The end of film for TV production?

[K Borowski]

That would be since 1936 -- are you counting seasons done on radio?

 

Yes, it had started on the radio. Just heard the name, ironically on the radio, driving home just now, and I've forgotten it again. Can someone help me out here?

[Keith Walters]

Yes, it had started on the radio. Just heard the name, ironically on the radio, driving home just now, and I've forgotten it again. Can someone help me out here?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guiding_Light

 

That show has never screened here, and I'd never heard of it, but googling: series cancelled "longest running" found it.

 

It had apparently been struggling for some time though, the current climate was probably the last nail in its coffin.

[Keith Walters]

I always think of the difference between Cheers and Cosby. Cosby chose video, and I think they lost literally hundreds of millions of dollars because the Cosby show DOES NOT play as well in reruns because of that.

 

Another example is Seinfeld, which will probably last a long time in syndication because it was a great show shot on film.

The all-time best example was "Barney Miller" vs "Taxi" in the late 1970s.

Broadly similar concepts made at the same time, similar production values, one shot on composite NTSC using studio cameras, the other on film. Taxi holds up really well on HD or even SD digital, Barney Miller is going to be frozen in NTSC quality for the rest of time.

 

That is the bottom line: There is always going to be more that can be extracted from 35mm negative whereas whatever video resolution you shoot something in, it is going to remain in that resolution forever. We may get better at disguising its deficiencies, but that's all.

Edited September 19, 2009 by Keith Walters

[Paul Bruening]

Aren't there concerns about whether TV can survive under any circumstances? I recall seeing something on TV (isn't that a hoot?) about the webbernet's impact on TV's income. Ad revenues are down not just because of hard times. The show seemed to promote that the web was undermining how viewers accessed episodic product. I find it difficult to even imagine a world without newspapers, TV, hard copies of music and movies. How are books holding out?

[Michael Most]

What I would find interesting is to find a show that that appears to be strong enough and that is being shot on digital video, to then switch to film to see if that in any way improved the ratings or popularity of the show. I don't think anybody has ever tried???

 

I can think of two. Newhart (the 2nd Bob Newhart show, the one set in a Vermont inn) was shot on video the first season and switched to film thereafter, primarily due to the request of the cast. Jeff Foxworthy's show was on ABC for two seasons and was shot on video, it then switched to NBC and was put on film, primarily because the network had a policy of doing all of their sitcoms on film at the time.

 

The Newhart show's ratings were never affected by the change, and all seasons - the video season included - were included in the syndication package. Foxworthy's show was cancelled by NBC after one season. My further guess is that none of the viewers of either one noticed or cared.

[Thomas James]

Actually all the arguments that video technology is not future proof are bogus. Advanced High Definition one thousand line television systems were used by Germany during World War 2. Now if it had happened that old movies were to have been recorded using some sort of ancient analog high definition video technology versus movies recorded using 8mm film we would say that it was video technology that future proofed our movies. The only difference that exists today is not so much the resolution of video because progressive scan high resolution video existed 65 years ago. The difference is that today we have digital compression technology so that we can fit a high definition video signal in the same bandwidth of that which was required for standard definition.

Edited September 19, 2009 by Thomas James

[Keith Walters]

Advanced High Definition one thousand line television systems were used by Germany during World War 2.

Bollocks

[Thomas James]

In 1949 France introduced a high definition television system with 819 lines of resolution.

[chris dye]

When I grew up, for me film was something magic (still is) those 24 frames flickering by in the darkness.

 

The fantastic vistas of John Ford ,Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood (bit of western freak) it was images from these people and many more that drew me to film making. It was not images from NTSC soap operas or sitcoms, not that there is anything g wrong with any of those.

 

And I guess that the same is true for most people on these boards, the names and genres above will certainly change but the love for cinema is what brings us together here.

 

Now there is nothing wrong about being pro digital, it's cheaper, "it's faster", "it's easier", and if it's suits somebody's story needs there is no reason not to use it, and one day it will probably match film, it's getting pretty close already.

 

What I don't get is when the pro digital crowd turns into the "I hate film crowd". 100% of the films that made me wane go into film making was shot on celluloid 100%.

 

I guess that number or very close to it is true for most people here.

 

So my question is, what are you "I hate film crowd", guys doing on these boards if you hate film so much. I can not for the life of me figure it out, why do you want to be in the biz in the first place, when there seems to be no love for it anyway?

 

Film is passion not pixels.

 

Personally I think it's fantastic what RED have done. They have a great product, but even more important is that they have forced everybody else to raise there game, hello 7D on the low and and the new ARRI's on the high.

 

And I'll admit that I'll be the first to shot digital when the quality is the same as film, film in it self has no value, only the images it' produce.

 

I feel much the same way. It was how movies looked that partly drew me into this madness. Film is 'magical'. I look at older 'shot on film' movies on these new HD channels and they're stunning looking, particularly the anamorphic Panavision movies (which I still dream of shooting on). Remember when shooting 35mm was a dream? When I started, the goal was to make your movie look like a 'real' movie. That silly dream is still with me. While HD looks pretty good these days, there's still a slight 'hazy, glazy' look to it.

 

I used to be so anti-video when I started, it was ridiculous and I only recently embraced shooting HD (not DV which I always thought looked horrible). I actually recently 'retired' my old 16mm Frezzolini newscamera for a Sony PMW-EX3. Overall the EX3 is a great camera that takes stunning pictures, but I'll tell you, I look at stuff I shot in the early 90's on an Arri SR1 and even my trusty old Frezzolini and it blows the EX3 images away. There's no beating the genuine film look.

 

I'm not abandoning film in using the EX3. It's just that it's at such a quaility now that you can shoot something that looks decent and isn't a 'one off' as it was with shooting film. Coming from the days when I started shooting film and even editing on film, it's almost too easy shooting with solid state cards and editing on a laptop. The quality and 'ease of use' is at a nice balance now. I'll only go back to film given a decent budget.

 

As far as those who seemingly hate film. I don't understand it much either. They shout 'film is dead or 'down with film', but they go through so much trouble trying to get their video to look like that which they hate. Doesn't make sense.

 

The only reason I think they 'hate' film is because it was an obstacle (more an illusion if you ask me). The cost of film, the 'fear' of film and all the 'troubles' that go with shooting film (sending it to a lab, hoping it turns out, etc) was preventing them from making a film. There was nothing more exciting to me than getting film back from the lab.

 

I never had troubles with labs except when they started to one by one go out of business in NYC. I was naive in thinking that film labs will be around forever at the time. In the early nineties when I started, I was dealing with TVC labs and they shut down on me and I lost a good chunk of money and my negative. Long story, but I learned quickly, so when I was dealing with Guffanti Labs and sensed they were having troubles, I quickly retrieved my negative. Sure enough two weeks later, they too were out of businiess. From there it was Du Art all the way. I could write a book on my first forays in filmmaking.

 

Yeah, making films on film 'back in the day' wasn't for the faint of heart, but as you stated above, film was (and is) a passion and was always worth the trouble and cost to me.

[Matthew W. Phillips]

There was nothing more exciting to me than getting film back from the lab.

 

Truer words were never spoken. I challenge any digital shooter who has never shoot on film to try it at least once and experience this. Shoot a roll, process it, and telecine it. I guarantee you'll be way more juiced to see the results than you ever were with digi-footage.

[Phil Rhodes]

Shoot a roll, process it, and telecine it. I guarantee you'll be way more juiced to see the results

 

Yeah, because you've spent so much *&@!ing money that failure is unthinkable. And because you said to the director "yeah, we've got that" without really having any concrete idea whether you had. And because you made a couple of borderline exposure decisions because there wasn't any more light available.

 

Shudder.

[Keith Walters]

In 1949 France introduced a high definition television system with 819 lines of resolution.

And then went back to 625 lines in 1967.

 

The French 819 line monochrome system is the standout example of Gallic Technical Ineptitude, eclipsed only by the System Engineered by a Committee of AMphibians. (SECAM is/was an unholy f*ckup, based of a lot of stupid predictions and turn-on-a-dime government policy decisions).

 

As a race the French seem constitutionally incapable of seeing past the end of their noses, (which I suppose is understandable in a lot of cases :lol: ).

 

Try to get your facts straight: The 819 line system was never HD in the sense that no signal source available up to its final demise in 1986 was capable of delivering the resolution it was theoretically capable of. It did not have "819 lines of resolution" either; it just had 819 interlaced scanning lines, not the same thing at all.

[Terry Mester]

... In terms of general image quality, most Blurays on a big HDTV already outshine multiplexes.

You can't compare a 5 foot wide TV screen to a 20 foot wide Movie screen. You need to compare them at the same width.

 

"Samsara" will likely be the last major film ever shot on 65mm, sadly. But what will replace 65mm are large digital sensors shooting 6K+ resolution with ever-improving image quality. And 4K projection will be the new gold standard. It will probably be similar to seeing a good print projected at 65mm, if not cleaner.

I certainly hope that your prediction about 65mm movies is wrong. However, whom do you propose is going to pay for all of these monumentally expensive Digital Projectors? The theaters certainly won't. As far as 4K Projectors, that is still lower in resolution than 35mm, and it certainly can't provide the colour quality of Film.

[Thomas James]

During the 1940's the French television system achieved 1042 lines of resolution but settled on 819 lines for broadcasting. The actual resolution was 800x384x50 fields per secound. The French television system also allocated 14 megahertz of bandwidth which is more than twice that allocated under NTSC. It is true that the system was interlaced so the actual picture quality is more or less equivalent to 480p running at 50 frames per second. However 480p has twice the resolution of 480i.

 

For people who hate heavy compression artifacts under the constraints of MPEG-2 compression which is limited to a 20 megabits per second bandwidth for broadcasting the 480p60 format offered picture quality that rivaled 1080i60 and 720p60. Unfortunately because most broadcasters try to get away with upconverting 480i to 480p it is better to force broadcasters to use the 720p60 format for sports even if that creates slightly more artifacts.

[Thomas James]

First of all you do not need a 20 foot screen for your home theatre. If you want a bigger screen just sit closer to the television. Screen size is all relative. IMAX is using this very same trick to convert the multiplex theatres into IMAX screens and all they are doing is moving the screen closer to the audience.

Second of all it is a known fact that Blu-Ray is better quality than what you get at the multiplex. The only advantage of the multiples is not everyone has a Blu-Ray player yet but with these devices on sale for less than $100 the theatre owners are running scared.

Third of all the money to pay for the digital projectors will be financed with the money saved from film prints. The theatre owners will probably not have to pay a cent in order to convert to digital as it will all be financed by the studios.

[Paul Bruening]

First of all you do not need a 20 foot screen for your home theatre.

 

Says you.

[Paul Bruening]

Yeah, because you've spent so much *&@!ing money that failure is unthinkable. And because you said to the director "yeah, we've got that" without really having any concrete idea whether you had. And because you made a couple of borderline exposure decisions because there wasn't any more light available.

 

Shudder.

 

Film is like wooing the love of your life.

 

Video is like a glory hole down at the local truck stop.

[Paul Bruening]

You can't compare a 5 foot wide TV screen to a 20 foot wide Movie screen. You need to compare them at the same width.

 

 

I certainly hope that your prediction about 65mm movies is wrong. However, whom do you propose is going to pay for all of these monumentally expensive Digital Projectors? The theaters certainly won't. As far as 4K Projectors, that is still lower in resolution than 35mm, and it certainly can't provide the colour quality of Film.

 

I would like to add to Terry's presentation. Remember that while film projected images have been "rated" compared to digitally projected images, the fact is that film images are unified images. Even at 24 fps (double that in flickers from the fan blade) you are seeing a whole picture. Digital projections are little blocks of images aligned together to create an illusion of a whole picture. Because of that, digital projection still suffers from the, currently, unavoidable sense of all that digital suffers from: the colors are strange, the edges of objects are strange, the sensations of sterility are strange. The entire experience of it seems strange.

 

Again, I beg the participants, here, to consider that the experience of watching movies isn't, entirely, about technology. WE are the reason for all of this hubub. It is our experience and perception that is the bottom line. Don't get me wrong, I love what power DI adds to movie making. But if you think DigAcq and DigProj are superior experiences to film, then your eye and brain are too clumsy to know better.

[Michael Most]

I'm not abandoning film in using the EX3. It's just that it's at such a quaility now that you can shoot something that looks decent and isn't a 'one off' as it was with shooting film. Coming from the days when I started shooting film and even editing on film, it's almost too easy shooting with solid state cards and editing on a laptop. The quality and 'ease of use' is at a nice balance now. I'll only go back to film given a decent budget.

 

You're much too reasonable for this forum. It seems these days like there's only room for two types of posts here: the "film is expensive, stupid, and should have died with the dinosaurs" posts, and the "electronic images have been, are, and always will be crap" posts. There's no in between. There are the film zealots, who (falsely) believe it will never go away and that sooner or later all of the deluded nutcases who have adopted digital cameras will ultimately realize the folly of their ways and go back to photochemical film, and the digital zealots who (just as falsely) believe that the current level of digital capture is perfect, and that anyone who's using film is a luddite who's "afraid" of the future - whatever that means.

 

A sad mirror of our society these days, and another reminder that sensible discourse, reasonable discussion, and intelligent analysis seem to be a thing of the past.

[Matthew W. Phillips]

There are the film zealots, who (falsely) believe it will never go away ...

 

I truly think film will be around the rest of my lifetime...beyond that isn't relevant to me now, is it?

[Thomas James]

The fact remains that digital is not just limited to square tiles representing pixels but can be assembled using any type of exotic mosaic pattern perfectly mimmicking the rod and cone patterns of the eye.

[Thomas James]

Also the "it will never happen in my lifetime so why bother" attitude is not the philosophy of the futurist. The futurist like the George Lucas who is the champion of digital cinematography as well as nuclear powered rocket propulsion knows that those who control the future also control the present.

[Matthew W. Phillips]

The futurist like the George Lucas who is the champion of digital cinematography ...

 

Yeah, and the new SW trilogy looks sickly compared to the old...so much for the future eh?

 

If the future is digital then the future looks...well...washed out!

[Phil Rhodes]

Next time a questionnaire asks me what I do for a hobby, can I put "correcting the unmitigated drivel of Thomas James"?

 

However 480p has twice the resolution of 480i.

 

No it doesn't. For a start, you're only specifying one dimension, which makes any comparative figures absolutely meaningless. Mainly, though, interlaced video has about 70 to 75% the vertical resolution of an otherwise equivalent progressive frame due solely to the need for anti-flicker filtering, and exactly the same horizontal resolution.

 

P

[Thomas James]

Lets say that you are right and interlace 480i has 70 percent of the resolution of 480p. However that only applies when the camera is not in motion. With fast action the fields are split and the resolution is halved which means that you only achieve 35 percent of the resolution of 480p. So on the average 480i has only 50 percent of the resolution of 480p60.