Carl Looper

Nostalgia is about loss Nostalgia is not the same as history. History is that which survives the past, into the present. Nostalgia is about a desire for something that has gone and will never return. What I am speaking about is not nostalgia. I am speaking about history - that which comes down to us from the past and survives in museums, in libraries, in art gallerys, in boxes under the bed, in the rubbish tip, in archeological digs, and so on. Putting on a pair of old shoes was a little nostalgic, but what I'm doing wit thoise old shoes is far from it. It is about history. Both that which comes from the past and that which has yet to occur. The present is a fiction. And yes the brief history of film I've posted is poetic. Poetry is required when you are writing to a forum, otherwise your posts will end up the length of a book. Because to write the history of film video etc, would require a book, many books. My posts tend to get too long as it is. So yes, it's very simple brief poetic stuff. What is wrong with poetry anyway? But a good point about the history being earlier. Indeed it is. Indeed the history of film goes back to cave painting. And it's not linear. It forks off in different directions. For example, the invention of photography is the result of at least two parents - one is optics and the other is chemistry. The camera was known a thousand years ago. The idea of atoms was first proposed by the Ancient Greeks. So yes, it is a bit silly putting dates on various things. Film has died many times, and has been reborn many times. The introduction of TV is a good case in point. Until then there was a particular type of film making called news reels. That particular type of filmmkaing eventually died. Because it went across to TV, where it continued on film for a little while, and then shot on video and then digital. It is quite simple to understand why. Film is dead. Long Live Film. C

Also it's important to know that this isn't really anything to do with Nyquist limits. The Nyquist theory argues correctly that you should sample at twice the frequency of your target defintion. But this in realtion to a an ideal noiseless signal. In relation to a noisy signal you will want to sample beyond this limit, as far as you can. How far is just a question of practical and economic limits rather than any theoretical limit. The only reason it's hard to pin down a limit is that there is no such thing as noise in mathematics. You have to use statistics to get some sort of idea of it and even then it's more art than science. C

That wasn't what I was getting at but that is certainly another improvement - anything which increases the transfer of information rather than blocks it, is a good thing. An advantage with a mono camera (as distinct from a bayer filter camera) is that you will get a much better colour signal, because you are doing the colour filtration yourself separately, rather than interlaced with every second or third pixel (so to speak). But what I was specifically talking about is the creation of noise that occurs in the transfer - ie. noise that is in addition to that already understood as in the original film. But insofar as electonic sensors have been the traditional means by which noise has been quantified in the first place, any noise actually created in a transfer (in a measurement) can be missed. There isn't anything to compare it with other than one's eyes. So for all those people who have insisted Super8 has always looked better projected than in a transfer, they have been right. There just wasn't anyway of measuring it because the very measurement tools, the electronic sensors, have been a contributing factor in the creaation of noise. The sensor itself is not the problem. The most expensive, cleanest, noise free sensor in the world can be used and it will still happen. The only solution, as we're discovering, is to increase the resolution of the sensor and/or perform multi-sampling, ie. over and above the delivery definition one is aiming at. The reasons put forward against this have been due to an erroneous understanding of the relationship between film and digital. Many will say that, for example, the resolution of film is X pixels/mm and so that scanning any higher than this is redundant. But if scanning higher than this improves the image (but not necessarily the resolution) one has to ask what else it is improving. What eles it improves is the noise level. The nosie level is reduced. But why is it reduced? This is not some magical thing. It's not as if a higher rez or muti-sampling approach reduces the noise already in the film. It reduces the amount of noise being created during the act of digitally measuring the film in the first place! C

The computer is what it's inventors aimed at: a "universal machine". The idea of such. The ultimate generic machine. What is built around this universal machine are things like: keyboards, screens, mice, xbox kinect sensors, cameras, modems, which are called "peripherals". They are not part of the computer proper. They are add ons around the central idea. This idea is as old as mathematics - of a universal system. A rational system. A logical system, that would account for anything and everything. At the heart of this system is the simplest of number systems, the binary system. Which can be physically implemented by a single switch. The first computer is an on/off switch. The switch that turns the computer on. And turns it off. Within the universe of computation there is no such thing as digital photography. The computer itself doesn't really give birth to digital photography. It's fundamental consciousness is not built on data but on a priori algorithms. Mathematics. The abacus. Data is something that happens later - imposed from outside this system. The digital photograph arrives in the form of data. Not much needs to be done with this data other than re-route it to storage. When something does need to be done it is algorithms that come into play, to manage and massage that data into some alternative form or not as the case may be. The data is then re-routed to the screen, to drive a display. The real power of the computer is not tested in any way by this. As far as the computer is concerned the data is just dumb information to be occasionally massaged. The computer's central consciousness is much more tested by the art of computer generated imagery where the computer creates the data in the first place, according to ancient and modern laws of physics, ie. where mathematics is king. The synthesised image. But in recent years an alternative role for computation has emerged, (other than simple data management) and that is the world of machine vision. This is where it gets far more interesting - where digital photography and computation actually start interacting with each other in interesting ways. Here it is not mathematics which is king, but statistics. And soon there will be quantum computation where statistical theories of the universe will need to be properly dusted and reworked. This is where digital really lives. Digital photography is just one small and insignificant part of the digital universe proper. C

Well yes, we should put the computer in there. Very good point. The interesting there is that digital photography begins with a video cameras plugged into an analog to digital convertor. Eventually the video sensor is replaced by a digital sensor. But the computer has it's own strange history, completely different from the history of image making. The first thing computers did, in terms of imagery, was to synthesise an image rather than encode a camera image. The rise of computer generated images. The synthetic image. Camera (emperical) image encoding would mature somewhat later. Perhaps we can say that digital photography has two parents: video and the computer. C

I'm interested in the film to digital pipeline - but I haven't been on any death watch. As far as I'm concerned film died thirty years ago. But it was reborn the very next day. This is perhaps purely personal as much as rhetorical but I think it might also have currency just beyond myself. Thirty years ago it was no longer a case of film being better (or worse) than video (or what I could see video would become). It was a case of film being intrinsically and fundamentally differerent from video, and from digital. The mediums were different. Both physically and conceptually. Both practically and theoretically. At every single level. Film was reborn in this moment for me - no longer in competition with video/digital. It was film as a parent who has love for it's children, but also film as something capable of change and evolution - not the medioum itself so much although great things have happened there as well, but in terms of what artists, who understand the medium, can do with it. This was thirty years ago. Believe me. Thirty years ago the same thing was being said as is being said today. Film is dead. By which was meant, it will be. One day. The electronic bandwagon was leaving town for the big smoke. Are you interested or do you want to persevere with this old Victorain age technology? And it was completely obvious. But film is a powerful ghost, far more powerful than digital. It is capable of haunting the present in ways that digital can't. Digital would have to die first. But digital can't die. It can not, therefore, return from the grave. Now since that time I've always treated film as completely secure, not in terms of day to day deals on film stock and whether this or that production will be done on film or video or digital (ho hum), but in terms of the massive history behind film. It's a huge legacy. It's has a legendary foothold in cultural memory. And the fact that today, despite the death of film thirty years ago, one can get a camera, a roll of film, shoot it, process it and screen it and see exactly what I mean - a spectre, a ghost, a poltergeist, a zombie. A beautiful, spooky and powerful force. I'm not on any death watch. Film died thirty years ago. Carl

Well I've actually started shooting film again. I had been working on film to digital transfer research, and that's still ongoing, but have picked up the camera again and gone out and actually exposed a roll of 16mm film. I haven't had as much fun as I've had in twenty years (the last time I shot 16mm). Have been putting together cameras, motors, lenses and etc. Anyway what I did do for the first time in my life, is actually process the roll of film. In a Lomo. In the past I just happliy sent my film off to the lab. Today there isn't any labs left in my neck of the woods - they've all closed down, save one. But around that particular lab an offshoot started - a film workshop, and it is there that I can see film is quite happy to continue being done. One of the workshop guys has almost finished a feature film on 16mm - and the material I've seen looks absolutely gorgeous. I've still got to get my wet lab skills up to scratch but I was glad to discover I hadn't lost any camera skills. It was like putting on a pair of old shoes. Extremely comfortable. Very enjoyable, and filled me with an exquisite sense of optimism. And the number of people asking me about what I was doing was extraordinary. I haven't talked to so many complete strangers in ages. C

But to be a little less rhetotical the point I'm trying to make is that at a particular juncture in history film gave birth video, or we might say - it gave birth to TV, which gave birth to video. Video gave birth to digital. At each juncture film died, only to be reborn the very next day. What has happened in recent times was always on the cards for a particular type of movie making. In each case film has continued, but in a new direction. Alongside it's children. It is moving into old age but not without the power and a history behind it which is still capable of surprising us in the simplest of ways. There is a saying that goes: The King is Dead. Long Live the King. Now here's some older history. Once upon a time, at the birth of photography, there was the cry that rang out - that "From this day forth painting is dead". And by painters themselves! But what followed on from this is that painting changed direction. What follwed was Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Surrelaism to name but a few movements. All that died was a particular type of painting, one which photgraphy was better equipped to replace. The same goes for TV, video, digital. It replaces a particular type of movie making, one that was better handled by TV, then video and then digital. Now it may not be so easy to map this history onto the situation between film and digital, but it's certainly informative. Today we would find it impossible to understand how people could have ever believed painting was dead. But they did. It may very well be the case that today people believe film is dead. But as I 've rehetorically arguing, it's been dead for thirty years (from a particular point of view) and what has hapened during that time, alongside the evolution of video into digital, is complete awareness of that evolution and corrsponding ways of differentiating itself from such. The friction between film and video/digital has been going on for a long time, enough time for film and film makers, who have understood this, to reinvent film. This will happen and more and more. C

Yes, my approach to this is purely rhetorical. Here is a more vicious version: Instead of trying to defend film in relation to the digital declarations of it's death one instead says: "yes you f**kwits, it's been dead for f**king decades, tell me something I don't f**king know". I'm not here to argue whether this is true or not. It is purely rhetorical. I'm here to say I very much enjoy film. It is has a beauty, power and history I appreciate. And I continue to enjoy it very much, despite the fact, that in 1982, I could see the future as clearly as it eventually became. Indeed I am very much part of that movement which created the digital present - the point being that despite this I still enjoy film. Always have, always will. If someone has some other way of explaining this I am all ears. C

Yes indeed. That is a really good point. Crystal sync is up there with pin registration. If you are going to build a new film camera make it a damned cool one. I was looking at some 3K scans of Super8 from the 70s earlier today and I thought wow - if today's state-of-the-art datacines were sent back in time to then, news cameramen back then would have thrown down their 16mm cameras and jumped on Super8 no problem. It's an extremely interesting phenomenon to see Super8 reproduced so well. It just goes to show that film is really quite a bizarre medium and capable of inter-participating with video/digital in ways that have been misunderstood for way way too long. C

Fair enough. Perhaps the Bolex branding was throwing me. Didn't really notice the specs. What I like about this Super8 camera proposition is the lack of branding - that it isn't trying to sell the camera idea on what some graphic designer might have dreamt up. It's starting where it should - on the mechanics, the specs, the engineering. Hell if it was available tomorrow as a raw metal box I'd love to use it. Look and feel is eventually important of course, but nowhere near as important as the actual engineering. The guts of the machine. What it actually does and how it works. That's what I'm interested in. C

Yes, if you don't enjoy working with film, then video/digital is probably the solution. For those who do enjoy it, any issue with glue and tape is, by definition, not their particular problem. As for image quality one can create just as crappy results in video/digital as one can in film. Or just as beautiful. In terms of information theory the way in which film encodes an image, in relation to the way in which digital encodes an image, are completely different. It is very difficult to propose an appropriate metric that would be respectful to both. A metric will be geared one way or the other, and give correspondingly different results. Digital is easy to define and that is one of it's virtues. It is based entirely on a rational model of the universe. The properties of film are a little more difficult to define. But that is one of it's virtues! The death of film occured thirty years ago (actually earlier, but 30 is a nice figure) but unless you understood the difference between film and video at that time (not in terms of what was then achievable, but in terms of what the future held) you will have missed it. For those who did miss it, but continued to use film, the future would, I imagine, be a mixture of turmoil. But for those didn't miss it, but continued to use film anyway, it's completely laughable to listen to the death of film as something recent. Let me try and explain it in another way. For those programming a Commodore 64 in 1982 it was silly the questions as to what a computer was for. It was a programmable machine. You programmed it. But the questions continued. For the clueless they had to wait another decade, for things like Photoshop 1.0. As if it just popped out of nowehere and revolutionised photography then and there. But it completely ignores all of the work on digital photography that was going on for a decade up to that point. Indeed it ignores much more than a decade. History creates the "present". The sense of film being dead recently is just a distant echo of things taking place a long long time ago. To continue working with film, knowing that, is to understand something a bit more profound. It is find that position where one can laugh at those who've just picked up the latest digital camera and find themselves empowered to declare, as if it was something that just happend last week, that film is dead. C C C

Yes, it is still very much early days in the art of film to digital transfers. High end systems will no doubt have put more thought into the problem, if somewhat neglecting the small gauge medium. They have perhaps, fallen into the erroneous idea that smaller film requires less pixels. Indeed the reverse is true. The smaller the film the more grain it exhibits and the more pixels per image area and/or more multi-sampling you would need to stop such from being amplified. Nevertheless one can come to an understanding of the problem even if there are not yet the best solutions for the Super8 filmmaker. There are, however, DIY solutions, that can benefit from this information and be factored into new DIY solutions. The most effective DIY system, I'd recommend, will be one in which the film is transported continuously in front of a capture device, and that uses an RGB LED flash to capture the film. But instead of just one capture per film frame one does many - the more the merrier. Even just four captures per frame will provide a significant difference. Depending on your skills this may or may not be the easy part. The second part may be the more difficult part. It involves digitally re-registering all of the captures and stitching them together. I'd eventually like to put such a DIY system together myself. For the time being I'm relying on a DIY single capture per film frame, at 5K resolution, even though I know (from theory and single frame testing) that an even better result would occur if I were to re-engineer it for multi-sampling. But for me that will just have to wait for another day. Carl

To be a little clearer, the argument that "film is dead" is a thirty year old argument. But it only had legitimacy thirty years ago. Film gave birth to video. Video rejected it's parent with the quite legitimate argument, for it's own purposes, that film was dead. And for video, and it's digital future, film was dead. Film is dead. It's been dead for thirty years. But for film, it's future took two paths - one a dead end, where those who should have converted to video and then digital didn't do so. They continued using film in a state of stupour, eventually sinking into nostalgia and loss, or jumping at the last moment. BUT on an entirely different path, thirty years ago, film was reborn, by those who have always actually understood the beauty, power, and history of film, and how to deploy it - those who actually enjoy it - and if doing so with a vengence can make it even more enjoyable, then that is what can also be done. The point is that we are sick of hearing the argument that "film is dead" precisely because, for those who witnessed the death of film, it is very very old news. C

Yes, you got it. It negates the "Film is dead" argument. Not sure I follow the tent pole indie thing but I think we're on the same page ... Carl

Thanks David. I'll divert that tangent to the general discussion area. Yes, you are totally right about cost. In fact I reinvested in 16mm myself recently because the cost was hardly any different from Super 8. Carl

Film died thirty years ago on the precise day that news cameramen replaced their 16mm cameras with video. That was the day that film died. It would be decades later before this news would reach Hollywood. So to those who keep predicting that the death of film is sometime next week - wake up - it's been dead for thirty years. What has been happening ever since that day has been two histories - the use of film by those who didn't know it was dead, and the use by those who enjoy and appreciate it's beauty, power and history.

Film has grain, but for reasons not well understood by film to digital systems, the transfer to digital actually increases the grain. This can be demonstrated by comparing, by eye, a film projected on a wall side by side with it's digital transfer. The grain is enhanced in the transfer. Where does it come from? The reason is a little complex but it has nothing to do with film or the digital sensor but rather in the relationship between the two: an "interference" (for want of a better term) between the way film encodes an image and the way digital encodes an image. The digital camera has a cutoff frequency whereas film doesn't. The high frequencies in film tail off into "noise" (or grain) but this "noise" is statistically correlated with the original signal (the original image) which the digital sensor can't see but is there in the film. There is an necessary exchange that occurs at this boundary where the information still in the film gets traded for a corresponding increase in noise in the digital copy. Fortunately there is a simple remedy that future datacine's will no doubt possess. One will be to increase the defintion of the capture sensor (4K or more), and/or the simpler remedy is to mutli-sample the film at a number of offsets (that are decorrellated from the pixel pitch of the sensor), and to re-register the captures, and then integrate. Film should not look as bad as it does in a transfer. It should look as good as it does when projected. This is not yet the case because the problem remains not well understood Denoising algorithms are not the real solution. They might decrease the noise but they also decrease the resolution of the image. The above method will properly minimise any increase in noise (the more samples the better) while maintaining the resolution of the result at the same resolution of the capture device (in fact it actually increases the resolution of the result from that which the sensor would otherwise suggest). C

When I say film died thirty years ago I'm referring to the precise day that news cameramen replaced their 16mm cameras with video. That was the day that film died. It would be decades later that this news reached Hollywood. So to those who keep predicting that the death of film is sometime next week - wake up - it's been dead for thirty years. What has been happoening ever since that day is the use of film by those who actually enjoy it. So lets pass this on to the future. C

But its not just cost. If it were just cost you wouldn't shoot film at all. Film, in an economical sense, died thirty years ago. The reason why film continues to be shot is completely mysterious to those not in the know. I'm thinking of kids in particular here. They look at grandpa with a big box on their shoulder (or grandma) and think: WTF. What's important to kids is convenience and ease of use more so than cost. If the kids are interested in film they need something with which to start - something they can feel happy about. Something that doesn't look like it's been pulled out of the recycle bin. Certainly for us old dogs it doesn't really matter. C

The cool thing about Super8 (compared to 16mm, 35 etc) is that it's cheap, convenient, lightweight, and the nearest a corresponding film camera could possibly get, to the convenience of digital, but with the infinitely rich benefits film provides. If this particular project wasn't already happening I'd suggest it would eventually happen anyway, for precisely these reasons. There is always a new generation of kids that would be asking themselves: what is this thing called film, and how can I start playing with it? C

I might add that this project is infinitely more interesting than the digital bolex idea. What on earth is the point of a digital bolex? To have a digital sensor with a Bolex branded box around it? All I keep thinking is that one could just as well make one's own wooden box, indeed with a hand crank on it , and put one's own digital camera inside that, and that would be just as interesting, if not slightly more, than the way the digital bolex is being sold. C

Note that while the purpose of this is exactly the same as pin registration, it would allow film-to-digital transfer systems, or indeed live projector systems to be a lot more relaxed (ie. cheaper) in terms of re-registration. A pin registered camera is only providing for half the job if there isn't a correpsonding pin registered, or laser registered projector / transfer to complete the task. With a printed registration mark, software can take over the task of registering a frame. In many cases software already does take over such a task (ie. image stabilisation software) but it has to do a considerable a amount of work to carry that out. With a known registration mark the simplest of algorithms can do the job. But in any case this is not a replacement for pin registration but rather in addition. Perhaps a more general purpose programmable optical encoder on the sprocket edge is the idea, allowing for not only registration marks, but any other useful information (timecode, etc). Can always put it a few frames ahead or behind the frame being exposed so as to avoid interfering with the lens/mirror/film/gate assembly. C

I'd add to the specs, that some sort of registration mark be printed on the film, ie. at the time of exposure, for example, a little cross hair, in between the sprocket holes. This would be invaluable during film to digital transfer. Instead of relying on sprocket holes as a registration method, the film to digital transfer can use the printed cross hair as a registration mark. The camera can use some sort of micro-lensed laser diode aimed at the area between the sprockets to record the cross hair. The recorded cross hair will effectively establish the exact relationship between the image and the camera, regardless of where the film happens to land on each frame. The transfer locks on to cross hair rather than the sprocket. In other words the function of the sprocket holes in the film would be purely for transport of the film in the camera. The result of this very simple addition would be a completely rock steady result in a digital transfer. Carl

I'd buy such a camera. For sure. No issue. How much would I pay? In the late seventies (or was it early eighties) I purchased a brand new Canon 1014 XLS for about $1000. In todays prices that would be about $3500 according to this link: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 531AAVr5Zf Would I pay that? Depends on how well the camera was made. If it was well made I'd certainly consider it. No problem. C