Why do they still shoot on film?

[Phil Rhodes]

flaming BBC

 

Brilliant idea!

 

 

[Freya Black]

Brilliant idea!

 

 

If that's Mark Thompson on the pyre, then you get no disagreement from me here!

 

love

 

Freya

[Doug Gorius]

So, if I understand this correctly, they basically take a 35mm interpositive or the negatives, transfer them digitally, and overlay the supers onto the picture?

[David Mullen ASC]

So, if I understand this correctly, they basically take a 35mm interpositive or the negatives, transfer them digitally, and overlay the supers onto the picture?

 

If you are talking about titles over picture, yes, the film negative is scanned and the letters are added over this digitally, it's been that way for about a decade -- Pacific Title, the biggest title house, went all-digital some time ago (and then they went out of business altogether.)

 

The old way would involve striking a color-timed interpositive off of the negative, loading that into an optical printer, then using b&w hold-out mattes (positive and negative) to add letters with drop shadows onto an internegative in a couple of passes, then cutting that internegative into the rest of the movie's negative.

[Anton Papich]

Film has aestethics that digital doesn't have, and I doubt it ever will. But David made good remark on this:

 

There is also a generational aspect, there are younger people who are so used to digital images that they don't have any nostalgia for film and feel that digital "looks right" to their eyes, it's simply a taste thing for them, and who can argue with taste? Some people think that digital images look "plastic" to them, being so clean, and some people think that film images are just soft and grainy, the beauty of that sort of image eludes them.

 

Now imagine this happened with video from 80s and that digital never came. Imagine that young generations would go crazy for VHS and tell you how better is than film. Imagine if every indie film has look of Trash Humpers. Oh noes! :o

 

Now, little more serious remark on this. Since my hobby is analog photography, I myself quite often get remarks why aren't my photos so sharp ( well, the main reason is lousy scanner, not possibilities of film ), or that my black&white conversion could be better ( altough I use only black&white film for home developing ) etc. Main problem with this is next line which I will wrote:

 

People today do not look on content, rather on form, which is for me biggest problem and reason why we got so much, well, I would say mediocre art.

 

P.S. Happy New Year everyone!

Edited January 1, 2011 by Anton Papich

[Deniz Coker]

Film has aestethics that digital doesn't have, and I doubt it ever will. But David made good remark on this:

 

 

 

Now imagine this happened with video from 80s and that digital never came. Imagine that young generations would go crazy for VHS and tell you how better is than film. Imagine if every indie film has look of Trash Humpers. Oh noes! :o

 

Now, little more serious remark on this. Since my hobby is analog photography, I myself quite often get remarks why aren't my photos so sharp ( well, the main reason is lousy scanner, not possibilities of film ), or that my black&white conversion could be better ( altough I use only black&white film for home developing ) etc. Main problem with this is next line which I will wrote:

 

People today do not look on content, rather on form, which is for me biggest problem and reason why we got so much, well, I would say mediocre art.

 

P.S. Happy New Year everyone!

 

Very nice photos Anton! There's just this quality that I can't look away from. I completely agree, too many people focus on the form factor and not the subject. I guess it's so easy to roll when digital and get it all in one take on the first shot as opposed to having to carefully plan all the details and do a few run throughs before you roll. I think that psychological aspect of film, the one that commands proper prep work also lends to it's uniqueness.

[Anton Papich]

Very nice photos Anton!

 

Thank you very much Deniz!

 

There's just this quality that I can't look away from.

 

If you ment on my photos, thank you again!

 

I completely agree, too many people focus on the form factor and not the subject. I guess it's so easy to roll when digital and get it all in one take on the first shot as opposed to having to carefully plan all the details and do a few run throughs before you roll. I think that psychological aspect of film, the one that commands proper prep work also lends to it's uniqueness.

 

Exactly! I will tell you on my own example. I had some rolls of Kodachrome, that I had to shoot asap, since Dwayne's Photo as you know developed it only till 31.12.2010. Oh boy, what a problem I had! I had only 36 exposures per roll, and I didn't know what to take picture of. I mean, I was wandering around town, torturing myself on what to spend couple of rolls. Why? Because I simply don't think in "digital way". I'm not used to go out and shoot 1500 photos in one day. I just can't. That is that psychological factor you mentioned and you got it right to the spot. I have even more extreme example, when I torture myself to spend 12 exposures of 120 film. I don't say everybody are like me, but I also doubt that there is anyone with digital camera who, when goes out, doesn't take at least 100 photos.

[Doug Gorius]

Beautiful photography, Anton.

[Anton Papich]

Beautiful photography, Anton.

 

Thank you Doug!

 

I would like you to comment on Deniz and mine last posts if you are willing. Every other opinion is great to hear.

[Brian Rose]

I think when we discuss film, we should consider there are really TWO kinds of film: film as capture medium, and film as an exhibition medium. The latter is on the way out, no doubt about it. Digital projection eliminates the need for expensive prints, and for theaters it means fewer necessary technicians with the kind of skills required for film projection. Not saying it's right, it's just that the numbers are too good for distributors to pass up. And I must say, projection has improved dramatically. Done right, I've been immensely impressed by its quality. And as projection improves, as it becomes possible to screen at 8K or even beyond, it will be possible to truly experience certain films shot in 65mm, which as is are rare experiences because of the short supply of large format prints, and houses to show them. Because right now, films like "Lawrence of Arabia" and 2001 aren't being truly experienced and as digital advances progress, this may change.

 

Now as for film as a capture medium, I believe there will always be a need for film. In fact, I believe that with a few forwarding thinking individuals in the position to make a difference, film could be the FUTURE.

 

Digital as a capture medium poses many problems...it has a finite resolution, as we've all discovered when we try to up convert SD footage to HD. You can't add information which isn't there. As soon as some new technology rolls out, stuff shot on the old technology immediately is in trouble.

 

Digital also poses a huge problem from an archival/preservation POV. How do we preserve what exists only as 1s and 0s? Are we really going to settle for perpetually transferring a file from an old storage method to the new one? It's unstable, and the ease with which digital files can be lost forever makes me wonder if we aren't headed for another dark age, like what happened with the massive loss of nitrate film for the 1930s and earlier.

 

Film is different. It is physical, it is *there* You need only scan into whatever format you need. Given proper storage, management, with fine grain master positives, internegatives and B/W separation masters, a film can endure indefinitely.

 

And while film too as a finite amount of information, it can be repeatedly scanned at higher resolutions, and resolves far better than a digital form which has been upconverted.

 

Film cameras are technology which essentially cannot go out of date. Only the capture medium is upgraded, so the equipment remains a safe investment. How remarkable that 50,60, 70 year old technology like the Mitchell BNC remain fully viable today!

 

I've said it many times on this board before, and I'll say it again: film is the safe option. More than that, if I were a studio exec, I'd be shooting my big budget, 9 figure films on large format 65mm, easily the most future proofed, resilient format in existence: prints to Imax with minimal blowing up, reduces to 35mm superbly, and produces crystal clear, razor sharp pictures on a 1080p monitor. It has enough untapped resolution to be viable for many new HD formats to come, and the developments of Panavision with the System 65 setup (as well as Imax's innovations) have completely refuted the idea that large format is too bulky and unwieldy to be practical for modern production. It's simply not true. And the added cost of large format is relatively minimal, when absorbed into the overall cost of a $50,000,000 or $100,000,000+ production.

[David Mullen ASC]

Sure Brian, I agree, film is a great medium and will be for years to come... but honestly, if long-term archivability were the main criteria, we probably should be using a 3-strip camera running b&w film rather than color-coupler film, or all be shooting Kodachrome at least. Practicality, flexibility, and affordability all come into play in the real world, which is why we dumped 3-strip for Eastmancolor negative, why we dumped K14 for E6, and why we'll end up dumping film for digital in the end. Not because there's anything inherently "wrong" about film, which works great, looks beautiful, but as digital gets its positives up and its negatives down, it gets harder and harder to argue against it. Idealism only goes so far.

 

There is always something lost when one process replaces another, it's rarely a win-win. Decades from now, people will be falling in love all over again with old 3-strip Technicolor and Kodachrome images. I've even been collecting every art book I can find on Autochromes, an amazing process. But eventually most people are simply going to see too many reasons to not shoot digital, like has happened in still photography.

[Brian Rose]

David, what you say is all too true. But do you think digital poses new problems for preservation and archiving? What is the solution?

[David Mullen ASC]

David, what you say is all too true. But do you think digital poses new problems for preservation and archiving? What is the solution?

 

Yes, there are real problems, as AMIA (Association of Moving Images Archivists) has been saying for years. On the plus side, a digital file is just a bunch of ones and zeros, so copies in theory can be completely lossless, unlike coping film over multiple generations, and these ones and zeros don't fade over time, unlike color dyes. But that's sort of the high and lofty optimistic view.

 

The reality is that all digital information has to be stored on a medium of some sort (metal, plastic, paper, etc.), and that medium is just as vulnerable to the ravages of time as the medium of film. And that medium has to be affordable for large amounts of data -- the solution can't be etching binary code on gold tablets. Plus information recorded to a magnetic medium is subject to radiation and quantum degradation, causing tiny bits to get corrupted.

 

So the only viable solution is data migration, i.e. make enough copies and copy often enough and you avoid the problems of the media degrading over time and you have back-ups that are just as good as the original.

 

Trouble is that vaults and archives are generally not well-funded places; lots of stuff gets dumped for decades there, only to be looked at when someone has a need to. So these places have to be better funded to afford automatic systems to migrate data on a regular basis. Some vaults have reached the point where if they started copying data today, before they got to the end of the vault, it would be time to start copying the stuff they started with -- it's like the old joke about painting the Golden Gate Bridge. So it's a serious problem, but solvable. It just takes the will and the money.

 

Another problem: images that use proprietary compression schemes and codecs that need some form of processing to be viewable. For a final master, it's easier for someone to insist that it be stored in some sort of open format, in uncompressed RGB data -- but where does that leave all the original, unedited footage? How can we be sure that 50 or 100 years from now, someone will be able to process these schemes that modern digital cameras use?

 

Of course, the other solution is to copy a finished movie at 4K to 35mm b&w fine-grain separations, as some studios do for their big titles. Personally, I think this is a good idea in that you are covering your ass better if you save the movie in multiple formats in multiple copies in multiple locations. Save movies both on film and on digital, just to be sure. But of course, that costs money too. And it doesn't solve the problem of storing original digital footage.

 

Look at books, for example -- some titles exist simply because enough copies were floated around the world. Same goes for some silent films -- the rest of the footage that allowed restorers to make a complete version of "Metropolis" came from a 16mm copy stored in the Argentinian film archive. It's pretty beat-up and scratched; unfortunately the copy was originally in 35mm but the archive made a 16mm copy decades ago because that's all they could afford, and probably junked the nitrate original.

 

I worry now that everyone is posting online and reading e-books about how some of these written works will survive a century from now.

 

There is also an opposite problem, which is volume -- we are creating more digital material than ever before, and assuming we save all of it, then it becomes a problem of not being able to find the needle in the haystack. Maybe we end up solving the digital archiving problem only to still "lose" things simply because they aren't labeled and indexed properly.

 

At least with a movie, you can look at it under a light bulb and see what's on the piece of film. Of course, stuff gets lost in film vaults too, as the story about finding the missing footage from "Metropolis" points out.

[Brian Dzyak]

What I know is that I can still take old 8mm footage that my grandparent's shot and look at the pictures and see an image even without a projector. I can NOT unspool the videotape I've shot of my kids and look at pictures no matter how hard I squint.

 

All things being equal, film is still a better choice for long-term archiving. We have years of unreadable computer punch cards to prove it.

[Phil Rhodes]

How can we be sure that 50 or 100 years from now, someone will be able to process these schemes that modern digital cameras use?

This is why proprietary compression is very silly. This is especially so, if you'll excuse a predictable swipe at Red, if you just take a fairly open piece of technology (such as JPEG-2000) and obfuscate it for no better reason than that you wish to make it appear that you have done more genuinely innovative and technical work than in fact you have. And continue to do that even after knowledge of the situation has become public domain.

Any half-competent computer user with a hex editor and a paint program can figure out how most DPX files work in a matter of minutes, same for wave audio files, and R210 or Y210 AVI is not massively more complex.

P

[Vincent Sweeney]

Why not archive to 65mm? Some loss over 50-100 years would be less minimal, it would seem, and it wouldn't be that expensive in comparison to the troubles of other methods.

[K Borowski]

What I know is that I can still take old 8mm footage that my grandparent's shot and look at the pictures and see an image even without a projector. I can NOT unspool the videotape I've shot of my kids and look at pictures no matter how hard I squint.

 

All things being equal, film is still a better choice for long-term archiving. We have years of unreadable computer punch cards to prove it.

 

Aren't punchcards a bad example? You can look at them and see what the letters/numbers were, based on where they are punched.

 

Getting them to read in a computer is another matter, though. Computer languages are like human languages, lots of them have died out very quickly.

[Tim Halloran]

I think when we discuss film, we should consider there are really TWO kinds of film: film as capture medium, and film as an exhibition medium. The latter is on the way out, no doubt about it. Digital projection eliminates the need for expensive prints, and for theaters it means fewer necessary technicians with the kind of skills required for film projection. Not saying it's right, it's just that the numbers are too good for distributors to pass up. And I must say, projection has improved dramatically. Done right, I've been immensely impressed by its quality.

 

All excellent observations, but what does this last statement, "...impressed by its quality," mean, exactly? Does it mean that its quality is determined by some unusually artifical "cleanliness" or "clarity" or what? Because digital projection is horrible and artificial in my opinion--I can spot it a mile away and it always feels cold and plasticky.

 

This is not because of some defect that can be "fixed" as the technology progresses--the kind of information that is transmitted via real film going through a projector is fundamentally different than the information that is transmitted via digital projection. Our bodies and our minds respond in different physiological and psychological ways to the two different processes. In this regard, digital will never be like film, period.

 

And this is the real shame about the hegemony of digital projection which, of course, is based on a purely economic imperative that makes it inevitable, I know. But audiences today are already forgetting what happens when you watch a real projected film and future audiences will simply not know the difference, and what they are missing.

 

Tim

[John Sprung]

Digital projection eliminates the need for expensive prints, and for theaters it means fewer necessary technicians with the kind of skills required for film projection.

 

There's a huge installed base of film projectors that aren't going away any time soon. They're paid for, they work, and they'll keep on working for years to come. Prints are the distributor's problem. Theaters don't make all that much money, so they're not going to spend ten times the price of a film projector that will last for decades to get a digital projector that will be obsolete in months. There aren't all that many projection engineers, because the machines tend to work well for a long time once they're set up correctly.

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Freya Black]

 

 

Look at books, for example -- some titles exist simply because enough copies were floated around the world. Same goes for some silent films -- the rest of the footage that allowed restorers to make a complete version of "Metropolis" came from a 16mm copy stored in the Argentinian film archive. It's pretty beat-up and scratched; unfortunately the copy was originally in 35mm but the archive made a 16mm copy decades ago because that's all they could afford, and probably junked the nitrate original.

 

Almost! The story goes something like this:

 

The original film was screened once in Berlin, declared "too long" and then hacked to bits by the various distributors in various countries. The original film was hardly ever seen in the first place, so there was little chance the "directors cut" would ever be seen again.

 

However in 1928, Adolfo Z Wilson, head of Terra, a distribution company, secured a copy and took it with him back home to Buenos Aires. Manuel Peña Rodríguez, a film critic, then acquired the film rolls for his private collection, and there they stayed until he sold them to a national museum in Argentina in the 60s. A copy of these rolls then wound up at the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires.

 

So the little museum never had the original print they just got a copy off the national museum. It's likely that the little museum is 16mm based. It's still possible that the original 35mm print could be found as it was known about as recently as the 60's. It just hasn't been located yet.

 

The only reason the film was found was because Argentine film fanatic Fernando Pena heard of a film screening where someone fought to keep a dying projector going "for hours" to project Metropolis. The version he was familiar with at the time certainly didn't last for hours and on the basis of this rumour he pestered the film museum to let him search their archive for the film for years, however this never happened until the museum got a new head.

 

I guess till then nobody had realised their copy of the film was different to all the other copies on the planet.

 

The story is quite miraculous because there was never really thought to be prints of the original film out there in the first place. Nobody was really expecting anyone to find a copy of this film except perhaps Mr Pena!

 

It's amazing that the film is now finally almost complete again!

 

love

 

Freya

[David Mullen ASC]

Why not archive to 65mm?

 

Not many 65mm laser recorders in existence.

[Nathan Rosenquist]

David Mullen is absolutely right about the current state of digital preservation. This is a problem that not only affects cinematographers and filmmakers, but anyone with high value digital data that should be archived for future generations. In the worst case scenario, major solar flares or EMP pulses could wipe out an untold amount of digital data.

 

I wish someone would come up with a device that could use film as a digital storage medium. Obviously it would be expensive to use (film isn't cheap) and you would only be able to write to the film once. The upshot is that filmmakers, businesses, hospitals, governments, and anyone else with important data could archive it long term and it would survive a hypothetical "digital dark ages".

 

If such a device existed, you could back up any sort of digital project or information in such a way that it would be able to survive far longer than computer tape backups or continual hard drive transfers. Just save your digital film in a really simple and universal file format, and archive the bits onto celluloid. Decades later, you could either transfer the film again using traditional optical processes, or read it back in digitally and encode it again to a new piece of film, or whatever the best technology is at that time.

 

If you stick with simple file formats and store it with instructions, it should still be easy to read into the future provided that society doesn't entirely collapse. There are a lot of dead file formats from decades past, but most of those were obscure to begin with. Barring a major catastrophe, I'd be surprised if we as a society can't read TIFF and WAV files in 100 years. Any decent computer programmer should be able to convert raw pixel and sound data into the format du jour if the archival format is documented properly.

 

I imagine such a system could be implemented on 35mm film, but the picture area would end up looking kind of like a high resolution QR code, or the data from the SDDS or Dolby Digital sections on the edge of the film. Error correction would need to be built in in case you lost a frame and had to do a splice or something. These are all solvable problems.

 

We actually have all of the technology today (DI, film out, encoding digital data in a 2D picture format), I just don't think anyone has put all the pieces together yet.

[John Sprung]

We actually have all of the technology today (DI, film out, encoding digital data in a 2D picture format), I just don't think anyone has put all the pieces together yet.

 

Something along these lines may be in the works. George Gush of Kodak mentioned a digital data on B&W film idea to me a while back, and on Feb 18 at the HPA Tech Retreat, there's this presentation:

 

11:15 am - 11:45 am Archiving Color Images to Single-Strip 35mm B&W Film -

 

Sean McKee & Victor Panov, Point.360 Digital Film Labs

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Oron Cohen]

Hi anton,

 

Like what you said about Art and about taking photos on film rather then digital, I still take 90% of my photos on film.(this is my flickr link: My link .

 

I also think working with a physical matter and within the restrictions that it gives you, can create interesting artistic result. I also try to push Super16/35mm in my work, sadly it's hard to do this days and I usually try to explain first and for most the difference in the work itself, when you work with different materials it could lead you into a different path/way in your search for the end result.

 

 

Film has aestethics that digital doesn't have, and I doubt it ever will. But David made good remark on this:

 

Now, little more serious remark on this. Since my hobby is analog photography, I myself quite often get remarks why aren't my photos so sharp ( well, the main reason is lousy scanner, not possibilities of film ), or that my black&white conversion could be better ( altough I use only black&white film for home developing ) etc. Main problem with this is next line which I will wrote:

 

People today do not look on content, rather on form, which is for me biggest problem and reason why we got so much, well, I would say mediocre art.

 

P.S. Happy New Year everyone!

[Paco Sweetman]

I edit for a living. I work in the music industry (i'm a closet cinematographer in my spare time). I've been working with music videos for over seven years.

 

In the last two years I have noticed a massive surge in videos originating on digital (especially bloody 5D and 7D). And I do find it sad that film is being slowly but surely phased out. Even the promo commissioners are starting to become more and more reluctant to splurge for celluloid. And with the masses starting to use digital for their acquisitions we are getting more and more problems from what I call 'the bedroom music-video-makers'. Things being shot on ridiculous frame rates, appalling color grading, you name it.

 

It will be sad when celluloid gets phased out altogether. I remember the middle of last year, we got in a copy of a video by an artist called Jack Penate, the video was called 'Pull My Heart Away' and was shot all on Super8 in Jordan. It was such a welcome sight compared to the schlock that I was doing on that day.

 

"Why Do They Still Shoot Film"

 

Because, in my opinion, there is something that happens when light is let onto each frame that contains those silver halides that no digital medium seems to have managed to capture. Call it warmth, depth, texture; it's something that encapsulates the moving image.