A Few Words About An article of interest... (1 Viewer)

[montrealfilmguy]

Wow Worth ! thanks for the awesome lists And yeah,they closed Technicolor here in Montreal also.

 

[Worth]

People in the future would find it far easier to figure out how motion picture film works than digital copies in obscure, copy-protected formats. More movies and shows are likely to be lost to neglect. We can still see films that are over a hundred years old because of the genius and relative durability of the format. Electronic media are not nearly so durable; case in point, obsolete videotape formats.

A while ago, Kodak was working on creating a digital negative for archival purposes - that is, digital data would be stored on motion picture film rather than discs or drives because of its durability. But I don't know what ever became of this.

 

[RobertR]

I see stair-stepping and pixels in my digital cinema experiences. Something about those artifacts drives me up the wall and takes me out of the movie. Like I just spent $12 to watch a big TV. I dunno if those were 4K presentations though.

I've seen the same thing, and I hate it. But, as you said, maybe they weren't 4K.

 

[Robert Harris]

Originally Posted by RobertR



I've seen the same thing, and I hate it. But, as you said, maybe they weren't 4K.

Problems are not a 4k v 2k issue. Can be anywhere from the creation of the data files all the way through to the setup of projection equipment. Nothing wrong with a high quality 2k system.

 

[Kevin EK]

One adjustment to the list of TV shows - Private Practice has changed over from 35mm film to digital. Using an Alexa.

 

[Kevin EK]

One more adjustment. House has also changed over to the Alexa.

 

[David Wilkins]

A sad time indeed, though inevitable I suppose. So far as still photography, I greatly miss the ambience and characteristics of various film stock. I especially miss Kodachrome, having used it heavily since 1970. Forgive, if the topic has been mentioned much around here already...but I wonder how far away we might be from having apps that specifically mimic the subtle qualities of selected film stocks, for both still and cinematography?

 

[montrealfilmguy]

I'm thinking Red bullet software invented by Stu Maschwitz would apply in trying to emulate certain film stocks with some success. In the 90's ,he left ILM to create the Orphanage,a visual effects company that has now worked on an impressive list of blockbusters since then. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orphanage_(company) Apparently they closed in 2009,but seems to have worked on Iron man 2 in 2010 ??? But it's a complete suite,not an app.

 

[Worth]

I wonder how far away we might be from having apps that specifically mimic the subtle qualities of selected film stocks, for both still and cinematography?

This has existed for a while. There are Avid and After Effects plug-ins that simulate the look and grain structure of specific film stocks. It's not uncommon for productions shot digitally at 24p to add a layer of grain to the image to mimic the look of film.

 

[Phoebus]

That last comment reminds me of Nine, which chose a grainy look over the actual look of sixties color cinema. It seemed a badly thought through decision and slightly insulting to the standard of the cinema of the period of the sixties in which it is set. Just an opinion, like any film criticism - I admired much about the movie and found much in day lewis' performance to be incredibly subtle and outrageous, likewise his many wild ladies. As to 70mm, IMAX cinemas can, surely, still project the format. If a Friday night showing of a restored 70mm can build a revival house audience, say once a month, then the legacy is surely still able to be preserved as a revival house demonstration of bluray vs. genuine 70mm. In london this only happens in all-night shows, a notable recent one including brainstorm and 2001, the latter showing in digital format at about 4am.

 

[Arild]

The fact is, digital will never equal the resolution of continuous-tone film.

How do you figure that? Film doesn't have infinite resolution any more than any other existing visual storage format.

 

[cafink]

The fact is, digital will never equal the resolution of continuous-tone film. Hollywood will go the path of "good enough is good enough."

But what does this have to do with digital? There are lots of different film formats, with different resolutions, too.

 

[RobertR]

It seems to me that the "can digital match film" question could be answered the same way it is with digital vs. analog audio: Do a double blind comparison between film and a digital copy of it (sans any manipulation to make it look "better", of course). If you can't tell which is which, the question has been answered.

 

[David Wilkins]

Digital imaging is in its absolute infancy. Digital will someday outstrip the limitations of film. At some point digital will have to be dumbed-down, to convey the quaint qualities of the film stocks of yesteryear...for artistic effect.

 

[theonemacduff]

Speaking as someone who still prefers film over digital, that's complete nonsense. Digital has made huge strides in the last decade and I have little doubt that it will equal and eventually surpass the quality of film in all objective measures. And I don't think you'll find many people arguing that you need to scan 35mm film at anything beyond 4K to capture everything the negative is capable of resolving. Even now, 2K digital projection offers a significant improvement over standard 35mm release prints in most areas.

Sorry to disagree, but when 35mm is shot through good glass, a 4K resolution scan will maybe capture about 75 percent of the data on the film; and that's a conservative estimate. My own experience in scanning 35mm slides and negatives for archival purposes (shot through Canon and Nikon lenses) has convinced me that I need to scan at least at 6K to make sure of getting all the data. At that level of detail, you can just begin to make out the grain in the shots, so long as the light is good. Some colour shots at the Library of Congress, shot on Graflex cameras, using Kodak sheet film, in the 1930s and 40s have even more detail, with no grain really visible at all, i.e., those shots could have been scanned at higher levels and revealed even more. I agree that digital will (probably) one day be as good as film, but 4K strikes me as much too low, compared to what film is capable of capturing.

 

[Adam_S]

well 35mm still photography and 35mm cinema photography have substantially different areas of film exposed, compared to one another. so 4k for a cinema frame but you'd want a higher resolution for a still frame.

 

[Alan Tully]

Oh well, it gave me a good living for 45 years (film lab & then telecine), & I do know some of the people who were made redundant in the UK last week. I would think that world-wide there were a great many job losses. I think 16mm will disappear very fast, any TV production that wants to go with film (& has the budget) might as well go with 3perf 35mm. I can see no technical reason why digital shouldn't look every bit as good or better than the best film can do. So far most of it hasn't, people are still draining the colour & making the picture look gungy, so a lot of films look like they were shot on someones cell phone. Hopefully this is a passing phase & people will look at films of yesteryear & say, I want my move to look that good!

 

[MatthewA]

Originally Posted by Billy Batson

well 35mm still photography and 35mm cinema photography have substantially different areas of film exposed, compared to one another. so 4k for a cinema frame but you'd want a higher resolution for a still frame.

A 35mm still photo frame is twice the size of a 35mm motion picture film frame, so if 4k can capture a movie frame it would take 8k to hold all the info on a still photo frame. And that's a TIFF file of over 100 MB.

 

[Robert Harris]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MatthewA

Technicolor had been cutting corners ever since the 1970s, and after they ditched dye-transfer (1974 in the US, 1977 in the UK) they were just another lab as far as I was concerned. I'm not a fan of the grungy look, but it's been around since the late 1960s yet and a lot of young filmmakers don't know and don't care what films looked like before then. Some of them think the banding and excessive grain of trying to lighten underexposed shots looks cool. While I mainly use digital, I prefer the old techniques of shooting and I use the look of pre-1970s films and photographers for inspiration in my film and photography work.



A 35mm still photo frame is twice the size of a 35mm motion picture film frame, so if 4k can capture a movie frame it would take 8k to hold all the info on a still photo frame. And that's a TIFF file of over 100 MB.

This k-thing still seems to confound.


Regardless of the number of perforations being scanned, a 4k image is still a 4k image -- perf to perf. Standard 35/4 and VistaVision 35/8 are both 4k. The difference would be in megapixels.


RAH

 

[theonemacduff]

 

Technicolor had been cutting corners ever since the 1970s, and after they ditched dye-transfer (1974 in the US, 1977 in the UK) they were just another lab as far as I was concerned. I'm not a fan of the grungy look, but it's been around since the late 1960s yet and a lot of young filmmakers don't know and don't care what films looked like before then. Some of them think the banding and excessive grain of trying to lighten underexposed shots looks cool. While I mainly use digital, I prefer the old techniques of shooting and I use the look of pre-1970s films and photographers for inspiration in my film and photography work.

 

 

A 35mm still photo frame is twice the size of a 35mm motion picture film frame, so if 4k can capture a movie frame it would take 8k to hold all the info on a still photo frame. And that's a TIFF file of over 100 MB.

Having a "duh" moment. Of course you are right; the orientation of the still and movie frames are completely different; and in fact, most of my still scans come in at about 97-99MB. They are mostly about 7000 x 5000, which is 35 megapixels. (The Red camera is apparently able to shoot much much higher than this, but I wonder sometimes how creepy an image with that much detail would look.)