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

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: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.