Digital vs Film as it stands right now

[John Holland]

Tom i love Mr Lubeski's work and love the look of all Mr Malicks work, but have you ever thought thats down to his Dop and not him and to be honest [ to me ] the few films has made are like Radio Dramas with nice images . Dont expect you to reply to anything i ever post again. :(

[K Borowski]

Fu ck this thread, and shame on the person that started it. Starting a thread on film vs. digital is like bringing together an adulterer and a cheated-on husband on the Jerry Springer show. . .

[John Sprung]

You give insult to paint drying watchers everywhere. Paint Drying is far more exciting!

 

Now Lenolium Curling, that's more comparible....

Shellac, man! You gotta try shellac! The first coat dries in 15 minutes, and the solvent is alcohol. ;-)

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Dan Goulder]

Shellac, man! You gotta try shellac! The first coat dries in 15 minutes, and the solvent is alcohol. ;-)

 

 

 

-- J.S.

Yes... alcohol could be the solvent of this thread.

[Paul Bruening]

Since so many are playing in both rudely and politely, I figured I might throw in some un-addressed perspective just to add to the general breadth of the topic. I've been riding a self-satisfied, levity kick in the forum lately and will shift gears to serious, if that's okay with everyone.

 

The grain of film is far more than just something to measure in terms of resolution. As David indicates, it is a thing that happens over 24 frames per second and actually doubles that as groups of two in the projector. In the viewer's perception of grain I have heard this referred to as "screen crawl". So, think a little about what grain does through time as a visual experience. The brain combines and averages those crawling grains to yield a simultaneously sharper and fuzzier image. The contrast of those two perceptive events is delightful and involving for the brain. Yea, I'm saying that grain crawl is simple brain candy. It adds subtly to the movie experience and at a very subconscious level. Too much grain and it becomes distracting. Too little grain, like in video and digital, it becomes too clean and sterile. Grain gives both clarity of definition through time and textural richness through time- those occurring at a semi-subconscious level.

 

Grain is lovely. Grain is delightful. Grain is involving. Grain is even seductive.

[K Borowski]

Forgive my response above, it was a knee-jerk reaction to realizing I just wasted 45 minutes reading this terrible thread!

 

Annie, I really like the film vs. digital drinking game. It sounds all too familiar though :blink:

[John Sprung]

Study what? There was never any such time.

 

It's obvious to anybody with 25% of a brain and not living in an Amazonian rain forest that the Earth is not flat,...People may not have known that the Earth was a sphere but they would have no reason to think it was flat. However because the sun and moon are both round, it would have been a fair bet that the Earth was too.

Well, of course it has hills and valleys, even mountains. But those are very small scale features compared with the whole planet. The fact that it's a sphere was known in ancient times, but pretty much lost between, say, the fall of Rome about 472 and Columbus's boat trip in 1492. Actually it takes figuring out the whole space and gravity thing to get to the notion that the earth is round like the rest of the stuff out there. Copernicus didn't let on about it until 1514, and didn't publish the big book until the year of his death, 1543.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[John Sprung]

The brain combines and averages those crawling grains to yield a simultaneously sharper and fuzzier image.

Compare a moving image with a freeze frame. If you just freeze a frame, you're looking at the grain of just one frame rather than integrating the grain of successive frames, so it looks grainier than the moving image. From this comes an old editor's trick: If you can find two consecutive frames with nearly no motion between them, you can alternate them to get the look of a freeze without the grain popping out at you.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Guest Glen Alexander]

Wasn't a question of whether earth was flat or round, question was about is earth center of solar system/universe.

[Tom Lowe]

Tom i love Mr Lubeski's work and love the look of all Mr Malicks work, but have you ever thought thats down to his Dop and not him and to be honest [ to me ] the few films has made are like Radio Dramas with nice images . Dont expect you to reply to anything i ever post again. :(

 

I forgive you.

 

Keep in mind... every DP who has worked with Malick since the late 1970s has been at least nominated for an Oscar. Coincidence? ;)

[jan von krogh]

The exact same discussions can be found in most still photography internet forum, ca. ~2000-2004, before nikon, hasselblad etc completed their transition from mechanical design to sensor.

In the moving images 35mm PL market,

digital cameras were mostly a theory in 2005,

the talk of the industry in 2006,

begun selling more than the 35mm mechanical cameras, but were tough to get, in 2007

and now, in 2008, sales as well as delivery of digital 35mm systems surpass elder mechanical design somewhere 20 to 50:1, depending whose figures.

 

Mechanical camera design and film negative wont disappear, as they didnt in the still photographic world - its a translation period.

I suppose the market distribution with digital 35mm taking >90% of the new cameras wont change anymore, however.

 

Which of the technology is the better one is a pretty much pointless discussion. That depends on the job, both methods have advantages and disadvantages.

If one cant shoot outstanding images with a 435 / penelope or a red / origin, then the camera is certainly one of the last problems to look into.

[Leo Anthony Vale]

Wasn't a question of whether earth was flat or round, question was about is earth center of solar system/universe.

 

That's right. More Monday.

[Stephen Williams]

If one cant shoot outstanding images with a 435 / penelope or a red / origin, then the camera is certainly one of the last problems to look into.

 

Hi Jan,

 

As somebody once said on CML 'If you know how to light it does not matter what you shoot with, If you don't know how to light it does not matter what you shoot with.

 

Many clips posted on REDUSER prove the point.

 

Best,

 

Stephen

[K Borowski]

The exact same discussions can be found in most still photography internet forum, ca. ~2000-2004, before nikon, hasselblad etc completed their transition from mechanical design to sensor.

In the moving images 35mm PL market,

digital cameras were mostly a theory in 2005,

the talk of the industry in 2006,

begun selling more than the 35mm mechanical cameras, but were tough to get, in 2007

and now, in 2008, sales as well as delivery of digital 35mm systems surpass elder mechanical design somewhere 20 to 50:1, depending whose figures.

 

Mechanical camera design and film negative wont disappear, as they didnt in the still photographic world - its a translation period.

I suppose the market distribution with digital 35mm taking >90% of the new cameras wont change anymore, however.

 

Which of the technology is the better one is a pretty much pointless discussion. That depends on the job, both methods have advantages and disadvantages.

If one cant shoot outstanding images with a 435 / penelope or a red / origin, then the camera is certainly one of the last problems to look into.

 

 

Umm, excuse me, but who buys a camera for a film production? You RENT one. Video cameras have been outselling film cameras 50:1 since the early 1970s probably when ENG came out, and only rental houses and a few devoted owner/operators were the only people buying film cameras competing against the entire professional, amateur videography market.

 

The transition from film to digital in the still photography world was all about HYPE, except maybe for the newsgathering field, which underwent the same transition that the 10 o'clock news did three decades earlier. Fortunately, Hollywood is about results rather than pure profit and hype.

[Max Jacoby]

Malick and Lubezki are high priests of film, and Malick is as close to a purest as you are going to get.

I don't think everything Malick touches is gold. Like his 'Jesus meet the Devil in the desert' script for instance.

[Max Jacoby]

and now, in 2008, sales as well as delivery of digital 35mm systems surpass elder mechanical design somewhere 20 to 50:1, depending whose figures.

However these digital cameras (well only one really, the Red) are not exactly replacing 35mm cameras. These cameras are bought by people who cannot afford to shoot on 35mm film. I don't see any rental houses chucking out their Arricams, or even BLs and Moviecams for Reds...

[Matthew W. Phillips]

These cameras are bought by people who cannot afford to shoot on 35mm film.

 

This is what I can't understand either. If you can't afford to shoot 35mm, why not shoot 16? Although you will lose some resolution, you are still getting all the benefits of shooting on film. To be honest, even the best of digital cinema cameras are having a hard time keeping up with 16mm.

[Tom Lowe]

Max, I can see that you are planning to go out like General Custer....

 

[K Borowski]

I'm sorry, I see he is saying that it is 20-50:1 for sales AND rental. Well, my response to that is that the vast majority of dramatic television in the US continues to be shot on film. The number of big budget shows and movies remains constant. . .

 

Look at YouTube though. Everybody and his brother is a videographer now. Look how many reality shows are on TV. Look how many channels there are now! I'm up near 1,000, with maybe 500 of those actually showing original programming and not being premium channels.

 

So sure, there are obviously not going to be many reality shows shot on 35mm film. Likewise, there probably won't be that many YouTube videos shot on it either.

 

I am not demeaning video here. Rather I am saying there are some things only HD video can actually do. In some ways it is good that this market is expanding, but in other ways digital has enmired the low- to mid-budget filmmaking industry because there is so much more garbage to sift through now. Origination format has nothing to do with the problem, either, production value does, and it is, unfortunately, a result of not having to budget for rawstock that has allowed this to happen. Sure people shot plenty of bad movies on film, but they were mostly bad movies designed to make money. Indy movies are often bad, but you didn't see people shooting 10 hour epics on mundanity because they couldn't sell their idea to anyone.

 

Everyone seems to hate the notion of an industry that one needs to get money from in order to bankroll making movies. There is this perception, just as there was with music, that a democratization of the playing field (i.e. cheap or practically free professional-quality equipment) will make things better. I submit they will make things worse, and I point out the music and still photography fields as proof of my assertion.

[Michael Lehnert]

Max, I can see that you are planning to go out like General Custer....

 

 

:rolleyes:

 

...such a telling pictoral post from someone who once claimed and strenuously argued that women aren't able-bodied enough to work in cinematography and don't have the required mindset to work out in the field generally..., did not reply to my enquiry of his own military career record after he claimed that only people with a military-style discipline can truly make it in cinematography..., and who doesn't object to the active-censoring practices and posting ethics of the moderator team on the RedUser board...

 

Tom, I very much admire your argumentative stances and your very own last stands.

 

*sarcasm alert*

[Greg Traw]

"Does one admire the easel Van Gogh painted on more than the painting?" -- Jean-Luc Godard

 

Some do these days...

 

This whole argument begins and ends in a basic misunderstanding despite how much it's muddled up with technical talk and so forth. Simply put, video will never be film and film will never be video because of their inherent STRUCTURES -- despite their latitudes and resolutions capabilities. That being said, one should not try to imitate the other.

 

The real golden age of video will only begin when it users -- both consumers and professionals -- use each medium for the own distinct aesthetic purposes. Their are some instances when video captures a mood or atmosphere better than film or vice versa...

 

I've often wondered why the painters never had this problem? Did a bunch of artists using watercolor sit around and try to compete and compare with those using oil paints? Or did everyone just accept the differences of each medium and go from there?

 

Ansel Adams, at a young age, tried to imitate the impressionist painters by experimenting with focus and f-stop but then realized -- at some FRUSTRATED moment -- that photography was it's own medium with it's own beauties. And he went places that painters could never ever ever go... :D

Edited June 21, 2008 by Greg Traw

[Tom Lowe]

:rolleyes:

 

...such a telling pictoral post from someone who once claimed and strenuously argued that women aren't able-bodied enough to work in cinematography and don't have the required mindset to work out in the field generally..., did not reply to my enquiry of his own military career record after he claimed that only people with a military-style discipline can truly make it in cinematography..., and who doesn't object to the active-censoring practices and posting ethics of the moderator team on the RedUser board...

 

Tom, I very much admire your argumentative stances and your very own last stands.

 

*sarcasm alert*

 

Jeez, we're just having fun here. No need to get all serious and start attacking people personally. I don't remember you inquiring about my military service, but I served in combat with 3/2 ACR in Desert Storm as a 19 Delta. Keep in mind that people sometimes skip over stuff on message boards on long threads. It might not be that they are trying to ignore you, just that they never saw your question.

 

You film guys need to lighten up. I think all those photochemicals are getting to you.. hehe.

[Ricardo Diaz]

For the Record Tom. I have two sources on Tree of Life who say that Terrance despised the look of the Red after further evaluation of the material. One source is in the camera dept. and the other is in the editorial dept. Also Chivo doesn't seem to be to impressed by the results either. Chivo loved the size of the camera and what its size can do for you creatively but was indifferent about the image.

[Ricardo Diaz]

Of course for my own record these sources may have their own agendas as well. But this is what they told me. They are close friends and I believe them.

[Tom Lowe]

For the Record Tom. I have two sources on Tree of Life who say that Terrance despised the look of the Red after further evaluation of the material. One source is in the camera dept. and the other is in the editorial dept. Also Chivo doesn't seem to be to impressed by the results either. Chivo loved the size of the camera and what its size can do for you creatively but was indifferent about the image.

 

That's interesting. I don't have anything at stake in those guys liking RED or not liking it. I just mentioned that they were shooting some scenes with it.

 

Like I said earlier in the thread, I think film is superior to digital right now.

 

Any other inside tips you can offer up on Tree of Life?