Soon, No More Film Movie Cameras

phil reed writes "Creative Cow Magazine reports that manufacturers of movie cameras have quietly discontinued production of film cameras. There are still some markets — not in the U.S. — where film cameras are sold, but those numbers are far fewer than they used to be. If you talk to the people in camera rentals, the amount of film camera utilization in the overall schedule is probably between 30 to 40 percent. However, film usage is dropping fast, which has ramifications up and down the production line. Archivists are worried."

Comments

Why are archivists worried?

[Hyperhaplo]

There are a whole range of careers available for data center specialists..

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[satuon]

They weren't worried about their jobs. They worried that now movies will be stored in physical mediums that last a lot less than 100 years. I know that digital information isn't bound to the physical medium - you can copy it to newer mediums, but there's still a valid concern.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[JBMcB]

If it makes them feel better, they can store the movie data on tape backups. If properly stored, magnetic tapes can last several decades.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[Anonymous Coward]

They weren't worried about their jobs. They worried that now movies will be stored in physical mediums that last a lot less than 100 years. I know that digital information isn't bound to the physical medium - you can copy it to newer mediums, but there's still a valid concern.

Film doesn't last anywhere near 100 years. Go look up the degraded footage from the original Star Wars cellulose. 30 years made the master copies look like hell. Digital lasts longer.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[CaptBubba]

Old film isn't exactly the most stable stuff out there either. Nearly every film before 1951 was recorded on nitrocellulose film which is very susceptible to breaking down (also to burning as well). We've lost many of the films from the silent era to the film simply eating itself.

Every generation of media has a special challenge which is eventually overcome. Digital is no different.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[Hyperhaplo]

I was thinking that it is much easier to duplicate and manage digital films... and more specifically perhaps that we will see an industry arise catering for very long term secure digital storage that will last for centuries.

Imagine many data centers spread across the planet, duplicate copies of stored items, offline and online access... we seem to be on this path now with The Cloud..

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[brokeninside]

If an archivist isn't actually a data center specialist, they're certainly analogs to data center specialists. ;)

More seriously, I know how archives work. Not only do I have friends/family that did stints at the national archives, I frequent archives for research on my MA thesis on an 11th century philosopher who wrote in Arabic. Archives are, in fact, data centers. It just so happens that the data isn't digital and the various physical media require different techniques for being catalogued, indexed, and searched than one might expect if you've been raised on Google. But it's really the same thing.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[EdZ]

It really depends on the film type used. 3-strip dye-transfer prints, for example, are almost indestructible if stored correctly (i.e. negligible degradation over time).

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[Arlet]

The good part is that Lucas can always shoot the movies again, and make some improvements while he's doing it.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[Arlet]

Digital will last forever if archived correctly. The problem is that few people care enough to do that, either for digital or analog.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[TheRaven64]

They worried that now movies will be stored in physical mediums that last a lot less than 100 years

You mean, like film? Making film last 20 years is easy. Making it last 50 requires considerable effort. Making it last 100 is really hard. The advantage that film has is that it degrades gradually. A film that's been badly stored (assuming it doesn't spontaneously combust, which is a problem with a lot of old films) will probably be watchable, but the quality will be bad. Digital recording tend to either be perfect or completely unplayable - there isn't much middle ground. The advantage of the digital recording is that, while it is not damaged, copies will be exactly the same quality as the original. This makes archiving a lot easier.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[JaredOfEuropa]

So store them in The Cloud, they will be safe there. Right?

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[timeOday]

Correct. (Without the sarcasm). Millions of dollars have been spent and people sent to jail, all in an effort to eradicate movies from filesharing networks. So far as I know, they've never managed to extinguish all copies of even one single movie.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[ozmanjusri]

http://www.archive.org/

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[Grave]

Thanks. Now I'm going to have nightmares about what it would be like if Lucas decided to just completely re-make Episodes 4-6.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[ColdWetDog]

Imagine many data centers spread across the planet, duplicate copies of stored items, offline and online access... we seem to be on this path now with The Cloud..

That's a great idea . We could get it all organized and call it something catchy - like 'Pirates' or something.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[jmauro]

Same is true of film actually.

Digital has the disadvantage though if you forget the file format it was stored in your out of luck. With film all you need is a spool and a flash light.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[maxwell demon]

The movie cameras are used to shoot the raw material. What typically gets archived is the final result. Which usually today is created on the computer anyway.
When production of machines which copy video files onto film is stopped, then it's time for the achivists to worry.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[DreadPiratePizz]

Archiving Digital data is not in fact easier than archiving film. To archive film, you put the negative in a climate controlled environment. That's it. To archive digital, you need to put the disks or tapes in a climate controlled environment, then constantly recopy and verify the data. It is actually more expensive to preserve a film digitally than to preserve the negative.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[maxwell demon]

In the new version, Han will not shoot at all, but Greedo will die from a heart attack.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[AngryDeuce]

I don't know, I've spent months looking for the leaked workprint of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (the wires and green screens and hastily thrown in placeholder CGI made an otherwise horrible movie hilarious) but I can't find it anywhere. Everything I've found is either the actual released film mislabeled as the workprint, a dead link on megaupload or rapidshare, or completely dead with no seeds.

I honestly think this is going to be the future method of the MPAA and RIAA in dealing with piracy. They can't stop it, but they can flood the web with fake files and other garbage and totally obfuscate the actual pirated material. The sheer number of torrents being indexed out there makes it impossible to combat. They can't compete with the efficiency of piracy as compared to the legal channels most of the time, and they never will unless they just decide to give up their rights and stream it themselves free of charge without commercials or ads of any kind. Since obviously that's never gonna happen, what option does that leave? Shit up the piracy channels and make it easier to just go buy the fucking movie, album, or game legit. People will do it. Look at the millions of people out there that do it now, and it's still a hell of a lot easier to pirate something then it is to deal with iTunes or Amazon or HBO Go or whatever service you're trying to use. Once it's not, I think we're going to see the traditional file sharing avenues collapse.

Piracy will never go away, but I could see it returning to the days when we bought our pirated movies, music, and games from shady people off of blankets on street corners and smoky flea markets. I hope not, but I can see it.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[maxwell demon]

Same is true of film actually.

Digital has the disadvantage though if you forget the file format it was stored in your out of luck. With film all you need is a spool and a flash light.

Then use a simple, discoverable format for archival. You don't want compression here anyway, because in uncompressed material bit errors have less consequences. So just store each image row for row, each row pixel for pixel, each pixel as red-green-blue. Add some basic information (frame dimension, color depth, frame rate) at the beginning of the file in plain ASCII. Use straight amplitude data for the sound. Again, add format information in ASCII on the beginning.

That's simple enough that anyone who has even the most basic idea how video and audio works can reverse-engineer the format in short time should the specification ever get lost.

That way, the main problem is keeping the bits intact.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[hairyfeet]

Uhhhh...why? Its all ones and zeroes. You could put it in .avi or .mkv, you could store it on discs or drives or NAND, hell you could even print it as a long stream of ones and zeroes if that melts your butter.

Hell if anything I'd say film is what you have to worry about, its fragile and don't take changes in temp and humidity well and is a bitch to copy so is less likely to have multiple backups. With digital its as simple as copy or transfer to format or medium, its pretty damned easy. I know that I have had a couple of customers lose quite a lot when a fire damaged their homes but thanks to digital their family photos? NOT among the losses as they took my advice and had them all backed up to the web. It would have been a royal PITA to do that with prints and therefor didn't get done with their old photos which are now gone forever.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[brokeninside]

Yes.

An often overlooked fact is that with media that is reliant on mechanical playback, not only do we need to archive the media but also the machines that play them back. Even for analog data, this is sometimes difficult. Remember NASA's moon tapes that could not be played back until a player was reconstructed?

So even if long-term digital storage is stable, efforts have to be made to also archive the format and how to play back the media. Analog film has an advantage in this arena because playback is relatively obvious and simple.

That doesn't necessarily mean that analog is always better. It just means that digital video archives have different, and arguably more complex, technical challenges compared to analog film.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[satuon]

I was talking about the physical medium. For example, if I gave you an old 8 inch floppy disk with important data on it which no one had thought to copy at the time, how would you extract the data from it? What machine can read it? What is the filesystem it uses?

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[teaserX]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Matsushita-Panasonic-Model-JA-751-8-Floppy-Drive-/370528490698?pt=PCC_Drives_Storage_Internal&hash=item56453814ca
I imagine that movie cameras as welll will be available though ebay or similar for a long ling time to come.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[Jonner]

Archiving is always limited by material. Lots of film prints have decayed over the years too. The challenges with archiving digital information are different, but it is possible to preserve digital information perfectly for indefinite periods of time, something which is impossible with anything analog. To archive film, you have to put it in a place with conditions that cause it to decay as slowly as possible. To archive anything digital, you have to know the limitations of the physical medium and design and adhere to a plan to make new copies before old ones deteriorate.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[nurb432]

Not only reduced longevity but now you have all this messy DRM and changing technology to deal with.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[KahabutDieDrake]

What they care about is, naturally enough, archiving. Which is done with 16mm microfilm and 35mm microfilm (similar to movie film). In fact, the federal government "archive" standard (required for all government records) is MICROFILM. NOTHING ELSE. PERIOD. Meaning, that every county office all over the united states has 2 systems in place. 1) Microfilm station with head camera. Probably looks like an overhead projector setup. Most likely uses 16mm film. Some still use 35mm. And 2), the fully modernized offices have digital system i/o, digital document creation, editing, and storage. Scanners, printers, and lots of computers. But they still print everything and then microfilm it... because they are required to do so by LAW.

So I imagine that's what most of these archivists are worried about. The market for microfilm gear, supplies, and skilled personnel is falling off FAST. 5 years ago, when I was working for a company that provided microfilm services, we were paying $50k for 20 year old kodak film processors THAT DON'T WORK. So we could fix them up and use them... because no one sells that kind of processor anymore. We were also the ONLY purchaser of 35mm nitro film in the state.

See, the US government used to be fairly smart. You modern geeks might look at this microfilm requirement and think it's stupid, or wasteful. The government, unusually, is one step ahead. See, they noticed that 'media' tends to go out of style, and degrade, or become unusable for various reasons. (do you have a disk drive for this 3ft disk that holds something like 128kb? me neither, how about a working floppy drive, 5 1/4?) They also noticed that as time went on more and more stuff was being put into proprietary formats and systems. So what they decided was, because these records were important, and because even if the world ends, we need to be able to read them, they said.. MICROFILM. You can create it with 18th century technology, and you can read it with any light source and any magnifying device (can be made from any water source and a loop). It also lasts longer than you do, assuming it's well handled.

I've cracked open film tins that haven't been opened since 1890. Sometimes the film is perfectly usable. Sometimes it's dust. Sometimes the retards put nitro film in the same cabinet as cellulose film, which causes the cellulose film to get erased by the fumes.

In short, film is and will continue to be the ONLY technology proof way of storing information. That digital media is volatile, degrades badly over time (less than a decade) and requires constant electrical supply as well as constant upgrades of gear (decade or less).

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[cffrost]

Why they're worried: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Digital_dark_age

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[bertok]

In short, film is and will continue to be the ONLY technology proof way of storing information. That digital media is volatile, degrades badly over time (less than a decade) and requires constant electrical supply as well as constant upgrades of gear (decade or less).

I'm not sure if all of you analog archivists are just very clever trolls, but in case you were actually serious:

"film is and will continue to be the ONLY technology proof way of storing information" - false, there's lots of other ways, film is actually quite bad at storing information -- you said it yourself: "Sometimes the film is perfectly usable. Sometimes it's dust.". How is that a good thing?

"digital media is volatile" -- not it's not. It won't evaporate, or vanish. If you mean "likely to change suddenly", it's not even that, because the whole point of something being digital is that it doesn't change over time. In contrast, every analog format changes constantly, no matter what you do.

"degrades badly over time (less than a decade)" -- that's not true either, in any sense. Fist of all, a well kept digital copy doesn't degrade at all, as in, not a single bit of information wrong. Archival quality WORM optical disks will last a lot longer than a decade, but anyone with some common sense would just keep multiple copies instead and copy data onto new generation storage every few years. And here's the thing: if you have multiple digital copies, it's trivial to reconstruct a flawless original copy, unlike archived films that look horrible despite careful restoration. Even a single copy can be made very robust using error correcting codes.

"requires constant electrical supply" -- are you keeping your "archival data" in RAM? Seriously? No digital media of any kind will lose data without power. Many archives use optical disks, which can be read with equipment that could be powered by a stationary bicycle. I think you're overestimating the robustness requirements for archives. If you can't power the archive reader because nobody has enough power for it anywhere, the human race has much bigger problems than immediate access to a 100 year old film -- which nobody would be able to project anyway without electrical lighting. Get a grip.

"constant upgrades of gear" -- which is actually a benefit. With analog, you can't upgrade your gear, whereas with digital, the archives that used to take up a whole building will eventually neatly fit into something the size of a thumbnail. The cost of preservation will drop to pennies instead of millions of dollars. Keeping dozens or even thousands of redundant copies will become easy. With analog, nothing like that will ever happen. A roll of film will continue to take up exactly the same amount of shelfspace it always did.

One estimate is that the US Library of Congress has about 300 TB of accumulated archival data. This is just 100x 3TB hard drives. That's a pile of drives about the size of a small suitecase that would cost under $20K. Now stop and think for a minute... the entire LoC, in your room, for $20K. Seagate has just announced a 4TB hard drive. Manufacturers are developing patterned media and hybrid laser/magnetic storage. Rumors are that 10TB will be doable. Do you see a pattern emerging? How long do you think it'll be before you can just have the entire library of congress on a single drive, in the palm of your hand? Not robust enough for you? Buy two! Or two dozen! Every year! It'll cost less than what the LoC spends on coffee for their staff!

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[CastrTroy]

The difference is that that's from the infancy of computers. Sure we can't read things from 30 years ago. But I can easily read most media from the last 20 years. At that point 3.5 floppies were mostly used, and since then, the only advances have been optical media. In my current computer I can probably use just about any hard drive, or external storage used in the last 20 years. As much as things change, they also stay very much the same. If you have something important, you'll transfer it to whatever the new medium is every 5 or so years, so as not to fall behind. It's not that difficult. And since it's digital, the copy is perfect every time.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[RPD9803]

I run the digital preservation efforts at a respected museum of photography and film, yet my comments are my own, not theirs. Frankly your assertion is a bit myopic. Digital media provides a key benefit that mitigates the volatility extensively, namely, mathematically provable exact duplicate copies, something you simple cannot do with film transfers, regardless of quality of your equipment. You think the government settled on microfilm because if the world ends and life re-evolves we can hope they'll read it easier? That's a stretch. Plus, I'll take needing to swap a hard drive for vinegar syndrome (which should be rearing its head in the next decades for all the non-polyester microfilm stock) any day of the week.. Right now, we can do 4K transfers easily (read: at many different labs).. and a feature length film is, oh, lets just call it 15TB for arguments sake.. a big hefty chunk.. in 2011. In the next decade, prices should come down to make this 'affordable' to archives, especially with respect to LTO tape libraries, as they can further help mitigate bit rot (by tape rotation) and obsolescence (Oracles support for "any tape any slot" kind of stuff helps out). With cinema being on the brink of a digital turn, digital will soon become an artifice (replacing the projection print).. if we printed it to film, we'd have quality loss from the originals. Considering we're beginning the transition in the field, it means archives need to start DOING this stuff, to gain competency for when we have no choice but to do it. Will there be missteps? There already have been (ask any museum of reasonable size about laser disc). The big shift for activists is that digital preservation isn't a function of archive management and library science, but of information technology.. will they inform IT WRT requirements? Certainly. But IT folks have been tasked with persisting digital data since approximately day 1 of the profession. There are plenty of nay-sayers, and I feel strongly that said nay-sayers are damaging the ability of institutions to deal with digital, because we WILL have to, so we might as well start now with challenge pieces and advancing standard conservation practices to incorporate digital.

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[couchslug]

Fun fact:

Nitrocellulose film could be cut up and used as "gunpowder". Note the location, whose inhabitants were plinking Brits with their jezails during the first Eurocolonial adventure in the region!

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BQY/is_8_47/ai_76558924/

"One of the intriguing qualities of nitrocellulose is that it is the basic material in many harmless, domestic products including celluloid plastic, early photographic film, rayon, fingernail polish and lacquer. Not that such items couldn't be converted to other uses. An old article in National Geographic describes tribesmen along the Indian border with Pakistan who were adept at producing gunpowder by dicing up nitrocellulose movie film."

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[Alamais]

NoooooOOOOOooooooooOOOoooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[Nethead]

Footnote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinegar_syndrome#Decay_and_the_.22vinegar_syndrome.22

Decay and the "vinegar syndrome"

The first instance of cellulose triacetate degradation was reported to the Eastman Kodak Company within a decade of its introduction in 1948. The first report came from the Government of India, whose film was stored in hot, humid conditions. It was followed by further reports of degradation from collections stored in similar conditions. These observations resulted in continuing studies in the Kodak laboratories during the 1960s.
Beginning in the 1980s, there was a great deal of focus upon film stability following frequent reports of cellulose triacetate degradation. This material releases acetic acid, the key ingredient in vinegar and responsible for its acidic smell. The problem became known as the "vinegar syndrome."[3]

Re:Why are archivists worried?

[DarwinSurvivor]

Do you have a link to the firefighter's test (preferably with video)? I would love to see something like that. I'm guessing it would be similar to how fuses work.

Right. So start archiving then.

[bartron]

Archivists might be worried but you can't say there wasn't enough warning. Production houses have been switching to digital since at least the 90's.

Re:Right. So start archiving then.

[nattt]

Film only lasted as long as it did because of digital intermediates and digital technology, film scanners etc.

Re:Right. So start archiving then.

[TheRaven64]

You don't need to burn film, just leave it exposed to the air for long enough and it will burn itself...

And for good reasons...

[subreality]

The good: Film stock is expensive. Being able to play back what you just captured is invaluable. Reloading by slapping in a new hard drive saves downtime. Cutting the size and weight of the camera down by 70-90% gives you flexibility. Recording in any aspect ratio by just pressing a button is awfully convenient. Filming at high frame rates like it's nothing is damned cool. Digital projection in theaters and HD sets at home let you have an all-digital workflow.

Improving: Film has (had?) better dynamic range. Digital cameras are getting cheaper, but still more up front; still, you make it up pretty quickly.

The bad: Film has established reliable procedures for archiving. Data's still iffy.

So yeah, other than nostalgia for film grain, digital is the future. This isn't a surprise to anyone in the industry... A few years back digital gained solidly "good enough" picture quality at an attainable price, and everyone's switching as fast as they can get comfortable with the new toys. The technology just keeps getting better, so this isn't going to reverse.

Re:And for good reasons...

[Kjella]

Cutting the size and weight of the camera down by 70-90% gives you flexibility.

I think you're exaggerating a bit how much the film is of the camera, there are some pretty compact 35mm video cameras and the professional ones are still rather big and heavy. Yes, my little prosumer camera also does 1080p now and that couldn't be done with film, but I doubt anyone's going to make a serious production on it.

Re:And for good reasons...

[petermgreen]

The bad: Film has established reliable procedures for archiving. Data's still iffy.

Afaict with a few golden rules you can make a very safe digital archive

1: keep lots of copies (remember unlike with analog medium there is no quality penalty for making a copy) at geographically diverse locations
2: keep block checksums and check them frequently. Use other copies to restore corrupt blocks.
3: Give network sharing read permission only.
4: don't let the same people have admin privilages on all your locations.
5: keep some copies completely offline

Re:And for good reasons...

[all204]

I've shot some projects on 16mm with both an old Aaton camera and a small Bolex. The Bolex was quite small and handy, but has some major drawbacks. (Although cool as hell to play with.) One of the issues most people seem to gloss over or ignore is the effective resolution of the film stock itself. Namely 16mm will give you a good 1080p conversion, 35mm somewhat higher than 1080p and 70mm, I'm not entirely sure, but greater than 4k. Notice all those WWII in HD footage on the history channel? That was all 16mm news footage transfered to HD. I ramble a little, but the point is, there is an element of future proofing what you've shot when you do it on film. Don't want >1080p now, no problem, but shoot it on a 1080p camera now and you're screwed later. Shoot it on 35mm and your good for 2K later. Trouble is, it's expensive, not that renting a Red camera that shoots at 4k is cheap either.

Re:And for good reasons...

[subreality]

It's not just the reels on top. The mechanical film path through the camera is also gone, which involves a lot of big metal parts.

Seriously, look at these things: http://www.red.com/products/epic ... The body is 5 pounds. Another 5 pounds for a lens, and you have a cinematography camera in about 10 pounds.

Picked up a Panavision lately? The body alone weighs more than that. By the time you've strapped on a lens and a loaded reel, it's quite a load to lug.

Re:And for good reasons...

[subreality]

It's all about what price archivists are willing to pay. I think it's workable, but it's not me establishing the procedures.

Re:And for good reasons...

[geekmux]

The bad: Film has established reliable procedures for archiving. Data's still iffy.

Yeah right. Just ask any celebrity who's had their cell phone hacked and naked pictures posted online how "iffy" that global archive is...

Re:And for good reasons...

[subreality]

Can you extend this technique to cover the masters of every hollywood movie being shot? :)

Re:And for good reasons...

[Kjella]

Don't want >1080p now, no problem, but shoot it on a 1080p camera now and you're screwed later. Shoot it on 35mm and your good for 2K later.

Uh, since 4k and 2k refer to the horizontal resolution 1920x1080 is already ~2k. A direct scan of a 35mm film negative will have a bit more detail than that, but plenty film grain too so in practice they're pretty close as we've seen on many 35mm to BluRay transfers. Note that with analog processing the actual resolution in a cinema was typically less than 1080p so it's not like it was better in the "good old days". Digital 4k all the way from the camera to a 4k projector is likely to look better than 35mm and more like something shot on 70mm, which was fairly exotic. Relatively little was shot on it then and even less now, I'd wager.

As for 4k, yes it's expensive but not like Hollywood-expensive anymore. Compared to paying Will Smith $20,000,000 to star in your movie renting a Red camera or a Cinealta F65 is peanuts. Then again, unless you're going to be in 4k digital projection cinemas then it's not going to help you today, only when what comes after BluRay comes out. That could take a very long while. Not to mention I wouldn't bet on the tool chain being ready for it either, if only the raw footage is 4k then it'll be a huge job to upgrade it. We saw that with many things made for TV, even if it was shot on 35mm film all the rest was done in SD and would have to be redone.

Re:And for good reasons...

[loshwomp]

Afaict with a few golden rules you can make a very safe digital archive

Sure, you can, but can you convince $CORPORATION to do the same when most of their attention is focused on *preventing* copies (think access control and DRM)? We'll probably always find a way to archive DVD/Blueray/whatever is released but the original HD source and audio tracks are probably locked away on $CORP's server and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

Re:And for good reasons...

[loshwomp]

It's all about what price archivists are willing to pay. I think it's workable, but it's not me establishing the procedures.

Exactly. $CORP is establishing the procedures and at best they think they've got it perfectly under control by leaving in on a forgotten server somewhere. At worst, they're actively working to make copying their films difficult.

Re:And for good reasons...

[mcgrew]

16mm will give you a good 1080p conversion, 35mm somewhat higher than 1080p and 70mm, I'm not entirely sure, but greater than 4k.

1 35mm frame = 4 16mm frames
Many movies, including the original Tron, were shot in 70mm (4x35mm).

The film's speed plays an important part in its resolution as well. The faster the film, the lower the resolution.

Re:And for good reasons...

[ColdWetDog]

Compared to paying Will Smith $20,000,000 to star in your movie renting a Red camera or a Cinealta F65 is peanuts.

This is key for pro work. The camera cost is a very small percentage of the total budget. Most productions rent them. Since your intermediate step is more than 90% digital these days (nobody rotoscopes by painting on the film any more), you might as well forgo the chemical process altogether and use digital capture.

Archiving is a separate issue and if one bothers to read TFA (which is pretty good BTW, congrats) you see a number of companies are actively working towards solving all the problem us brilliant armchair archivists have thrown at the subject.

Re:And for good reasons...

[ColdWetDog]

It's not just the reels on top. The mechanical film path through the camera is also gone, which involves a lot of big metal parts.

Seriously, look at these things: http://www.red.com/products/epic ... The body is 5 pounds. Another 5 pounds for a lens, and you have a cinematography camera in about 10 pounds.

Picked up a Panavision lately? The body alone weighs more than that. By the time you've strapped on a lens and a loaded reel, it's quite a load to lug.

Picked up a fully loaded RED1 recently? It doesn't weigh 5 pounds anymore. Between the monitor, the stand, the recorder box, and half a dozen other little gizmos they can bulk up pretty fast. Actually getting a 4K system that is light and small and useful is a problem that a number of people actively are addressing.

People get around this by using smaller cameras like the Sony EX3 and changing their shooting style to match the camera (like the 'documentary' scenes in District 9) (which was mostly shot on RED 1's).

(more parenthesis for (extra) effect.)

Re:And for good reasons...

[bryan1945]

On the plus side, however, the parent's steps could be mostly automated. Climate controlled off-line hard drives, DVDs and Blu-ray discs should last for a long time.

Re:And for good reasons...

[zippthorne]

If the editing software companies are smart, they're saving the *actions* of the editor as well as the raster results. That way, the edits can be replayed later at a higher resolution, which is probably sufficient for most of most films - there would likely be areas that need more detailed editing, but that would be a much smaller expense than re-editing an entire film.

Re:And for good reasons...

[modecx]

Most productions rent them.

Not only that, most studios rent cameras and equipment from their own shell corporations; by taking advantage of some weirdness in the tax code, they make even the most successful show look like a dismal failure...on paper...it probably works out that your camera is completely free, minus tax lawyer fees.

Re:And for good reasons...

[DreadPiratePizz]

"Being able to play back what you just captured is invaluable"

It's called video tap, and it works on 35mm cameras.

"Reloading by slapping in a new hard drive saves downtime"

Changing magazines on a film camera is just as easy and quick. Pop one off, pop the other on.

"Cutting the size and weight of the camera down by 70-90% gives you flexibility"

There are tons of small motion picture cameras. The A minima is way smaller than any comparable HD camera for example.

"Filming at high frame rates like it's nothing is damned cool"

With film you can shoot hundreds, or even thousands of frames per second easily since it's all mechanical. I'd like to see you do that with something like the varicam or RED's stuff, which tops out at 120fps.

Just about the only advantage to Digital over film right now is if you're going for a certain look, and cost.

Re:And for good reasons...

[Zhiroc]

Keeping archival copies is probably harder than everyone thinks.

• In 1980, I saved my files from college on a DECtape. Few of you probably even know what that is.
• In 1988, I saved files from grad school on an 1/2" reel tape.
• In 1995, I saved files on 1/4" cartridge tapes.

So, basically, "archives" I made 15-30 yrs ago are basically trash to me (I'm not even sure the bits would have survived on those that long, but that's another story.)

Note that even if I had a DECtape reader that I could interface to modern computers, what's the format? It was a directory-based, block-structured device where files tended to be non-contiguous. Also, to get the most out of it, we generally uses FPIP to compress the data. And FPIP used a dynamic compression technique. That means if a byte corrupted in the file, you could no longer decompress as that would change the frequency counts used to determine the decompression tables.

So, in the list of archiving problems we have: old media, loss of integrity of the media, the hardware format of bits on the media, the software format of bits on the media, and the software encoding of those bits. How long will it be before MP4, etc., are no longer used?

Re:And for good reasons...

[nattt]

Add in the weight of the mag and film stock, and the size of the mag and film stock.

Re:And for good reasons...

[petermgreen]

How long will it be before MP4, etc., are no longer used?

My bet would be a long time. The computer industry has been stabilising and a small handful of formats has been settled on for each type of data and then stuck with. The file formats for images, audio and finalised documents in use today are much the same as those in use 10 years ago.

Video has taken longer to settle due to the combination of it's sheer bulk and the rise of software patents but I think MPEG formats are a safe bet for longevity as they are both very common in the PC world AND baked into standards like DVD, DVB and blu-ray. So even if the dominant format for files actually stored on the PC changes support for older MPEG standards will still be needed in video handling applications.

Life (both physical life and availability of reading hardware) of physical media is an issue but is one somewhat mitigated by the fact that each generation has stored far more than the last. So by the time migration is needed it can often be accompanied by a huge reduction in the bulk of the archive. You do need to keep on top of it though to a far greater extent than was needed with film. On the other hand anyone who wants to can keep a private archive of thousands of hours of video without breaking the bank.

Re:And for good reasons...

[sixsixtysix]

of course, for true archiving, all that data should've been transferred from tech to tech as it emerged, and plenty of copies made as well.

Re:And for good reasons...

[tlhIngan]

If the editing software companies are smart, they're saving the *actions* of the editor as well as the raster results. That way, the edits can be replayed later at a higher resolution, which is probably sufficient for most of most films - there would likely be areas that need more detailed editing, but that would be a much smaller expense than re-editing an entire film.

That's what non-linear editors do, and has been a standard part of video editing on computers for decades now.

Basically all the editing actions are saved into a cutlist, and the preview window renders low-res in order to do a real-time view. When complete, the final cut is "printed" using the original high-res video.

Heck, it's so common most consumer level video editors do the exact same thing.

Re:And for good reasons...

[drinkypoo]

If you want output to look right when you're not shooting at a multiple of output resolution then more pixels is better, so you've oversimplified quite a bit, haven't you? This isn't like film where the cost of enlargement or reduction is minimal.

Re:And for good reasons...

[geekmux]

Can you extend this technique to cover the masters of every hollywood movie being shot? :)

Yeah, if someone were to actually get off their duff who had access to these "masters" and secured(encrypted) them in the BitTorrent network via "certified" archiving/seeding systems. The increased usage of torrents by Universities relying on this network to distribute their media further validates its resiliency. Likely problem is those who control the "masters" are too damn paranoid about "someone" getting a copy...so paranoid that they refuse to acknowledge the "unofficial" network that helps preserve these works today.

Re:And for good reasons...

[Wescotte]

There is no film stock that lets you shoot both 24fps and then shoot thousands of FPS under the same lighting conditions. I suspect there aren't any film cameras that do 1000+ fps AND 24 with the same motor. You have to have the right tool for the Job. So you switch to a Phantom Flex type camera for your real slowmo stuff.

Re:And for good reasons...

[Wescotte]

I've recently met Vilmos Zsigmond ( http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005936/ ) recently when he came to town for a screening of Close Encounters and did a lighting demo with Q&A. He went on at length about film vs digital. He essentially said with digital his job really don't change. It's as simple as working with another film stock. However he does prefer film because he felt digital was actually TOO sharp.

Re:

[taiwanjohn]

Solution: make a film transfer of any movie you want to archive. Also, they could transcode the digital info onto film in the form of one really long-ass barcode.

Movie theaters

[mehrotra.akash]

What about the thousands of screens that still use film? Will they ALL have to change their projectors, or will the digital recording be converted to film for them. Also, doesnt film have effectively unlimited resolution, while digital is limited to something around FullHD(1920*1080)?

Re:Movie theaters

[nattt]

35mm film negative measures around 3k resolution - so 3000 pixels across. Any more rez on the scan and you won't get more detail out of the image. Digital is already at 5k with the RED Epic. Digital is not limited to HD, and most "HD" cameras don't measure HD resolution anyway.

Re:Movie theaters

[Hadlock]

While it's recorded on film, it's edited on a computer, and then duplicated back on to "film", which really is just a long strip of color laser printer transparency paper. The edited digital film is transferred at 4096x2000 give or take. The only films shot in 1080p were independent films. You'd be shocked at how many films are distributed this way. Something like 90%.

The end result is that the picture you see in the theater isn't as clear as the image you saw in the 1980s, but it's still ultra sharp for the purpose it's used for.

Re:Movie theaters

[AC-x]

Given that most post-processing in film has been digital for decades but digital projectors have only just started to become widespread, I'd say we already have perfectly good ways to produce 35mm prints from a digital source.

Re:Movie theaters

[subreality]

Film resolution is limited by the grain size. It's about 3k grains across on 35mm. 1st-gen digital projection was 2k pixels across; the current standard is 4k; 8k may become popular if 3D stays in fashion.

Re:Movie theaters

[tgd]

Virtually all movies are edited digitally, so for a decade film prints have been from digital copies, anyway.

And given the costs of film copies (and the corresponding cut in profits from the distributor), theaters are being very heavily incented to go digital. (And the rise of 3D is pushing that, too.)

Re:Movie theaters

[tgd]

4k is extremely rare, even today. Even IMAX Digital isn't really 4k.

Re:Movie theaters

[nattt]

3k is the neg. Projected film doesn't generally measure more than 720p in a typical cinema. Digital projection already out-measures film projection.

Re:Movie theaters

[Anonymous Coward]

one of the best photographic film can give about 160/80 lines per mm under high/low contrast conditions, which translate in approx 22/5.53 megapix of true RGB resolution or 66/16.5 megapixels of resolution in techspeak, so 5K sensors from RED Epic are getting there but not quite there regarding the quality. The theatre audience may not realize the lower contrast but certainly the technology will move on from bluray to higher definition formats and then the 'telecine' transfers will be quite crappy. (not that you can find crappy transfers even with the film)

Re:Movie theaters

[nattt]

4k scan is typical for 35mm film. 65mm (think Baraka or Samsara) would be scanned at 8k. IMAX would be scanned higher still. As for digital projection, 2k is standard, 4k becoming more common.

Re:Movie theaters

[nattt]

Film doesn't have a "true RGB" resolution because the granularity of the three layers is different. If you examine some film scans the detail you'll pick up in blue is much less than the other channels due to the larger grain size in that channel. Even at 160 l/mm that's like what, 3.5k across the film? Typically 35mm film will measure around 3k resolution. RED Epic will measure (in the recorded file) ~4k and in A/B testing does look sharper than 35mm film, looking more like 65mm film.

Re:Movie theaters

[timeOday]

That's comparing apples and oranges. Scanning 35mm at 4k doesn't mean it ever had that much resolution. The grain is clearly visible.

Re:Movie theaters

[swalve]

Well, they are both unlimited to this extent: if you use more of it, you get more resolution. If you use a film stock that is a square foot and run it at 180 frames per second, you are going to get a lot of resolution. But same thing if you use a giant digital sensor with 100 LTO4 tape drives hanging off the back. Effectively, however, we are mostly at the limit of what we can do with film. It is too expensive or impossible to make cameras that can run large film at a high framerate. We are not, however, at the limit of what we can do with digital.

Re:Movie theaters

[swalve]

Agree. I have a shoebox filled with negatives that all have this mythical high resolution. The problem is, none of it is used. No point in over-sampling blur, where only 1/5 of the dynamic range is used.

Re:Movie theaters

[nattt]

Yes, there's some oversampling, so the 3k detail in 35mm film is scanned at 4k to avoid aliasing artifacts and get some over-sampling in there. But 65mm film is around twice the size, hence the greater resolution on it's scan at 8k to preserve it's detail with some oversampling, and larger again for proper IMAX for it's larger frame area.

Re:Movie theaters

[zippthorne]

Digital IMAX is, iirc, 2 * 2k projectors, which is not quite 4k, even if the pixel count matches (I don't know the vertical resolution, for instance...) I don't know what it's shot at...

Re:Movie theaters

[Art3x]

No, film is not infinitely sharp. The maximum resolution of a 35mm motion picture film negative has been measure to be about 4,000 by 3,000 pixels. But that's a negative. The audience does not watch projected negatives. The answer print projected in theaters is a few generations away from the negative --- a copy of a copy of a copy, etc. --- and has a resolution of less than 2,000 pixels across.

Re:Movie theaters

[farnsworth]

The only films shot in 1080p were independent films.

The star wars prequels were shot at 1080p. How that was allowed to happen is beyond me.

Re:Movie theaters

[sharkey]

How what was allowed to happen? The prequels being shot at 1080p, or the prequels themselves?

Re:Movie theaters

[innocent_white_lamb]

I own and operate a movie theatre, and I had my 35mm film equipment removed and replaced with a digital cinema setup earlier this year. In place of my film projector, lamphouse and platter I now have a rackmount cinema server and a digital projector. It takes up a lot less space in the projection room.

The movie studios are pushing for theatres to convert to digital due to the cost savings from not having to create all of those prints on film.

Digital movies and trailers are currently distributed on CRU hard drives. There is talk of going to satellite distribution instead, but at the moment I get hard drives couriered to me in Pelican cases. I copy the movie from the CRU drive onto a raid in my cinema server. Once the CRU drive is copied onto the server I'm done with it and can put it back in the case it came in; the movie actually plays directly from the server.

My picture is brighter and crisper than it ever was with film, it's rock-steady with absolutely no jitter, and scratches and dust are a non-issue. The sound is also vastly better than what I had with film.

My customers don't really seem to notice the picture quality, but I have had a lot of comments and compliments on the digital cinema sound.

There is an official specification for digtal cinema.

From the point of view of the guy who operates this stuff (I'm a projectionist, of course) digital is a lot easier and less time consuming than playing movies on film. The cinema server works like a giant ipod -- I copy the movie onto the server (which takes a half-hour or so but I just go away and come back when it's done), then set up a playlist with all of the trailers and whatever else I want to show with it, and insert cues to do things like turn the lights up and down in the auditorium. The playlist takes about ten minutes to set up. That's it. I press Play to start each show, and at the end of the week I spent two minutes hitting Delete to erase the old movie.

Compare that to film, where I would spend an hour or so getting the movie off of the shipping reels and onto the platter, then spend a half-hour per day cleaning and oiling the projector, plus five minutes threading up each movie on the projector. And another 40 minutes or so tearing the movie down and putting it back on the shipping reels when I've finished playing that movie.

The negative side of the digital versus film is that a fault is less obvious. If the film is buggered up or a gear on the projector is stripped it's usually pretty easy to see the fault and possibly fix it or take steps to deal with it somehow before there is an actual problem that keeps the movie off-screen. (I've actually hand cranked my platter to keep the movie going when one of the motors quit in the middle of a show.) A fault in the digital is both less obvious and more likely to be impossible for the projectionist (me) to fix and deal with.

But digital cinema is sure nice. Having spent my life working with film to this point I wasn't really sure that I would like it, but having had the digital cinema setup for a number of months now I won't say that I miss film. As far as I'm concerned it's all about the results and I'm providing a better presentation for the customers now than I ever could before, so what's not to like?

In some ways digital is probably more idiot-proof than film.

Re:Movie theaters

[drinkypoo]

As I recall, SWEP2 was one of the first movies, maybe the first real big movie, to be shot entirely digital, and SWEP1 still had analog elements. But I've been wrong before.

Re:Movie theaters

[ChrisMaple]

Low speed film has better color but really big film grain. High speed film has very small film grain, but poor color.

Low speed film has small grain, high speed film has big grain. The big grains intercept more photons, thus allowing a lower light intensity to develop that grain. Hence bigger grain allows more sensitivity, called "high speed".

Re:

[qubezz]

Or 100,000 Blu-ray discs.

How many Star Wars reels were archived?

[brokeninside]

The cardinal problem we have with old film reels is not the medium's inherent instability. It's that no one had the foresight to archive the reels properly.

Properly stored and handled, film is quite stable. But if you send out all your reels on the road because each reel is expensive and they get handled by the doofuses in the projection booth that thread them backwards the first time, left in car trunks, etc. and you store your masters in a warehouse with no cooling/dehumidifying apparatus where it is subject to extremes of heat and cold, sure, you end up 50 years later with reels that are barely salvageable.

Re:How many Star Wars reels were archived?

[MurukeshM]

Wouldn't the same thing be applicable to punch cards, tape, Betamax, VHS, floppy drives, CDs, DVDs, BluRay, HDDs, SSDs? With proper handling and storage, any of those could last just as long, and have better storage density.

Re:How many Star Wars reels were archived?

[loshwomp]

The cardinal problem we have with old film reels is not the medium's inherent instability. It's that no one had the foresight to archive the reels properly.

And the problem is worse for digital. At best, the source material may be stored in a proprietary format on a server somewhere at $CORPORATION.

$CORP is not concerned with archiving, thinks they've got it all under control by themselves, and instead has most of its forces (think access control and DRM) working against your ability to make your archive.

Re:How many Star Wars reels were archived?

[nattt]

For archive purposes they generally use open uncompressed formats. That takes up more space, but is utterly more reliable.

Re:How many Star Wars reels were archived?

[DreadPiratePizz]

Not all Color film is inherently stable. The dyes Kodak used in the 60s and 70s fade very quickly. Star Wars was preserved correctly; the film stock was simply very prone to degradation. A good way to archive film is to create separation masters, which are three strips of black and white film; one for each color. You can then later combine them to form a new negative. Black and white film will last damn near forever.

Re:How many Star Wars reels were archived?

[brokeninside]

Compressed/uncompressed makes little difference.

With digital you've got three challenges:
1. Physical preservation of the media
2. Preservation of the format of the digital data
3. Preservation of the mechanical playback device

With analog film, only 1 and 3 apply and 3 is arguably much simpler. That 3 is simpler isn't something inherent to being analog. For example, recall NASA's lunar tapes that couldn't be played back until a specific model of Ampex tape player was rebuil. The technology to build a projector for analog film is much more simple than for most digital media.

Re:How many Star Wars reels were archived?

[brokeninside]

Maybe, maybe not.

See my other comment in this thread, digital video archives have a different set of challenges than analog film archives.

Re:How many Star Wars reels were archived?

[Belial6]

It is a lot more complicated than that though. With digital you can have multiple copies of the the media, update the format to current standards, and change the mechanical playback device that is needed.

With analog, no matter how much foresight you have, time will take it's toll on your media. With digital, it is pretty much only neglect or lack of foresight that takes it's toll.

The question is whether we have learned our lessons from the past. Will we have the foresight to keep perfect copies, or won't we.

Re:How many Star Wars reels were archived?

[brokeninside]

`` With digital you can have multiple copies of the the media, update the format to current standards, and change the mechanical playback device that is needed. ''

Provided that you can (a) play back the media and (b) read the format used encode the files on the media. Given that, you can make a lossless copy of the digital video. But you're presuming the capability to do the very thing that's under question.

Not to mention that you can do the same with analog film. The frames in an analog film can photographed by a higher resolution analog camera and the resulting recording be superior to the original to the extent that it will clearly reveal imperfections in the original that were previously invisible.

But I do agree that is a complex situation. I'm not arguing that one is inherently better than the other. My point is that digital sources are inherently more complex compared to one particular analog source: film. Other analog source (for example, analog video tapes) can have some of the same sorts of problems as digital sources. A great example are the NASA video tapes of the lunar missions that were indecipherable because no tape player was known to exist which could play them. Then a player was found in storage behind a chicken coop and restored at great effort. But for film, building a new projector is relatively easy and straightforward. For digital media, that may or may not be the case. If your media was CD, that technology is straightforward enough and documented well enough that there is probably no real barrier to building a reader 100 years from now provided that the file format is sufficiently documented. But a sufficiently curious and intelligent person with no knowledge of the media could probably figure out how to project a film with no documentation.

Re:How many Star Wars reels were archived?

[brokeninside]

Sure. But storage density is a small part of the problem.

Imagine 100 years into the future. Which is easier to figure out how to play back: a movie stored on analog film, a movie encoded into uuencode into ASCII into binary and stored on punch cards, a movie stored in MPEG I zipped and split across single sided double density 5.25 floppy disks, a movie stored in a proprietary format on an MFM hard disk, a movie stored in WMV encrypted and stored on a HDCD?

It's not just about long life and storage density. It's about ease of access. A great example are NASA video tapes they found a few years ago. They couldn't play them back because they couldn't find a working playback device. Once they did find one, in a storage garage behind a chicken coop, they had to repair it and were quite fortunate to find technicians that /could/ repair it.

In the case of analog film, how to play it back is fairly obvious. WIth some digital media (e.g. DVDs) the formats are well enough documented that future generations ought to be able to figure it out. But there are quite a few storage choices that look like good choices that ended up being very poor choices.

Re:How many Star Wars reels were archived?

[MurukeshM]

We have the Internet today, and something like that is likely to persist (assumption). So hobbyists and collectors will not only be easier to find, information about obscure digital media are a lot more liely to exist in some niche of the much-more-searchable Internet. While analog playback is obvious, consider that a disaster capable of wiping out every data center, and standards archives, would probably destroy the infra needed to maintain the film.

Re:How many Star Wars reels were archived?

[ChrisMaple]

Even the best analog copies have accumulation of errors with each generation. Not only dust and new grain, but dimensional distortion, nonlinear exposure distortion, scratches, and loss of color separation (unless separate films for each color are used.)

Re:How many Star Wars reels were archived?

[Wescotte]

I've been told the current method for archival is actually just that. They use 3 B&W stocks to separate the color because B&W is far more stable and last longer under ideal conditions.

Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[wisebabo]

Ordinarily, being the geek that I am (and having worked at the very forefront of digital cinema) I'd be pleased that faster, better cheaper technology is replacing film, even in the "capture" (recording) stage.

However, as a wanna-be physicist, I know(?) that color is NOT just the simple mixture of three (or more) primaries; that is in Real Life(tm) it is a continuos spectrum and that film cameras (I think) capture it with some chemicals that are not just sensitive to a narrow slice of this spectrum. I compare this to modern CMOS based cameras in which the sensors, even if they are similarly "broadband", probably have different responses to light than say Kodachrome.

So, does this account for why some people say digital looks different than film? Can it corrected? Do people care? I worked in compression not color but I guess I should have learned this. :(

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[nattt]

Film negs use three layers which respond to it's three primary colours, CMY. Digital generally uses three filters to do RGB primaries. Our eye's cone cells come in three types - LMS.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[realityimpaired]

Digital will never be 100% for everybody... for most of us, it's pretty close though. The reason is that while light is a continuous spectrum of wavelengths, our perception of light is a mix of 3 primaries. There's 3 basic colours of cones in your eye (red, green, blue... what a coincidence!), and your brain compares how much each of those react to different wavelengths to produce a colour. Digital display relies on this in order to reproduce the same perception of colour... it displays relative intensities of each of these three primaries in order to trick your brain into thinking it's looking at a different wavelength when it's actually looking at a combination of primaries.

The thing is... your "red" cones aren't all responsive to exactly the same frequency. Ditto the green and blue ones. And my red peak sensitivity band is almost certainly different from yours. Because digital display doesn't reproduce the exact colours you're sensitive to, it'll never be 100% true to life. It'll be close enough that most of us won't notice the difference, but it can't be 100% true to life. More than that, some humans, mostly females, actually have 4 colours of cones instead of 3, and can see slightly into what most would consider the ultraviolet range (I'm one of them). For those people, digital playback can never be as vibrant as real life, because it's not capturing that extra information that the eye sees. (and no, Sharp with their quattron, is still a waste of money, because the 4th colour isn't yellow).

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[luckymutt]

So, does this account for why some people say digital looks different than film? Can it corrected? Do people care? I worked in compression not color but I guess I should have learned this. :(

I don't think so. I think some people say it looks different when they are talking about low budget, quick turn around digital like like soap operas and low budget independent shot on consumer grade equipment.
When the digital pipeline is professional grade, shot, comped, edited and finished at 4k, then I think most people won't spot the difference (that is, if the director is going for a "film" look, which many do)
As for color, some pro digital cameras sport up to 18 stops of dynamic range, which is greater than film.

Take a look at this list of movies shot with the Red camera and have someone honestly say if they could tell it was shot digital.

I think most would be surprised.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[swalve]

Film looks "correct" because it is analog and made of real world chemicals that have the same flaws that the real world does. The green pigment in film (for example) shares some of the non-linearities that the green pigment in grass and tree leaves do. The color gamut reflects the real world better. Where digital is more linear, and a bit more artificial. You can also make Serious Photography Mistakes on digital and just correct them, where in film, you are more stuck with it. So, for example, if you shoot in low light, you just correct it. But that makes the subjects look un-real, because our eyes see a bright face that looks different than a face would look if it was actually lit brightly.

Not to mention, analog fails more pleasingly than digital.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's 3 basic colours of cones in your eye (red, green, blue... what a coincidence!)
No, it's actually yellow, green, and blue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[nattt]

Yes, the colour gamut of a modern digital cinema camera like the RED Epic already exceeds that of film.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[Arlet]

Of course, analog film also uses 3 different pigments, that don't perfectly match the colors of your cones, so it can't be 100% accurate either. At least with digital, it's much easier to improve the gamut, since you don't need messy chemicals, just a bunch of color filters.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[bryan1945]

There are processing systems that make digital look more like film. The different systems have varying levels of success. Here is a generic Wiki article about it-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filmizing

Sorry, I tried to look up individual systems, but couldn't find any since I forgot their names. I had an acquaintance make a film for about $6K, and when I first saw it I asked him how he afforded film. He told me about his digital setup and I was quickly lost in the tech details.

The processing is getting better as the equipment prices come down.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[sunderland56]

It is not the colour range so much as the intensity range. Companies are working hard on building sensors with a larger range, but a sensor with both the resolution and the dynamic range of film is not there yet. It might be possible to manufacture a camera with multiple sensors and neutral density filters to expand the range, but I don't think anyone has done so.

Film is still widely used in the television industry because of that. A large percentage of high-budget TV dramas, commercials, and movies are shot on film, and then digitized. Yes, that market will evaporate instantly once a sutable camera appears - and that day may come soon, but it is not here yet. And no, the Red camera is nowhere near good enough yet - it isn't even the best digital movie camera available today.

The original article is wrong, though - Panavision has not stopped manufacturing film cameras. All of their cameras and lenses are custom made, by hand, as needed. You can still get any Panavision gear you want.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[jon3k]

Well I don't know if comparing film and digital video on a digital monitor really tells you much :) You'd need a film projector using "analog" film and a digital projector with a digital source to get a real comparison, right?

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[zippthorne]

Film isn't continuous either. It's layers of color filters.

In fact, the only hope you have for a continuous spectrum is to do some kind of scanning spectral imaging setup like is done in some planetary mapping satellites - you don't get to have a 3 dimensional sensor, and I'm not sure where you'd put the diffraction grating to separate the spectrum of a 2-D image even if you could, so you have to scan a line for every frame. You're going to need a pretty bright light source for TV HD - at least 1080x as powerful if you scan vertically.

And it gets worse. You're still going to have to deal with quantization. Only your quantization in color will be whatever dimension of the image sensor you chose for spectral info. So, instead of 3 colors you get 1,000. And secondary diffraction modes might be mixed in with primary ones.

And then you have the problem of merging all of that into some kind of display device...

Far easier to choose three color filters, and match them as closely as possible to the eye's sensitivity curves. Then, when reproducing the image, choose representative frequencies that are as close to separate in as many people as possible. Any photon that would register as "green" in your eye is as good as any other. As long as it doesn't also trigger "blue" - overlapping ranges were already taken care of in the input filter.

I think that actual devices aren't even quite so exacting. But what they chose seems to be good enough. At least as good as film, anyway, and just as good in week 4 as it was on day 1.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[PPH]

As for color, some pro digital cameras sport up to 18 stops of dynamic range, which is greater than film.

They have to, since their sensor has less dynamic range than film. And therein lies the problem. Sure, you can set your digital camera's stop to match the scene average, or for one spot. But given a scene with large dynamic ranges (between the brightest and darkest spots), film still beats digital.

There have been some good articles about film vs digital resolution (i.e. pixel size). And some professional digital cameras are catching up with film by this metric. But they skirt around the issue of quantization levels for individual colors. That's bits per pixel, and film still beats digital.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[Anonymous Coward]

FIrst, you're a human, not a bird. The fourth color is yellow, being a variant on the "green" cones, and is wholly unrelated to the violet/UV cutoff (which varies person-to-person, even amongst males with no hope of tetrachromacy).

But the Quattron isn't even trying to add a fourth dimension to the colorspace. It's trying to maximize coverage of a standard (say, CIE xyY) colorspace. Looking at the chromaticity (xy) plane of the xyY colorspace, you can plot the component colors, and the convex hull of them is the reachable chromaticity, aka gamut. With one component, you get monochrome displays with only one color (well, duh). With two components, you get a line of color (potentially including white, if the colors are chosen correctly -- some early color films used this to good effect, the color pair red-cyan chosen to preserve blue sky, brown earth, and flesh tones). You need 3 (or more) components to cover a non-zero area of the plane, hence RGB.

But even if your three components are maximally saturated (e.g. lasers) lying on the periphery, you can only match the triangle including them, and at least two (usually three) "lobes" of high-saturation colors will be undisplayable (yellow, cyan, and deep violet for typical RGB); with broader-band components (e.g. white light filtered through a LCD's color layer, or a DLP's color wheel), you don't get any color fully saturated, and yellows and cyans are even worse off.

If, OTOH. you add a fourth component, you can dramatically reduce the area of undisplayable chromaticity, or use less-saturate colors to acheive the same percentage of coverage, and it'll also be more evenly distributed about the colors, so e.g. selective yellow fog lights won't look hideously washed out. Adding even more components continues the same benefits, but with diminishing returns -- essentially, you're approximating an ellipse-like shape with n points.

And all that applies to film as well, so quit whinging about "digital" -- 3 primaries is three primaries, so all the standard three-pigment color processes similarly leave vast chunks of gamut unused, robbing everyone of real saturated colors, and to the extent human tetrachromacy offers a genuine fourth dimension to your colorspace, it also fails there.

And no offense to tetrachromats (I envy you!), but given your low population and the lack of scientific evidence (one way or the other) on the hypothesis that the retina processes it down to three channels for the optic nerve anyway (giving higher resolution, but the same 3D space), coupled with the huge gamut deficiencies in typical RGB displays, which affect all trichromats and tetrachromats, I think adding a fourth (and maybe fifth) channel to expand gamut makes a much larger difference than using it to try for a 4D colorspace. Unfortunately, I can't ultimately disagree with your conclusion that Quattrons are a waste of money, since all visual content is produced with the assumption of some RGB display's gamut -- the actual missing colors are not only not present in RGB data (or YUV or similarly RGB-derived color spaces), but are avoided in filming because of it. Until four-component displays become widespread, standards won't support it, and until standards support it, it's a waste of money. And we know nobody will bother to break this cycle, because they didn't make a 4-color film process in the last half-century for exactly the same benefits.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[Art3x]

Color film is actually still divided into three or four layers, each of which captures a certain color.

Digital does, yes, usually look different than film, but that's more because of the "gamma" of film, the way it handles changes in brightness. Video sensors have a linear response, while film has an S shape. At the darkest and brightest parts of a film image, the film is no longer responding to light linearly. A spot that was twice as bright in real life only looks, say, 50% brighter on film. In other words, it tapers off.

This sounds worse, a distortion of reality, and it kind of is, but it is the best way to compress brightness. You have to compress it, unless you want your TV set to be able to be as bright as the noon-day sun. A scene in real life with a 100,000:1 contrast ratio is reduced to about 500:1, because it's easier on the eyes (and your electric bill).

Both video and film compress brightness, but video does a hard clip at pure black and pure white. It's mid-tones are also lower contrast than film's, which give video sort of a milky or even plastic look. Film has high-contrast mid-tones (where faces and other subjects of interest are) and low-contrast lows and highs. Video just has medium-contrast everything. And that is a big part of the film look.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[Jonner]

As the article said, post production is all done digitally already, which allows color to be manipulated easily. I'm sure it's possible to make video from any source look like any kind of film if desired.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[Twinbee]

Wow, someone with a 4th cone. I am so curious! Do you feel as if the 4th primary is a completely independent colour all by itself, or is there some overlap with one or more of the other three?

Alos, do you believe the RGB cones represent what we see as RGB, or do you the think you perceive colours as 'squashed together' so that the 4th primary is essentially what we see as blue/violet?. Which means really you only see 3 primary colours like us, but that each cone shares some colour pollution with adjacent cones. Is that a possibility?

Love to hear an answer to this.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[Twinbee]

I've asked this countless times before to various people, but noone's ever known the answer - maybe you can help.

If one were to activate each of the three cones individually (i.e. hypothetically disabling the other two cones), what colours would one see? Three answers for each combination.

Disable G & B - what would R look like? (I'm guessing red)
Disable R & B - what would G look like? (I'm guessing green)
Disable R & G - what would B look like? (I'm guessing blue)

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[Twinbee]

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. It may be called yellow/blue, but if it presents an impression of red to the person, then, calling it the red cone makes more sense doesn't it?

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[Solandri]

However, as a wanna-be physicist, I know(?) that color is NOT just the simple mixture of three (or more) primaries; that is in Real Life(tm) it is a continuos spectrum and that film cameras (I think) capture it with some chemicals that are not just sensitive to a narrow slice of this spectrum. I compare this to modern CMOS based cameras in which the sensors, even if they are similarly "broadband", probably have different responses to light than say Kodachrome.

Film won't reproduce the spectral response of the objects you're filming. It takes the spectral response of those objects under that particular lighting, and maps it onto the spectral response of the film. Just like digital maps it to an RGB color space. So whether you're shooting film or digital, you're not getting the original spectral response anyway.

But this is a moot point. The whole point of photos/movies is to reproduce the spectral response achieved under the lighting of the scene at the time you shot it. You don't want the image to look different when viewed with sunlight coming in the windows, vs. a halogen lamp lighting the ceiling at night. You want to lock in the spectral response of the objects at the time of the original shoot, which both film and digital do.

The only time you want to try to duplicate the original spectral response of the objects is if you're trying to reproduce the actual color and texture. Paints, fabrics, chalks, etc. need to worry about it. Film and digital photos and movies do not.

So, does this account for why some people say digital looks different than film? Can it corrected? Do people care? I worked in compression not color but I guess I should have learned this. :(

Imitating the color response of different films is mostly trivial. There have been photoshop actions to do it since the early 1990s. It can get a bit dicey if the film is sensitive to a wavelength the camera sensor is not (e.g. UV), but for the most part you can digitally make a pretty close approximation to most films.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[evilWurst]

You'd be able to see Imaginary Colors . Note the graph in the top right; normally, two or three cones are reacting to the same wavelength, and our brain does some interpretation afterwards.

So, for example, if red and blue cones were shut off, you'd only be able to see green (and, well, also the monochrome from rods). Impossibly pure green at the peak, and duller green at the extremes. And any two wavelengths with the same y value on the green curve of that graph? Those two colors would look identical to you. That means it'd be possible to make a red and blue checkerboard pattern that looks like uniform green to you.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[LWATCDR]

actually no white light is not a continuous spectrum of wavelengths. That and film uses three pigments. In other words ahhh... Never mind.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[nattt]

Typical motion picture film stock maxes out at around 14.5 stops of dynamic range. Any camera that shows a greater DR will hold the scene better. Film is also relatively noisy (grain) in the shadows meaning you get much better low light performance with a quality digital cinema camera. Good digital has already outdone 35mm film in terms of measured resolution and noise performance. It's just starting to take over on dynamic range.

Quantization is a non-issue because that is in film, grain limited and digital has been less noisy (it's equivalent to grain) for quite a while, hence the better low light performance.

Re:Loss of (or difference in) color fidelity?

[mikechant]

My experience is the opposite; I used to use a moderate quality 35mm camera, and I was constantly disappointed with the results; I tired my best but the focus and/or lighting were always poor and the colours never looked quite right. In the end I virtually stopped taking pictures, it seemed a waste of time. About 6 years ago, I got a moderate quality point-and-shoot digital camera, and I love the results; clean, sharp, vibrant colours, I display the results on a large-screen TV and I really feel I'm there. I use it all the time.

Those silent films that ate themselves ...

[brokeninside]

.... how many were stored in a climate controlled archive?

Some films do have problems with age. This is especially true of film reels from the early age of the motion picture. But in most cases the degradation is more a function of the film not being stored properly because no one imagined wanting to preserve them for posterity all those years ago. Just like during the studios used to just throw out animation cells, they used to can old reels after they retired them from the box office. Consider one of my favorites, Metropolis. Shortly after its debut, pretty much no one thought it was worth keeping around. The few reels still in existence were found by mistake or in the vaults of private collectors who, fascinated by the movie, bought their own copy when it first came out.

Don't Cling to the Past

[Sponge Bath]

Don't fret so much about lost media. You can always remake a film, with the added bonus of improving it for modern sensibilities. Lose your blues, everybody cut footloose! Next up: Soylent Green, it's people!

A 1000 year medium is only half the problem

[brokeninside]

Recall the story about the NASA tapes found a few years back with footage from the moon walk. It took over a decade to find the parts to build something that could play them. And that was with analog video.

It is true that film has the same problem to a certain degree. But, due to its nature, it'd be far less expensive to build an analog projector than it would be to try to reconstruct a data format on an obscure disk standard 500 years after everyone has stopped using it.

Re:

[taiwanjohn]

Their goal is not efficiency, anonymous retard, it's longevity. If they're already accustomed to archiving film, then why not just use it? You could probably fit a couple of hundred "tracks" of barcode on one frame of film, though it would still take a LOT of film to store one movie this way. Personally, I would just do an image transfer to large format film, but as an analog medium, that would be "lossy."

Obviously these archivists don't trust the standard magnetic storage media, otherwise they wouldn't be "worried" about the obsolescence of film. So if film is what they trust, they might as well just figure out a way to use it.

Re:

[swalve]

That's awesome! Fuck this blueray shit, I want to rent movies on punchcards!

Re:Special offer

[TheGratefulNet]

film is very high res. your comment shows your ignorance.

tell me, oh wise one, how do you squeeze more detail out of a digital 'film'?

otoh, gone with the wind (very old film-based movie) can be resampled and given more resolution than even some modern HD movies.

I laughed when some kid said something about 'yeah, but they didnt' shoot with HD film, did they?'.

film has always been 'high def' and with better scanners, you get more bits of res from it.

my old 35mm negs still scan very well, too.

film is more expensive to edit and change and digital does that easily; but film has its place and pretty much always will.

Re:

[swalve]

They don't trust it, but only because they are familiar with the failure modes of film, and not (as) familiar with the failure modes of digital. There are no layers of abstraction to film, there are multiple layers with digital.

But also, film people have a point that digital can't yet overcome: film has more resolution than all but the most wildly expensive and impractical digital modes. Much of that resolution is wasted, but when newer digital standards emerge, film can be rescanned at that standard and you get more out of it. Can't really do that with digital.

Re:Can we have some consistency of terms?

[icebraining]

Film cameras are a subset of movie cameras.

Re:Special offer

[nattt]

A good 35 film neg will contain around 3k of resolution. This is generally scanned at 4k to preserve all the detail. Scanning beyond that makes for larger files, but no more actual detail. "Digital film" - as in the files from modern digital cinema cameras like the RED Epic is already recording more detail than that 35mm film neg.

Re:

[taiwanjohn]

> film has more resolution...

I suspect that's why film has survived this long, despite all the hassles and expense associated with it. I worked in a camera shop in the early 90's, just as digital photography was coming to market, and I remember several "old-timer" customers who scoffed at the idea, often citing their Kodachrome slides from the 40's, still in pristine condition after fifty years.

Instead of barcodes, I think the most "efficient" solution would be to print the image on large format film -- large enough to allow a distinct "box" for each pixel -- and combine this with some sort of histogram of the colors in each frame. Sorta like an MD5 sum, this would allow color correction to control for aging/fading of the film. After a century of development, film manufacturers have gotten pretty good at making an archival-quality product. And film archivists have gotten pretty good at storing it, too. So it seems like a natural fit.

Re:Special offer

[Mindflux0]

film is very high res. your comment shows your ignorance.

Well, well Sir Labelsalot, where exactly did anyone say "film is low res"?

film has its place and pretty much always will.

Apparently not. Since no one makes the cameras anymore.

I'm not saying they're going to disappear next year or anything like that. But digital will beat film out in most respects sooner or later and then it will just be nostalgic. When CDs came out some people complained that the low bitrate cut out a portion of the music but everyone used them anyway. How many people have vinyl? How many people even noticed and cared? Not that many. And now the quality is better anyway.

So...yeah, film is here now and has some time left but I'd be pretty surprised if it has more than a marginal place in the market 50 years from now (aside from digitizing old films at least). Much like vinyl.

Re:Special offer

[hairyfeet]

What has made sure the film camera is doomed is the RED because it was Hollywood, and those that were aspired to be LIKE Hollywood, that kept film alive. But with RED the amount of definition is frankly better than the old 72mm superwide they used for a brief time in the 50s.

Couple this with the fact that HD cams are dropping in price like mad, for the majority of folks the cams are ALREADY "good enough" at around 7MP and like Kodachrome you have a tech that made really pretty pictures that simply isn't used anymore. Kinda like how LPs often sound better than CDs thanks to being pretty immune to the loudness craze but nobody buys LPs so it really don't matter.

Like it or not digital is here to stay, analog is going the way of the 8 track. Folks want instant gratification and film just don't do that.

Re:Special offer

[nabsltd]

A good 35 film neg will contain around 3k of resolution. This is generally scanned at 4k to preserve all the detail.

For low-light motion picture film, I'd agree, but slower film can eke out 8K resolution.

And then there's still 70mm. 60-year-old Cinerama, Todd-AO, and other large format negatives still don't have any digital capture system that can come close to the resolution.

Re:Special offer

[suso]

I guess you've never heard of film grain. Film doesn't have infinite detail as you seem to imply.

Re:Special offer

[Joreallean]

Only to the "film-o-philes" just like the audiophiles love their analog. Does mean that it has any place in the mainstream market? No it doesn't I have never seen a resampled film that looks better than one created entirely in this generation of technology. You may be able to get more "res" from the film through additional sampling, but every nick, tick, defect, fade, and scratch is lost forever as well. So to say that digital can never get better, well it also means that you shouldn't ever have to buy a "digitally remastered" copy of your content either. When you have it you have it.

China

[leandrod]

No Chinese manufacturer? In still TLR photography Rollei, for instance, is gone, but China’s Seagull is still going on.

Re:Special offer

[JimCanuck]

Eh,

Red is using a image sensor the size of 35mm film. Big deal. Their sensors are also measuring less pixels per mm then film does. RED sensors natively only do 4,096 by 2,304 or 9MP, all the other sizes are cut down from this that it produces, or done in software.

At the moment, good 35mm film stock is generally rated to being equivalent to 80MP under normal conditions (due to lighting changes etc if at ideal values film can go up to 140MP for normal films, but even as high as 400MP using photo-archiving film). These are native resolutions not software "enhanced".

Your HD TV, at 1080p, is only giving you 2MP worth of image. A 10 year old digital camera can do that for you. Film will still be used for decades, why? Because it can always be scanned at a higher resolution at a later date, and even fixed up if our scanner resolutions finally reach the resolutions supported by film already. At the moment, high quality film scanners are only capable of 50MP natively.

But just like in film photography, the higher megapixel digital camera's cannot compete with medium formats (such as 6x6) large formats (such as 4x5 inches) and even good 35mm film stock when it comes to enlargements. Which is why you are told to sit "x" number of feet away from your HDTV so you get that good picture. As at that point the fuzz disappears due to your own eyes resolution when looking at something being less then the distortion of the picture.

There have been news stories for the last 10 years about both motion picture film camera's and still camera's being completely discontinued, and every time the story has been highly misrepresented.

Jim

Re:Can we have some consistency of terms?

[jon3k]

So if I use a "film camera" to shoot a television show does reality unravel?

Re:Special offer

[geoskd]

my old 35mm negs still scan very well, too.

film is more expensive to edit and change and digital does that easily; but film has its place and pretty much always will.

Now you are letting your personal bias show through: Analog storage in any form (be it film, or magnetic tape, etc...) is a far *less* preferable alternative on so may levels that its surprising that it took digital media as long as it did to overtake it. Film will go completely out of use soon. Film is a mature technology and really isn't improving anymore. Digital on the other hand is still improving fast, and it is already competitive with analog on almost every measure, and far superior on many. Resolution of digital cameras can be bought up to any scale desired, and cost is the only factor. Its just a matter of time before the cost curve comes down to the point where everyone can afford movie quality resolution movie cameras, and digital currently makes all the other movie production costs so much lower that it is currently worth digital recording almost no matter the cost of the camera.

Film is doomed to a niche market of crazed die hard artists, much like authors that still use the typewriter, photographers who work in black and white, and musicians who use cassette tape. Its over, deal with it.

-=Geoskd

Put source code for a decoder on each disc

[tepples]

Digital has the disadvantage though if you forget the file format it was stored in your out of luck.

Take as an assumption that the physical media spec and K&R are well preserved. Then you can split the film across several discs plus parity discs and include the C source code for a decoder on each disc.

Re:Special offer

[nattt]

Which film stock are you referring to? at 35mm to get 8k rez you'd need a lens capable of passing detail at 160lp/mm.

Re:Special offer

[nattt]

No, good 35mm motion picture film stock like 5219 measures about 3k resolution. 80MP would equate to what - 12k. Don't be silly - that's a vast over-estimation of the resolution of film and you're also well into lens and diffraction limitations at that point. Don't confuse scanning resolution with measured detail, and don't confuse 35mm motion picture film with 35mm stills film which is somewhat larger...

Re:Special offer

[i_ate_god]

I'm not saying they're going to disappear next year or anything like that. But digital will beat film out in most respects sooner or later and then it will just be nostalgic. When CDs came out some people complained that the low bitrate cut out a portion of the music but everyone used them anyway. How many people have vinyl? How many people even noticed and cared? Not that many. And now the quality is better anyway.

The medium of the final product isn't the issue, the medium of the individual components is the issue. I don't know about film, but in sound, analog imparts a particular flavour. Portishead is a great example. They record their drums to vinyl, then bounce that back into the final mix, just to impart the flavour of vinyl onto the sound

Archivists are worried

[Maury Markowitz]

Why? Once all the footage is in, take the masters (on HD one assumes) and run it all at once into a high quality film recorder. Archive that.

Re:Special offer

[wealthychef]

LOL -- the "flavor of vinyl" basically means distortion and inaccuracy, doesn't it?

Why store things on film?

[xiando]

I have a DV camera which stores the video on a tape. I have two tapes I'll use until they wear out (I have a few more spare tapes). I go out, videotape something, go home and dump the files to a harddrive. I use the next tape again next time. Why would someone want to store anything on film or tape? I don't see the point. Digital is better. Sure, harddrives fail, but you can always cp things around, make numerous backups and so on.

Re:

[Nadaka]

just dont drop the box, they are a pain in the ass to re sort.

Re:Special offer

[Belial6]

Which is better is the wrong argument in digital vs. analog. They could both be made better than anything that has currently been made. No one has, or likely ever will top out the quality that either one could produce.

The real question is which one is cheaper to produce at the "good enough", or maybe even "a little better than good enough" quality. Analog get real close to the "good enough' range real fast with cheap manufacturing. I can build an analog audio system in my home out stuff pulled from my kid's craft bucket. Digital is much more expensive to get going. To match the audio fidelity of my 'craft' analog system in digital, you are going to need a billion dollar chip foundry. Ok, you could probably do it with discreet components with only a million dollar factory, but the point remains that there was a lot of infrestructure that needed to be built to get digital off the ground.

The thing is, once you get the infrastructure in place, digital gets real cheap. It would take $1000s of dollars in analog gear to match the audio quality of a $20 CD player. Very few people care to try, as the digital player is "good enough". If the masses decided that they had to have better than CD quality, digital equipment could easily be produced that was dramatically better at a much cheaper price than analog equipment. What we have found is that not only do people not care about better than CD audio quality (see DVDA and SACD), but in fact have chosen lower quality in MP3. They did this fully informed of the choice they were making. Cost was the deciding factor.

Re:Special offer

[tinkerton]

You should check out those guitar amplifiers some day. They're horribly inaccurate. Some of them even have knobs for massively increasing the distortion.

Re:Special offer

[adolf]

Film grain also isn't neatly rectangular, as pixels are. At high magnification, film fails with a random pattern which our brains are fairly decent at processing into a useful image because it's not too dissimilar to how our own eyes fail in instances of poor focus, lighting, or both.

Digital pixels are not perceived the same way.

Archivists are worried

[nurb432]

So are those of us that appreciate analog.

Re:Special offer

[Billy the Mountain]

LOL -- the "flavor of vinyl" basically means distortion and inaccuracy, doesn't it?

Huh? You say that like it's a bad thing.

Archiving old film.

[carpefishus]

NOBODY, is archiving old film back to film. Old film is being archived digitally. That alone is sufficient clue as to the direction film is going.

Re:Special offer

[i_ate_god]

uh, yes, I do. It adds depth to the sound that is not fully reproducible on a digital medium.

Film will *always* be superior.

[FlyingGuy]

I know this will get lost in the background noise, but ti needs to be said.

File has more latitude, better color reproduction, and does not have jaggies, compression tear or bizarre artifacts.

Film has an ethereal quality and it allows my eyes to relax and take everything in while letting me slip into that space were I am transported to the realm of the movie.

One day film will be gone completely. For now I have stocked up on as much 35mm film stock that I can afford to but and have it in deep cold storage. The chemicals required to develop it will always be there and I have the formula's to mix it.

Re:Film will *always* be superior.

[RightSaidFred99]

Film will not always be superior, and isn't now. I think you're mistaking compression artifacts with the quality of raw digital media.

Looks like we've entered the realm of the "videophile".

I just bought a new gold-plated power cord for my film projector, I really get a more ethereal quality and the eye-strain is far less with a more purified power source.

Re:Film will *always* be superior.

[FlyingGuy]

Raw digital video information is useless. I don't know but I think that the RAW data from the senors would be 1000 times or more the size of the compressed movie and is therefor useless to me

Digital does not have the ability to have a true fade from one color to the other, there will always be distinct boundaries between each stage, that is just the way it is, you cannot get around digital being a 1 or a zero.

Film on the other hand is completely seamless and beautiful.

The first movie I have a memory of seeing was Un homme et une femme in 1966. Yup I was 6 and my mother had me along for the matinee ( I asked her many many years later ). I saw the movie years later from an original print and I the images were beautiful, subtle, rich. Not like today's cartoon looking HD movies that I cannot stand. I really don't want to see every pore in ever actors face and when they try to tone it down with after effects it just looks wrong.

I want a movie to transport me, to lul me into that realm were I can surrender reality to that dreamy images on the silver screen.

To me a movie is art. It is like the difference between a portrait painted by a master and a photograph., even one on film they just don;t compare. Imagine some of Adams best work done in glaring digital. Just the thought offends me.

Don't get me wrong computers are great for a lot of things, but for art, not so much and that is what I want on the screen not garish digital madness.

Steven Spielberg must be sad.

[antdude]

He still prefers film over digital. :)

Re:Special offer

[mug funky]

google Modulation Transfer Function.

original camera neg can have huge amounts of detail, but beyond ~3k (as noted by others), all you're gonna get is grain and blur and exposing the shitty lens optics (that make cinema great... too sharp sux).

it's like arguing that vinyl has more detail than . you might be able to recover something "up ther", but the whole spectrum is covered with noise and distortion and other crap.

film is going the way vinyl did. i'll miss it, to be sure. i'll miss rocking up to work at 7am only to find the lab hasn't finished processing it yet, and my client's coming in at 9. i'll miss not being able to get the telecine started, or having a coke-can sized capacitor blow up while i'm loading it. i'll miss the piss smell of fresh black-and-white reversal, or the soft touch of a reel that's been rushed from the lab and is still warm. i'll miss waxing lyric about the merits of various film stocks, and the amazing amount of highlight detail the modern stocks can give you (8 stops overexposed and still something in the picture with the vision3 stuff... digital still has some room for improvement in latitude). i'll miss how goddamned easy a well shot bit of film is to colour-grade, and how beautiful it can look, even on a modest budget.

digital is so much cheaper and more accessible. for practical purposes on a sane shoot with a good DP, it's just as good as film (no, really it is and has been for a while). it's easy to do effects for as it's more linear and has bugger-all grain (though rolling shutter is a pain in the anus).

it's a fair bit harder to post, at least not counting keeping the scanning/telecine machines running. going tapeless and lab-reel-less is a nightmare for workflow, especially with people who don't know what timecode is because they grew up on final cut and miniDV and never needed it.

Re:Special offer

[ChrisMaple]

Focus of the original film is rarely perfect, nor is it likely that the exposure was at an f-stop that allowed best resolution. Also, I'd be surprised if there are many cases of working with the original negatives. And there are other degrading factors, such as motion blur. Overall, it's unlikely that more than a small portion of any film can recover more than 50 lp/mm. 35 mm images are 24 mm wide, that's 2400 pixels wide; 70 mm motion picture film takes images 52.48 mm wide, that's 5248 pixels wide at 50 lp/mm.

To get best results, oversampling should be used to get the places that would be zeros in a lower resolution transfer function, and surely high resolution records should be kept for archives and as a source for digital post-processing. But super-high resolution for the viewer of entertainment video from filmstock is pointless.

It's all about money..

[Wescotte]

The only reason film is still used in Hollywood productions is because it's currently cheaper to do so. Their entire workflow from shooting to archival to restoration is based on using film in key spots. The studios are in it to make money. When an all digital workflow becomes cheaper than their current model then you bet your ass they will switch over.

I'm a student film maker in an experimental (focused more on art house than typical Hollywood) film program. There are tons of students here madly in love with film for various reasons. Most of them are purely sentimental and no doubt unable to tell the difference if you put them side by side. I'm not one of them. I prefer the advantages of digital.

However, there are some legitimate reasons to prefer film. Digital workflow has it's downsides. It can be more complicated to get started editing with. Film you can just cut and tape together. You can hold the medium in your hand and see how it all works together. Some people prefer something they can physically touch. It can be a more enjoyable process for them to work with and problem solve with.

Digital can require significantly more complicated just to get your footage to play nice with your NLE software. Also, being able to see your image instantly can give students the impression they can cut corners in planning stages. When you can't see your final image until days/weeks later after processing it really forces you to make sure you plan everything out in more detail. You just have understand everything going on to avoid mistakes that will cost you both in time and money.

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[Richy_T]

Just ask George Lucas. He ended up with part of the audio of Revenge of the Sith mixed in with Return of the Jedi. They never did get the whole Han/Greedo scene ordered properly again either.

Re:Special offer

[hairyfeet]

But I don't think what killed those formats was audio quality and the users not caring so much as the media companies took a shit on them by making them so DRM tastic that nothing was compatible and nothing worked. from what I was told (can't say first hand, avoided both formats when I heard about all the DRM) that it was a royal PITA just to rip your tunes to your drive, something most of us have been doing for over a decade and even the most clueless have been doing since WinXP.

So I would say what makes something "good enough" often comes down to ease of use and if the ease of use isn't there folks just won't bother. I hear the cat & mouse game with Blu Ray and DRM is just about over but now I simply don't care. I was excited when it first came out but when I found out about all the DRM bullshit I found upscaling DVDs were "good enough" and ease of use, which includes the ability to back up those movies so a single scratch doesn't bone the thing, trumped all.