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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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."

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.

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...

[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...

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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?

[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.

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.

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: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: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

[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

[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.

Archivists are worried

[nurb432]

So are those of us that appreciate analog.

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.

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.