Working with motion picture film in a digital enviroment

[Jon O'Brien]

Sorry for taking this thread off-topic, Florian. I promise, my last post on this, talking about the film/digital thing.

Just wanted to write one last thing, in order to encourage some who've always shot digital in the past who might feel daunted at the idea of using film for a short film project.

If you do extensive tests beforehand, with precisely the same camera, lens or lenses (maybe just use a single lens, if you can, but do many tests with it), and same filmstock (from the same batch, even?), and if you change nothing, and maybe even keep the lens on the camera as much as possible between shoot days except to check the gate or whatever, experience teaches us that, in most cases, everything will turn out fine with that camera and the film you load into it if you are careful with everything that needs to be done. Yes, problems can still happen, when loading film, or whatever. But with a dependable Arri or similar, and even a Bolex, chances of something going wrong aren't high unless it's a problem with the processing but I've never, so far, experienced a problem with the processing.

Just a quick note if filming with a Bolex. Make sure if using 100' spools (in fact you can use these in an Arri SR, too) that your take-up spool is not bent or misshapen in any way. As Simon once advised me, here at Cinematography.com, make sure to roll your empty take-up spool, before using it, along a flat table top surface. Make sure it rolls straight, and watch it as it rolls. Make sure the two sides of the spool remain perfectly parallel with each other. Because I once lost a roll of film because it became unspooled inside the film compartment because the take-up reel wouldn't smoothly accept the film. I lost that whole 100' of footage.

Edited May 12 by Jon O'Brien

[Tyler Purcell]

19 hours ago, Giray Izcan said:

If you work with professional assistants, the unfortunate problems Tyler faced could be avoided - though there is still always a chance something wrong could go down.. film jams and such.

Yea, I don't think more cooks in the kitchen would have helped much. I always do camera tests after lenses come back from service and they looked fine to me. I've had plenty of jams and mechanical issues on non-Aaton cameras, but my Aaton cameras have been stellar. 

19 hours ago, Giray Izcan said:

Shooting on 35 for instance will easily cost you 1200- 2k per page depending on the page - purchasing brand new stock, developing, 4k scan. Especially when shooting dialog, you will easily be in the 20:1 ratio. 10:1 ratio sounds a lot for narrative, but it is really a bare minimum. 20:1 is more ideal if you want all the coverage needed and get the best performances from your talent without having to cut corners or without having to be a slave to the camera. 

People underestimate the waste, it's the biggest problem with film. You can't manage film stock use based on raw numbers, it doesn't work. If you have a 3 minute scene and 2 minutes of film left, you're not going to shoot with that roll and change it. That adds up and by the end of the shoot, you got dozens of little rolls you have no use for. You may get some money back selling, but from my experience, most of them are too small, 100ft or so and nobody wants them. Maybe if that happens once or twice, ok but that happens four times a day on a 35mm show. You need to re-load mags with fresh film and move on, you can't just leave mags hanging and you aren't going to re-load a 100ft roll, makes no sense, so it goes into a can and that's the end of that. The extreme waste throws the numbers off and by the time you have real data, you've already blown through your budget. Now, this is why I try to go for 10:1 minimum on film, because at least you've got some of that overage covered. Also, less dialog scenes the better, with MOS stuff, it's way easier to use up those little SE's. 

[Tyler Purcell]

16 hours ago, Jon O'Brien said:

But really I was hoping to film other people's narrative short films but the lack of interest is astonishing in my area. 

People buy cameras, they do tests, maybe a little single roll film with one of their friends and then they disappear. Few months later, they call me and wonder if I can help sell their camera. This is the trend I see more often than not, especially with lower end cameras. Usually people buying Arri SR's or Aaton XTR Prod's, know what they want, but the K3, Beaulieu, CP16, Bolex, Eclair, crowd, really is fickle. They want that look, but they don't understand it comes at a cost. I see them all the time because I service those cameras AND scan their film. So I stay in contact with those people and they're cool. There was a point a few years ago, that I was shooting S8 or 16mm every single week! That all dried up in 2024 and this year, it's been entirely dead thus far. 

16 hours ago, Jon O'Brien said:

No one wants to risk losing a bit of money if film doesn't turn out for them. Sheesh. I actually find it lazy. It wasn't meant to be that way. You're supposed to take risks in the creative arts.

I planned a road trip in 2021 to re-create a trip I did with my parents in 1990. The concept was to re-create the super 8 film I did back then, so we could make a short film about my history with the railroads we went to visit. I wanted to shoot on Ektachrome because we shot the original trip on Kodachrome and I wanted to project the material when it came back. Ektachrome has a lot of cartridge problems, but we did some camera tests before we left and got acceptable results, so we went with it. We also brought a bunch of 50D Vision 3 carts with us as well, so if something DID jam, we could keep shooting. We prepped the carts perfectly, the camera ran through each roll normally without any jamming. Yet, when we got the film back, it was basically trash. Every frame of the Ektachrome material was jumpy and un-projectable. The 50D stuff was 100% flawless, perfect in every way for Super 8. We even shot 100D and 50D on the same day and the Ektachrome was always trash. Sometimes when the pulldown would grab the film, it would skip a perf and it got into this weird cadence where it would just not pull down like the pressure plate was not keeping the film on the gate. So many shots just didn't exist, which was a real shame. In the end, we scrapped the entire idea because it cost us $10k to do the trip and we didn't get anything back that was really usable enough from being on the road, which was the whole point. I wanna say we shot 10 rolls of Ektachrome and 8 rolls of 50D? That was the last time I even attempted to shoot Ektachrome on super 8 and I simply won't ever recommend it to anyone.  

I just did a portrait shoot in Colorado this winter on my friends Pentax 465. We tested the camera first, worked flawlessly. We did the entire shoot on film, no digital what so ever. The color negative rolls came out great, the E6 rolls came out great, we had 2 rolls of black and white, one of them appeared to be ok tho for sure not nearly as good as we expected and the other one, was blank. Sadly, that blank roll, was the big portrait shoot roll. So we lost 17 pictures out of 100 or so, which may not seem like a lot, but when your paying $5k to get 100 pictures, (trip costs and such), you'd think at least there wouldn't be some technical issue. So we learned a lesson; don't trust film cameras. Shoot digital and use film as a backup, which basically means don't shoot film because we can only carry 1 big camera on these trips, seeing as I'm carrying my 16mm camera. 

In 2023 we shot some Fuji Velvia and Illford 3200 on 35mm, our normal shop that processed and scanned for us, didn't do a good job on those scans. So we sent just those 7 rolls to another lab who we had used just recently to process and scan the color negative from the same shoot. We walk in, pickup the negatives, drop off the already processed Velvia and illford film, they scan it in a few days, send us the files on the web and we immediately run to a shoot out of town for two weeks. We come back and drive over to collect, they're closed (they have weird business hours). Ok fine, no problem, we'll check them next week. We go back, new sign on the door "out of town for a week", ok fine. Another month goes by, we call them and they can't find the negatives. We drive over and they've fucking destroyed the film. Yea, they threw out our negatives, as their procedure is to destroy after 30 days. I was like guys, you were closed! The mother fucker shrugs and walks away. No sorry, nothing. My boyfriend was going to punch him in the face because the Velvia shots were supposed to be turned into slides for a presentation project we were working on, they were one off pictures, not easily re-creatable. What a fucking nut bust man so now I can't even trust the good labs. I made a post about this that went viral on social media and dozens of people came forth saying they had similar issues with labs they've used. 

So there ya go, three more stories of three projects that basically didn't get finished because I choose to focus on the look, rather than focused on being creative and getting the shot. In the end, the decision is to either be creative and come back with something OR focus on the look with the risk you won't get anything. Doing art projects is cool, but the majority of people want a perfect finished result this day and age. They love that film texture, but maybe not at the cost of it being screwed up. Now, I have shot a lot of film in the last 4 years, so maybe my stories are a consequence of that, but in the end, what's happened to me is unacceptable and I have dozens more stories like this. 

[Tyler Purcell]

14 hours ago, Jon O'Brien said:

If you do extensive tests beforehand, with precisely the same camera, lens or lenses (maybe just use a single lens, if you can, but do many tests with it), and same filmstock (from the same batch, even?), and if you change nothing, and maybe even keep the lens on the camera as much as possible between shoot days except to check the gate or whatever, experience teaches us that, in most cases, everything will turn out fine with that camera and the film you load into it if you are careful with everything that needs to be done. Yes, problems can still happen, when loading film, or whatever. But with a dependable Arri or similar, and even a Bolex, chances of something going wrong aren't high unless it's a problem with the processing but I've never, so far, experienced a problem with the processing.

I mean, I just processed and scanned someone's film that had severe X-ray damage. It was sharp 50D and the camera worked flawlessly, but the film was trash and 100% a throw away due to the x-ray damage. I was so sad for the guy, I think he tried to save a few bux and bought film from another country and just the shipping back and forward from that country to his and then to me, was enough to get it zapped. Probably got zapped before the film was shot to be honest, at least it looked that way. 

So yea, even if you nail the camera and lens, you still gotta be careful. Here in So Cal, I can drive to Kodak, drive to Fotokem, drive home to scan and the film is never leaving my side. But imagine you're shooting somewhere remote and you're shipping? I have never wanted to take that risk on my own projects, we travel with ALL our film, which is risky as well. It requires a technique of keeping the film cold wherever you go and making sure it doesn't get any direct sunlight sitting in the car. So quite a bit of our car storage is gobbled up by a huge cooler, which has these frozen packs all around the film, just to keep it in the 60F range. Then whenever we stop for the night, we have to take it all inside, stick it all in a refrigerator and re-freeze the packs for the next day. It's a lot of work and in the end, it's why when shit works, our results are outstanding. 

As a tech, I'd say the majority of running cameras that have issues, are from Bolex cameras. I don't even advertise Bolex repair, but holy crap, 60 - 70% of the Bolex footage I scan and obviously the cameras I fix for people, it's mostly Bolexes that struggle the most. I think it's also because they're low entry cost, so people who may not know much about cameras own them, so they generally don't know what to look for and maybe it's their first or second roll of film ever? Still, because I process and scan film for people, I see lots of shit man. I just scanned a roll yesterday that had a light leak along the entire upper edge of the film, the whole roll. Yet, the 2nd roll, zero problems. Like WTF? It just grazed the image and the filmmaker was like "what the heck is that", I had never seen that one before, especially on ONE roll out of what, 5 or so?  I could go on all day about Bolex cameras and Bolex issues, suffice to say, I do think user error is to blame for MOST of them, at the same time, it's still the highest amount of errors I see from WORKING cameras. Obviously, I serve Arri and Aaton cameras the most, because people who own those cameras want them to be in perfect working order for their shoots, not the same with Bolex owners. They only come to me when they're broken! LOL 😛

[Gautam Valluri]

On 5/5/2025 at 10:49 PM, Florian Noever said:

It took me longer than expected, but I finally managed to set up the page to view the resolution test and download all the test images. Please let me know if anything doesn’t work, what you think of the test, and feel free to share your thoughts or start a discussion on the topic.

www.florian-noever.com/filmresolutiontest

This is a very interesting study. I didn't think there would be so much of a difference between the 7219 and 7213.

Also, would you say that the 7207 is close enough to the 5219 (3-perf)?

[Florian Noever]

23 hours ago, Gautam Valluri said:

This is a very interesting study. I didn't think there would be so much of a difference between the 7219 and 7213.

Also, would you say that the 7207 is close enough to the 5219 (3-perf)?

I can not say, because I haven't shot any tests on 7207...

[Gautam Valluri]

6 minutes ago, Florian Noever said:

I can not say, because I haven't shot any tests on 7207...

My mistake! I meant to write 7203, the 50D Vision3 stock.

[Florian Noever]

16 minutes ago, Gautam Valluri said:

My mistake! I meant to write 7203, the 50D Vision3 stock.

From my testing, I think 7203 holds up pretty well to 5219, but there is a visible difference in details and depth of field. Especially in wide shots, 7203 is far behind 5219 in terms of resolution.

[Gautam Valluri]

55 minutes ago, Florian Noever said:

Especially in wide shots, 7203 is far behind 5219 in terms of resolution.

Yeah I generally am not a big fan of S16 for wide shots. I think its the same reason Caesar Charlone used 3-perf 35mm for establishing shots in City of God and The Constant Gardener. Nice to see a a proper visual comparison now.