images at 1920x1080 resolution at a 16:9 aspect ratio, the same aspect ratio as HDTV (basically, it is an HDTV camera). In order to form a 2.35:1 widescreen image, this will be cropped to about 1920x800. Compare that with this resolution chart for 35mm film scanning. 35mm film still has scannable information on it at resolutions up to 4096 x 3112.

Of course, the real resolution of Sony's video camera is effectively only about half of the stated 1920x1080, due to the fact that the images are color sampled in a 4:2:2 fashion, which means that every other pixel is just a black-and-white pixel, with the color sample from the adjacent pixel added in. That's not the same thing as true 1920x1080 resolution. And don't forget that the image data is heavily compressed in-camera 9at about a 7:1 compression ratio) using MPEG-2, just to make it fit onto the tape. Can't wait to see all those nice compression artifacts!

Finally, as you pointed out, there are slow-motion shots to consider. Well, guess what? The Sony camera can only shoot at 24fps! Therefore, the Episode II crew had to keep film cameras around for any shots that required slo-mo. Notice that they've been pretty quiet about that. You won't find any information about that on the official Star Wars website! It's a bit of a dirty little secret.

To be fair, shooting with video does have one advantage -- instant feedback. You don't have to wait for dailies to see if you got the shot right. Of course, with video assist systems on most film cameras these days, you can tell a lot already, even though the video assist playback doesn't exactly show you what the final product is going to look like. But when the video is your final prodcut, you know exactly what you're getting right away.

I know I probably sound like a Luddite with this post, but I'm really not opposed to video taking over film. It's just that the quality really isn't there yet. Until the resolution and color range of video is increased to match that of film, it just won't look as good. I think George Lucas is getting ahead of himself in deciding to go with video today. However, I think he's so anxious to be known as an "innovator" that he's decided to just do it anyway, quality be damned. Oh well, that's my take on it anyway.

Boy, am I glad to hear that I'm not the only one who thinks that this "Filmed in HDTV" movie is going to suck in terms of picture quality. Too many people are busy drooling over the use of that damn Sony video camera just because someone decided to attach the "digital" buzzword to it.

Just think, if Lucas had said he was going to shoot the next Star Wars movie using a video camera, everyone would have laughed. But because he used the word "digital" instead, people's eyes glazed over, they shut their brains off, and started chanting "digital is good, it is the future, digital is good, it is the future..."

I wouldn't have too big a problem with the use of a video camera if it had proper resolution, but this movie is going to be filmed in 1920x1080 format (16:9 aspect ratio), cropped to about 1920x700 to form a widescreen "scope" image (2.35:1 aspect ratio). That's simply not good enough to replace film. Have a look at this resolution chart for motion picture film scanning/printing. You'll see that the mamimum resolution for scanning film is about 4000 pixels per side, not 2000. Lucas is essentially shooting at HDTV resolution, not film resolution.

Even though it was shot on film, Ep. I looked pretty bad too, since almost the entire movie was processed on computers at 2K resolution (instead of 4K). All that extra resolution that was captured on the film just got thrown away, and the image quality ofthe final product just suffers. When they project that image up on the big screen and you sit at the proper distance so that the image completely fills your vision, 2K resolution just looks blurry.