Matthew W. Phillips

47 minutes ago, Frank Wylie said:

But, please, be my guest and whip up an alternative.  I'll even put in the first order for 10K of good color negative stock.

35mm please.

Let me know when it's done.

I will have my checkbook ready...

 

 

I am not saying I have an alternative. But I am not Kodak. Kodak has a reputation for going with the status quo and not taking advantage of advances in technology. It is their business to figure out better/cheaper/etc ways to create their products. Most other industries that still exist have done just that but Kodak is supposed to get a free pass because why? I couldnt care less if they go out of business. If film can become a viable format again, someone will figure out how to make it work. 

44 minutes ago, Frank Wylie said:

Frankly, I don't think you do; in fact I am sure you do not.

Having toured the color coating alleys in Rochester back in 2008, I can assure you they companies that build CPU manufacturing facilities would not have a fun time trying to replicate Kodak's color coating alley. 

But, please, be my guest and whip up an alternative.  I'll even put in the first order for 10K of good color negative stock.

35mm please.

Let me know when it's done.

I will have my checkbook ready...

 

 

No need to be testy. I am just asking about what makes it so difficult? You arent giving too many specifics. Are there any videos online that show this process? I don't think you are giving enough respect to how much tech. has advanced as far as automation and robotics. And 2008 was 14 years ago.

4 hours ago, Frank Wylie said:

There's no puffery;  the job is hellishly difficult to coat film to the standards Kodak has established over their History.

Think of the coating alley as a Giant steamship you have to have to push into dock with a small ski boat.  The inertia of the process is astronomical, the standards extremely exacting, the raw materials and chemicals must be totally pure and clean...

in 2012, the main coating drum of Efke Film in Croatia broke down (so I have heard) and they simply walked away from film production because they knew they could never recoup the cost of getting the coating alleys back up and operational.  Efke sole a fair amount of film and was well regarded in the still film industry.

Nothing is off the shelf, nothing is easy. 

As Phil Rhodes implies;  ask Ferrania how easy it is, even when you have some access to former employees and a small, preexisting coating alley (yes, in bad condition, but in place nonetheless).

 

 

I do appreciate the work involved. I was just pointing out that compared to say, creating CPUs or other nano-precise processes that must be done in negative pressure rooms, etc, that it cant be that hard to automate. Kodak isnt (or wasnt, at least) some small time operation that had to rely on manual labor for everything because they couldnt afford machinery. Am I to believe that creating film stock is more precise than creating a modern CPU? I would need some hard data to believe that.

2 minutes ago, Cristian Tascianu said:

What do you think a Classic should cost these days?  

 

I am not sure of what they are worth as far as a book value, but I wouldnt pay more than $3,500 for one. (I am in US so not exactly sure what that would correlate in Euros). Even at that price, if it had > 7500 hrs on the sensor, I probably wouldnt buy it regardless of the price. That is just me. I probably wont find that gem that is prices in that realm with that low of hours but then I guess I wont buy one.

On 9/14/2020 at 4:26 PM, Mark Kenfield said:

The quality of Proaim’s machining is generally junk. I would be very wary of using them. 

What I find amazing about this site is that there is no middle ground. People here tend to think gear is either great or junk (or the obnoxious definition of "a toy")

Could it be possible that some of this "junk" gear could actually be decent gear for a segment of the population who has different (and lighter) needs than you? Or are you that narrow minded and simple that you can only think in black and white?

On 9/16/2020 at 8:05 AM, JD Hartman said:

A toy tripod dolly. What next?  What size PVC pipe to run it on?

Oh boy, we have one of those...

Pray tell how you have the skill to detect, while watching footage, what type of dolly it was shot on? 

5 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

The mirrorless cameras are cool, but there just is nothing satisfying about them. Every one I've used from the A7R to the GH5, have all been horrible cameras, nothing like the big ol' Canon 5D MKIV for instance. Complicated menu's, difficult manual adjustments, piss poor ergonomics, worthless viewfinders, etc. I just don't understand how anyone can use them, but I guess the quietness is more important? 

Have you tried out the Fuji X-t line? These arent full frame but, for a stills camera, have a lot of manual controls. Feels very much like an old 35mm stills camera. Menus arent complicated either.

10 hours ago, Doug Palmer said:

Rather more useful.  

Not sure about this one. Imagine all the beautiful silver bullion that could have been made from the film shot to make an orange and teal Michael Bay film.

22 minutes ago, Tyler Purcell said:

It's not rocket science, generally if there is no businesses that do XYZ thing, then it's usually because it's not a profitable thing to do. 

Not sure this is an accurate statement from a business perspective. If that were true, how did businesses ever come to exist in the first place?

Businesses often fail because they assume "if you build it, they will come." But marketing is perhaps more important than the service or quality thereof in most cases. Cannot tell you how many businesses fail because people don't even know they exist.

22 minutes ago, Jon O'Brien said:

On the price of silver, and all that. Don't worry about it, everyone. Worries about resources come and go. It's like Frank says: worrying about it is futile. Film will survive. Any bets.

Not to pick on you because I know what you are saying. But I had a funny thought about if we hit the last of the silver stockpile in the world and you had people arguing over whether to use the remainder to make antibiotics or motion picture film. ?

9 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

That green probably isn't even a particularly good representation, on a website that's being presented to you in sRGB. 

I never thought the film's color accuracy was its selling point. However, from pixel peeping, I found these colors to be much closer to accurate than all of the digital footage I have shot with a color chart. The colors are more saturated and less tainted from those of the electronic variety. Granted, I am not shooting on an Alexa either so I cannot speak to that end of the market.

7 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

As a sort of social experiement, what would anyone think of these colours, in comparison to the ones which received such a glowing reception above?

I see you are being cynical today. From one glance, I would guess that you used an eyedrop tool to acquire a pixel from red, green, and blue to make those from the Kodak image. The grain will still make it more interesting though because it has close but different values around it to give it more variation in exact color instead of being a single monolithic color block. I guess I would say that grain variation is more "visually interesting" than that representation? Not much different than a textured wall looks more interesting than a perfectly flat wall.

8 hours ago, Mark Kenfield said:

I own Dehancer's halation plugin and have trialed their full software, and I compared it side-by-side with Filmbox, and (frankly) it wasn't even close. And that's comparing the various effects (colour, grain, weave, dust) both individually and combined.

While Dehancer is certainly a step up from what we had earlier in Filmconvert, Filmbox stomps all over it. You play the clips back to back and one looks like film, and the other looks like film emulation (and that's even if you neutralise the colour differences entirely, by excluding them from the comparison).

Borrow a Mac and try out the free Lite version. I think you'll see what I mean.

Wow, you reach for the top shelf with words, don't you?

Would I know the difference side-by-side with Dehancer? Yes, likely so

Would Filmbox "stomp all over it"? I highly doubt it

I am not defending Dehancer and I did not purchase it; I played around with it for over a week and was over it. But even your own screenshots are not that compelling compared to other screenshots I have seen from Dehancer. This doesn't mean it isn't better on a side-by-side comparison but it does mean that Filmbox isnt breathtakingly amazeballs and necessitates me going and begging, borrowing, or stealing a mac to get my hands on it.

Although side-by-side comparisons are useful to "isolate for the control variable", I never thought that you should have to critically scrutinize something to see its benefit. It should be apparent from the first glance that "wow, that is something special."

For reference of the beautiful saturation of film, I found this partial color chart from an old Kodak ad:

Look at that red, green, and blue. Good lawd, that is beautiful.

5 minutes ago, Phil Rhodes said:

It seems to be doing at least some variation on what a lot of similar things do - contrasty cool shadows, low contrast warm highlights.

There's a point to be made about what modern film actually looks like, too. Modern camera negative is very low contrast because they were trying to compete on dynamic range, and they easily could. What that actually means is very, very flat, which of course is exactly what most people don't want when they go for film (or film emulation). It's also very often digitally stabilised, so it's very, very stable, and if you shoot 200 speed stock it's pretty low grain, and then you can degrain it - and that's before we even get to the point of being Christopher Nolan and shooting 5/65.

The better we do film, the less it actually looks like film. Which, of course, was always the point. Before we replaced film, its faults weren't cool.

 

This is so true, Phil! I love film but I love it for what it is; faults and all (looks wise, not workflow wise)

1 hour ago, Mark Kenfield said:

Well, yes. That's kinda the whole reason for giving my word. ?‍♂️

But here are a couple of samples (Video Village do a "lite" version of the plugin which is free, and can be used on footage up to 1080p in resolution, it just gives you a single, full S16mm and S35mm preset, with no adjustability of the various parameters). These are the same shots with just an Arri Rec709 LUT applied, and then Filmbox's S16mm emulation from the Lite plugin applied (no other adjustments):

In motion, with the halation, grain, gate weave and occasional dust-spec applied. It's remarkably convincing. 

Those arent bad clips at all but I dont think it looks any better than some clips I have seen of Dehancer.

The one thing I have noticed about all of these plugins is that the saturation cannot be pushed as far as it can with film without the colors falling apart. So we end up with, like Phil said, flatter looking images with large dynamic range, lower contrast, desaturated colors, and a few "token" characteristics of film like grain, halation, bloom, and orange and teal.

2 hours ago, Karim D. Ghantous said:

But now let's go to Matthew's post where he proposes that the price of silver might go as high as 450% from here. So roughly that's a four times increase in the price. So, let's assume that the cost of silver is now 4 x $15.853, which equals 63.412. We already have $15.853 worth of silver in that 400ft roll, so let's add (63.412 - 15.853) to that, the difference being $47.559, which comes to $375 or so. The price increase is 14.5%, rounding it up to 15%. Not stupidly huge, but it will add up to lots of dollars over time.

What sucks even more is that most sellers of anything precious metals related add a markup or "premium" in addition to spot price. Even if Kodak can buy at spot, you can be sure as hell that they arent selling it to us as spot. I imagine they are marking the silver portion alone up a good deal. Not much different than a coin shop or bullion dealer would.

Therefore, in the scenario I gave, I imagine Kodak would go as much as double the silver value added onto the cost of film for the movement in the spot price. 

3 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

I don't know and Kodak won't tell you, but it's reasonable. It's not just slop the gloop on the plastic ribbon. The chemistry has to be mixed and coated on there with incredible precision, or the density of the pictures would be all over the place. Even black and white film now has a handful of layers to control its contrast, while colour films have a handful of layers per colour. I'm speculating, but I'd be fully prepared to believe there's an unavoidable need for some pretty qualified process control people and some very exacting equipment maintenance.

I think the real risk for Kodak is someone in China deciding to do it. As Ferrania found, setting up to make colour film is extremely non-trivial, even when you're an ex-manufacturer with most of that manufacturer's facilities and people available to you, but it's not impossible.

I am not trying to make light of the labor that goes into making film. However, I am quite sure that tougher manufacturing problems than that have been solved in the past using even automated technology. In a world where we have 3d printers available to most any income bracket (which has precise motors on all 3-axis), I am finding it a bit tough to envision the creation of film to be that exacting. And if it were, I doubt it would be a problem solved by humans since we tend to be...error prone.

Not arguing with you, Phil, just saying that I wonder if there is either some puffery on Kodak's part or maybe it is a question of the automated systems not being worth the return?

I really hope something positive becomes of this thread. I am selling my CP16r, but if I end up stuck with it, I might as well be able to use it.

Having a better lens solution would make the value much greater. Good luck with this thread.

35 minutes ago, Mark Kenfield said:

It's like $129 or something for a three month licence. Which is plenty of time to finish the grade on a project. Compared to the cost of doing a film-out or shooting on negative, that's beyond neglible.

And the results far outstrip any other digital film emulation I've encountered to-date (and I've tried most of them). For anyone wanting a "film look" for digital material, I don't think there's any better (and certainly any cheaper) options. ?‍♂️
 

Do you have any footage to prove this or are we supposed to take your word for it?

I looked online and couldn't find anything other than the stock couple of screenshots put up by the creators (which mean nothing if they have exact film shots to draw from; anyone can match closely with time/technique). Would be nice to see work done by actual users of this.

And I still think it is weak to be mac only. Some of us have Windows or Linux systems for our other work and not a dedicated computer just for using a particular program. PCs give you the best bang for your buck performance-wise anyway.

16 minutes ago, Phil Rhodes said:

B&H charges $327.50 for a 400-foot roll of 5219, so even if we found an ideal, no-drawbacks replacement that was free, it would make film less than 5% cheaper.

This is both encouraging but also aggravating. It is good because it shows that the price of film shouldn't be that closely tied to the price of silver. However, it is aggravating because silver has long been a (at least partial) justification for why film costs so much to make. This here proves that story was a load a BS. So where is the costs of it? Labor? Is the labor actually difficult or is this more BS like the silver cost fallacy?

1 hour ago, Simon Wyss said:

Traditionally it is reckoned with five grams of silver per square metre. That corresponds to oz. 0.17637 per 10.764 sq. ft.

Wouldn't it be 0.16077 oz. since precious metals are measures in ounces troy? (1 ozt = 31.1 grams)

6 hours ago, sines said:

I have a O'Connor 50D, in good condition, no leaks, with Peter Lysand sticks. 
https://kitsplit.com/rent/peter-lisand-jr-a-74-heavy-duty-tripod-supports-50-lbs-brooklyn-ny
 

I clicked your link but didnt see a buy price? (Unless I missed it)

34 minutes ago, Tyler Purcell said:

The problem is that you need a substance which can be reactive to chemicals and withstand the test of time. 

Even if you were to make some synthetic that could do it, who would guarantee it living long time? Sliver has done a very good job thus far. 

Silver is great and all but (and I imagine you know this if you invest in Silver; I used to put a good deal of money into it myself) the silver supply is dwindling a bit each year and the values are believed (by Silver bugs, at least) to be artificially suppressed by the paper market (JP Morgan, etc.) If this theory is true, the time will come when Silver will become untouchable for creating film stock.

The approximate natural occurrence of silver in the Earth to gold is about 17.5:1. Historically, the Romans set silver as 1/12 of gold price and the USA (when on the gold standard), had silver as 1/15th of gold.

Right now, Silver is ~1/79th the value of Gold. It is possible that Gold is "overvalued" but I doubt it. With the crazy recent inflation, I would say that Gold is still undervalued. Nonetheless, even if Gold is "priced right", Silver is historically extremely undervalued.

If Silver had the correct pricing relative to its ratio in the Earth (17.5:1) and Gold is "priced right", then Silver would be ~$103/ozt. This is about a 450% markup over current pricing. Could you imagine what that would do to the price of film? Yikes.

I agree that, if possible, Silver should be replaced with a cheaper metal. Not sure if it is possible but also not sure if anyone has thought to try. 

8 minutes ago, Chance Shirley said:

People aren’t moaning over things that have already been fixed. They’re reminding you that (1) the injustices of the past still affect people today and (2) if we aren’t mindful of the injustices of the past they might return. The past is indeed past, but the present does not exist in a vacuum. And it is foolish to look at current events and not at least consider how they might mirror historical precedents.

At this point, I believe you just want the last word so I will give it to you. Have at it!

Cheers,

Matthew

8 minutes ago, Phil Rhodes said:

I have noticed that the sort of grain people seem to like actually isn't that realistic anyway; it's often a lot less colourful than real grain.

This is an accurate point; at least from what I have noticed from watching a million YouTubers discuss the topic. Pretty much everyone on there advocated for keeping grain only on the Luma and suppressing the Chroma. Therefore, I cannot imagine that procedural grain is going to be any more "realistic" than grey card scans.

I, personally, like Cinegrain because a couple of the samples have other things that I stylistically like something like the subtle flicker, vignette, or a few legitimate pieces of dust for effect that might be harder to simulate in a very gentle sort of way. But I do not disparage procedural grain; I just don't want to spend 400 - 1,000 for it.

3 hours ago, Chance Shirley said:

Or it’s just that people like to make themselves (or their constituents, if they’re a politician) feel better by bullying a marginalized group... immigrants, people of color, women, gay people, trans people, etc. It’s been that way for thousands of years.

You have the right to your opinion. I don't believe there is some grand conspiracy to bully people in this country. I tend to view these issues as the struggles that a society grows through with rapidly evolving social norms. People tend to change slowly but the agenda of the progressive left have been moving quite fast. Cut people a little slack instead of always assuming the worst of them. Even positive changes take some adjustment and some people are more conservative than others. Does that make them bad?

Hell, even on this forum, there are some that do not want to adjust to the rise of digital as the dominant acquisition medium. This is a relatively small matter in the scope of the problems of the Universe but you still see the passion involved. Imagine challenging people's ideas of ethics, morality, religion, fairness, etc and you are bound to set off a sh*tstorm.

3 hours ago, Chance Shirley said:

But no, you’re probably right, everything is cool now and nobody wants to bully anybody, it is just that life is real complex and intricate and whatnot.

I never said "everything is cool now". I hope you are intelligent enough to recognize that there will never be a time in history where everything is cool. If that is what you are expecting, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Therefore, the best we can do is fix problems as we spot them in the best way we can, balance the rights of everyone; not just a niche group, but sometimes take stock of how far we have came (and give credit where it is due). I find that many people of the SJW variety always have a new complaint but seldom give a pat on the back to their country for coming as far as it has. I believe that the modern free nations (USA, UK, Australia, etc) are among the most fair and just nations in the history of the world. Things are getting better overall and if you disagree, consider that it wasn't even 100 years ago that we had a tyrannical madman in a first world European country that believed genocide was an appropriate discourse.

3 hours ago, Chance Shirley said:

Sigh. But seriously, there are several replies in this thread expressing the classic centrist argument “the past is past, get over it.”

I agree with that "classic centrist argument". Why? Because what else are you going to do? Keep moaning over things that have already been fixed? Like I said, if you have an issue, try to fix it. If it was already fixed, shut up about it.

3 hours ago, Chance Shirley said:

If that’s true, please let us know the date (or at least the year) that justice finally arrived in the U.S. and mistreatment due to gender, race, or sexuality was done away with once and for all.

The USA has always been an experimental government. We aren't completely unique (as many aspects of our structure were borrowed from predecessors) but the exact way we do things is largely an experiment. With any experiment, there is a chance for great success but an equal chance for terrible failure. I admit that I don't have it all figured out. But if you would be honest, either do you. Also consider that most things in life have a tradeoff so what solves one problem might create another. Therefore, we will never reach political Nirvana.