FILM vs DIGITAL

[George Ebersole]

That thing is massive in the photo because it is in its blimp.

 

Not sure what you mean by amount of information -- each frame was a standard 4-perf 35mm one, just that there were three b&w negatives to create the color from, but the red information was a bit fuzzy and grainy compared to the blue and green information, and registration in printing the three colors was a limitation on sharpness, which is why some modern digital restorations where each color can be more precisely re-aligned has created sharper versions than was possible before, such as with the restoration of "Singin' in the Rain".

 

Wow, so the actual physics and chemistry through aging of the film created a sharper picture than what was shot? Amazing.

 

And yeah, I figure that was the blimp version. I guess there was little hand held work done with 3-stripe cameras (joke).

[David Mullen ASC]

When Eastmancolor first came out in 1950, Kodak said it was equivalent in speed to existing color technology (i.e. 3-strip Technicolor). The new color negative was 16 ASA and daylight-balanced, though during or right after WW2, 3-strip Technicolor had become a tungsten-balanced system. So it wasn't like color negative allowed lower light levels to be used at first. But Eastmancolor became 25 ASA / tungsten-balanced by 1953 and 50 ASA by 1959.

[David Mullen ASC]

Wow, so the actual physics and chemistry through aging of the film created a sharper picture than what was shot? Amazing.

No, just now we can see the potential sharpness that the system had by not being limited to photochemical and optical printer limitations of re-aligning the three color records. But you can't get more sharpness than what was originally captured, it's just that now viewers can see a sharper color image than was possible in the original release prints. But this is assuming that the original b&w negatives are in good condition, or even exist anymore.

[George Ebersole]

So it's the newer engineering that allows more precise alignment of the three elements. And continued development of faster film for better colors allowed lower light levels, which I'm guessing is why the colors in those old film have a lot of color to them, but they still have a kind of muted feel, which again I'm guessing is because of the slower film speed. I can't imagine shooting anything 16 or 25 ASA. No wonder they had so many huge 10k and 12k lights back then.

 

I feel like I've been schooled in 35mm development history. This isn't something I was taught in any of my film classes (more likely I just forgot it because I don't use it), so sorry for sounding like a freshman.

 

Thanks for the lesson.

[John E Clark]

So it's the newer engineering that allows more precise alignment of the three elements. And continued development of faster film for better colors allowed lower light levels, which I'm guessing is why the colors in those old film have a lot of color to them, but they still have a kind of muted feel, which again I'm guessing is because of the slower film speed. I can't imagine shooting anything 16 or 15ASA. No wonder they had so many huge 10k and 12k lights back then.

 

I feel like I've been schooled in 35mm development history. This isn't something I was taught in any of my film classes (more likely I just forgot it because I don't use it), so sorry for sounding like a freshman.

 

Thanks for the lesson.

 

It is because of the digitization, and the ability to precisely align the 3 color 'layers' that one reveals more of the 'latent sharpness' (given the image was sharply focused in the first place.)

 

On looking into how one would find examples of 'real' 2 and 3 color samples... I was directed to one of the movie libraries in LA. Unfortunately the pursuit of common lucre does not allow me to go up to LA often, so perhaps one of these days.

 

I think Eastman Color was competing against 3 strip Technicolor which was the 'gold' standard at the time, and obviously, was much more expensive, and I belive there were no 'wide' screen 3 stip Technicolor movies made, which the Eastman Color product could support.

 

Here's an article with some pictures of the 3 strips using the filme "Becky Sharp(1935) as an example. (The article mentions that the film stock was derated to ASA 5... I've also read that some actors/actresses suffered some sort of eye damage due to the use of intense lighting to over come the low speed...).

 

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicolor6.htm

 

The Wife had a project for making lare 20x30 decals... talk about pain in the ass of registration, and that was just to about 1/4 inch was 'good enough'... I can't imagine doing that for a 35mm film frame...

Edited September 19, 2014 by John E Clark

[John E Clark]

On the topic of digital reconstructions, here's a 'creative' idea... what would "Star Trek: The Geritol Generation" look like in 'cinerama/cinemascope/vistavision', etc... There are stills constructed from a sequence of 4:3 TV frames... sort of the inverse of 'pan and scan' used to reduce wide screen to 4:3.

 

And lest someone complain about how 'video' it looks... the 1960's TV show was shot on film, according to IMDB, Eastman 50T 5251, 100T 5254. I think the artist who put this together used remastered HD frame shots.

 

http://cargocollective.com/nickacosta/Star-Trek-in-Cinerama

 

Edited September 19, 2014 by John E Clark

[Matthew B Clark]

I think a lot of things in life come down to what you are willing to sacrifice in order to "better" what I guess you could call "yourself" or "your knowledge". If you are the type of person who always finds themselves reciting the sort of conclusions that start with phrases like, "if only I could..." or "...yeah I'd do that but..." or "I can't do it the way I want to do it because..." then you are basically just a loser and a winer. There are no two ways about it. I'm not saying you have to cut off your left hand and sell it to science in order to finance a film, but I am saying that there are people who make stuff happen and there are people who talk about making stuff happen. Most people who talk about making stuff happen do not realize they are in a loop of sheer noise. That's the type of person who would mostly argue with this post anyway to be honest. This isn't a hard rule, but it's largely truth. If you want to shoot a film on film for real reasons important to you, then you just have to save your money and make it happen. I'm not going to tell you how to do that. You just make it happen. I have had to do this with everything in my life, from a record label to films I am busting my butt now to get done and get done satisfactorily. Right now though, I'm largely a talker. That has to change. I change that with my actions. I give no sympathy for people who can't figure this stuff out on their own because I had to. The truth is not a wet blanket. It's more like a brick falling from a building.

 

People who are after "the filmic look" are just conflating ideas they have about professional cinematography with film, largely as a circumstance of the sheer history of it. Many films, even those today's generation grew up loving, were (and are) shot on film. The toruble occurs once people start knowing this "fact". Once they know this "fact", they start conflating that with the "final product", intermingling it with their emotional response, and wa-la, nostalgia yields a lying monster that roams the corridoors of their minds searching and telling them to "do ittttt onnnnnn fiiiiiiiilmmmm". While I am totally partial to actual film myself, and would not be caught dead even reading literature on a digital camera for other reasons, I do realize that there are people who simply conflate the massive idea of "professional result" with "film". Now that I feel like an anthropology professor for the day, I better go do something productive, because I am right now currently just talking $%^& on a message board and becoming my own demise. By the way, this post is not a reaction to any one comment. It's a vibe reflector.

Edited September 19, 2014 by Matthew B Clark

[Bill DiPietra]

On the topic of digital reconstructions, here's a 'creative' idea... what would "Star Trek: The Geritol Generation" look like in 'cinerama/cinemascope/vistavision', etc... There are stills constructed from a sequence of 4:3 TV frames... sort of the inverse of 'pan and scan' used to reduce wide screen to 4:3.

 

And lest someone complain about how 'video' it looks... the 1960's TV show was shot on film, according to IMDB, Eastman 50T 5251, 100T 5254. I think the artist who put this together used remastered HD frame shots.

 

http://cargocollective.com/nickacosta/Star-Trek-in-Cinerama

 

 

All the Star Trek TV series, with the exception of Enterprise, were shot on film. The mid-seasons of Next Generation looked better than the earlier ones when they started using more diffusion and softer lighting (as well a change in set & costume design.) But I'd have to say Deep Space Nine had some of the nicest lighting.

 

The above images don't look "video" at all. Film images that have been restored or "reconstructed" are some of the nicest around.

Edited September 19, 2014 by Bill DiPietra

[Matthew B Clark]

The very personal reason I prefer all film to all digital is because of the analogy film offers. The way film captures light is dependant upon mechanical processes that provide an infinitely variable sampling of light. It is not rendered as approximations on "a grid" of pixels. No matter how minute, and how "invisible" to the naked eye, does not matter one bit. It is the sheer concept. You are accepting the concept of stereotyping light. Reducing the infinite. It is like pretending nothing exists outside your scope of sensory perception. It's a statement to choose that (one way or another!).

 

I'm sure I'm not the first person in the world to say this, but then again I haven't read or heard anyone else discuss it so here it is...the idea of a mechanical, ever-shifting plane that catches light in infinitely variable patterns is to me just a much more beautiful analogy to life. And it's like how memory works...imperfect....in science anyway. You recall your memory later....it is imperfect! The light bends and breaks into miniscule shapes on the film grain...the grains almost talk to each other on a subconscious level. They RE-FORM a NEW PICTURE. What the %^&* is digital? Beautiful LOOKING? Ok. Beautiful like a computer's motherboard design though. It's beauty is totally in its rigor, that's it. In it's "Swiss Time Piece" quality. I see where this would serve a bread-winner well. But not necessarily an artist who is thinking about bigger picture concerns than where he is getting his next sandwich. This is where the river seems to carve the valley between us as camera operators, cinematographers, directors, whatever when it comes to choice of media. Whether your value system resides in clinical precision, budget, or other "wordly" concerns...or if you just are in it for the art of it (or at least the "art of it" is a major and driving factor in your work). Many people have to eat! I get it. Another hard-hitting brick of truth! But at the same time, I don't think I could ever become romantically involved with a "Swiss Time Piece". And since my goal is to keep pure what I love to do, I pretty much have subconsciously (well, consciously now, I suppose) resigned myself to keeping that compartmentalized away from my breakfast table and toilet, where crude activities occur. I don't want a string of dependency between the two. That affect my decisions. I keep a day job that I particularly hate in order to make money there, because in that sector of my life, it is the crude region that serves these purposes nicely. For art, the concern is ideological, and when it comes to ideology, there is no way I can accept anything that keeps most of its fundamental stance rooted in cold capture, cold facts like that. I like to look at the Crate & Barrell catalog covers too sometimes. But have you ever actually felt great in a room that looked like that? It's almost inhumane. I don't want to either buy or sell that kind of calculated beauty. Does anyone else ever think about stuff like this? Not trying to be rude. But there is a lot of talk about simply rendering image, and not as much about this component of the metaphysics and allegorical components of our choices. By the way, I haven't been to a single workshop on filmmaking, let alone film school. So you can view that nug for what it's worth to you. It's a fact I'm comfortable with.

Edited September 19, 2014 by Matthew B Clark

[George Ebersole]

Well, I take exception to the "geritol" comment. It was and still is a good show, and I happen to like it. We all age and get old. What does an old 1960's TV show have to do with the film verse digital question?

[Gregg MacPherson]

Hey Matthew, how about some paragraphs yo!

 

There is a famous quote from Buckminster Fuller that goes something like...I don't care who understands me, as long as no one miss-understands me. There's an infectious notion in play in modern media that goes something like ....I don't care who understands me, as long as everybody reads (or sees) me, and knows who I am.

 

Lean towards the Bucky way.

[Bill DiPietra]

Well, I take exception to the "geritol" comment. It was and still is a good show, and I happen to like it. We all age and get old. What does an old 1960's TV show have to do with the film verse digital question?

 

Whether John intended to or not, he pointed out that older images which originated on film and have been restored using digital technologies look gorgeous. Hence, the blending of the two mediums are, in my mind, a great combination.

[Matthew B Clark]

Hey Matthew, how about some paragraphs yo!

 

There is a famous quote from Buckminster Fuller that goes something like...I don't care who understands me, as long as no one miss-understands me. There's an infectious notion in play in modern media that goes something like ....I don't care who understands me, as long as everybody reads (or sees) me, and knows who I am.

 

Lean towards the Bucky way.

 

How can you misunderstand a sphere?

[John E Clark]

 

Whether John intended to or not, he pointed out that older images which originated on film and have been restored using digital technologies look gorgeous. Hence, the blending of the two mediums are, in my mind, a great combination.

 

While I usually state that I stopped watching broadcast TV when CBS cancelled the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, I did 'sin' and watch the last season of "Star Trek"... sure, since them, on random occasions, at friends' houses, etc. hotel rooms, waiting for Gudot... but otherwise I've pretty much maintained that 'goal'.

 

Only recently have some of the 'cable' content providers, such as HBO, come up with interesting enough material, with production values that I like, have I looked at some of the popular shows... When the Wife and I took an American Sign Language sequence, we did watch an ABC show titled 'Switched At Birth', the story line involves two girls 'switched' at birth by hospital error, time passes, and now '15 years later' (despite the fact that the principle actresses are in the 20's...), one of the girls is deaf, living in the 'barrio', while the other has lived her life in upper middle class luxury... Ad breaks drove me nuts... even though we were watching the disks... the little 'petite mort climaxes' to lead up to the break were anoying...

 

But I digress...

 

As for film+digital combo, I don't see that as problematic since using digital means has allowed for 'matte' paintings to be more realistically composited into to the live action, set extensions, 'crowd replication', etc. have for me allowed for 'better' images. To be sure... those ancient ad campaigns of 'cast of thousands', may have given the director some 'boost' having marshalled such an army... but then again... digital means could have taken out the 'van' sitting in the shot of one of the battle scenes in 'Spartacus"(1960) which even escaped the notice of St. Kubrick of the Eternal Cinema.

 

The problem I do have with some of the 'reasons for film', is that at this point, quite a bit of what is seen on screen, has been 'digitized', and 'augmented', with such cgi elements, and those purely digital elements have been processed to show no different visual effect than the original Film film portions of the frame.

 

Of course if the composite is badly done... sure complain... but for many award winning films, I've never heard someone say, "Well I liked the bottom half of scene X, because the top half was clearly a digital extension'...

 

If people are critiquing to that 'level'... I'm pretty sure they are bored with the story, acting, etc... and would rather be watching grass grow sipping some 'adult beverage', or the like.

Edited September 19, 2014 by John E Clark

[cole t parzenn]

A quick look through screenshots from this late Technicolor movie should answer that question. Simply beyond breathtaking.

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Niagara-Blu-ray/72429/#Screenshots

 

They're lovely, I agree, I just don't know what makes them lovely. Is the three strip process inherently more saturated?

[John E Clark]

 

They're lovely, I agree, I just don't know what makes them lovely. Is the three strip process inherently more saturated?

 

This is a real problem when discussing technique details... Books with artworks, almost all never actually represent the image the same way that one sees it when standing in front of the work itself.

 

In the case of 'restored' Film, one has to rely on some form of 'copy'. These days Bluray disks do offer the 'highest quality' that most people can afford, but still was the restored Film 'look' what was seen in theaters back in the olden days, even if they viewed the film in a pristine state of a Hollywood Premiere??? As a note, in the olden days, films were not released 'wide'. Most films traveled around the country, or the world, as a relatively small print set. So, if one lived in Los Angeles or New York, one perhaps say a pretty 'clean' print if one made it to theaters close to the first release date... if you lived in say, Cedar Rapids Iowa (ok, I never lived there just spent a sommer in my youth there, and noticed the films being shown in the theater had all been shown several months before in So. California...), you may be seeing a print that had been through a number of projectors, and could have a number of 'defects' just on the print alone, not to mention perhaps the projector was old and perhaps had had lax maintenance...

 

In that regard, watch the 'comming attractions' bumper that is on the Rodriguez/Tarantino "Death Proof" and "Planet Terror", and note the 'crappy' look... that was more like what many people saw in theaters in the era. In addition, there were 25/50 cent theaters that took films that had been in circulation for years and presented them to an audience that was sleeping/puking, or whatever, because a 25 cent place to be late at night was cheaper than being on the streets...

 

Anyway, it is sort of difficult to say, how much is 'restored' and how much is 'enhanced'.

 

This is not just a 'film' problem but an artwork in general problem. Similar discussions have been held about the recent restorations of the Sistine Chapel, where part of the discussion, regarding Michaelangelo's "Last Judgement", was whether to remove the 'fig leaves' that were added after Michaelangel died, to assauge some viewer's 'moral outrage' in seeing naked men's 'package'. The decision was to keep the figleaves since they were added shortly after Michaelangelo's death, and so were nearly contemporary with the original work. For the ceiling, there were also discussions about 'how much' of the soot to remove, and especially, 'repaint', as the underlying fresco was too damaged to mearly just remove the soot and have the painting revealed.

Edited September 19, 2014 by John E Clark

[David Mullen ASC]

Certain shades were more clearly separated, like yellow, and dye transfer printing had particularly strong reds, they were almost 3D. But a lot of the color look was design, back then they carefully picked every color in the frame. There was some control over saturation and black density in the dye transfer printing side of the process. Tastes changed over time as well, from 1935 to 1939, Technicolor pushed filmmakers towards a more muted color palette on the theory that audiences' eyes would get tired of looking at strong colors for the length of a feature (short films could be more color saturated to show off the process) but halfway through shooting "Gone with the Wind", Selznick started pushing for bolder colors, though even he thought that William Cameron Menzies went too far with the famous red sunset kissing scene after the burning of Atlanta. By 1940, saturated color design was commonplace of many Technicolor movies, particularly MGM musicals. But the process could also be subtle and painterly, as Jack Cardiff and Ozzie Morris proved in their British 3-strip Technicolor movies.

[Chris D Walker]

Black Narcissus may be the most beautiful Technicolor film there was. It's daring to have at times near monochrome images in a format designed for vibrant colour reproduction.

[Younes Boudiaf]

The very personal reason I prefer all film to all digital is because of the analogy film offers. The way film captures light is dependant upon mechanical processes that provide an infinitely variable sampling of light. It is not rendered as approximations on "a grid" of pixels. No matter how minute, and how "invisible" to the naked eye, does not matter one bit. It is the sheer concept. You are accepting the concept of stereotyping light. Reducing the infinite. It is like pretending nothing exists outside your scope of sensory perception. It's a statement to choose that (one way or another!).

 

I'm sure I'm not the first person in the world to say this, but then again I haven't read or heard anyone else discuss it so here it is...the idea of a mechanical, ever-shifting plane that catches light in infinitely variable patterns is to me just a much more beautiful analogy to life. And it's like how memory works...imperfect....in science anyway. You recall your memory later....it is imperfect! The light bends and breaks into miniscule shapes on the film grain...the grains almost talk to each other on a subconscious level. They RE-FORM a NEW PICTURE. What the %^&* is digital? Beautiful LOOKING? Ok. Beautiful like a computer's motherboard design though. It's beauty is totally in its rigor, that's it. In it's "Swiss Time Piece" quality. I see where this would serve a bread-winner well. But not necessarily an artist who is thinking about bigger picture concerns than where he is getting his next sandwich. This is where the river seems to carve the valley between us as camera operators, cinematographers, directors, whatever when it comes to choice of media. Whether your value system resides in clinical precision, budget, or other "wordly" concerns...or if you just are in it for the art of it (or at least the "art of it" is a major and driving factor in your work). Many people have to eat! I get it. Another hard-hitting brick of truth! But at the same time, I don't think I could ever become romantically involved with a "Swiss Time Piece". And since my goal is to keep pure what I love to do, I pretty much have subconsciously (well, consciously now, I suppose) resigned myself to keeping that compartmentalized away from my breakfast table and toilet, where crude activities occur. I don't want a string of dependency between the two. That affect my decisions. I keep a day job that I particularly hate in order to make money there, because in that sector of my life, it is the crude region that serves these purposes nicely. For art, the concern is ideological, and when it comes to ideology, there is no way I can accept anything that keeps most of its fundamental stance rooted in cold capture, cold facts like that. I like to look at the Crate & Barrell catalog covers too sometimes. But have you ever actually felt great in a room that looked like that? It's almost inhumane. I don't want to either buy or sell that kind of calculated beauty. Does anyone else ever think about stuff like this? Not trying to be rude. But there is a lot of talk about simply rendering image, and not as much about this component of the metaphysics and allegorical components of our choices. By the way, I haven't been to a single workshop on filmmaking, let alone film school. So you can view that nug for what it's worth to you. It's a fact I'm comfortable with.

That was really poetic and romantic, in fact its really subjective as you said, and honestly that doesn't help much to develop or evolve Cinema, people have new vision and technology is evolving in a way that we have to push our imagination to catch up and imagine what will be happening in the next 50 years from now ! and without doubt film still looks better than digital BUT unfortunately will not be better in the future, even digital (0's and 1's) is not the top notch technology, quantum mechanic s are changing concepts and debayering a 6k image will be a task of a phone maybe !!

far from subjectivity we are trying to understand how the medium is evolving and how Art vs Business are contributing in this, so choices are not limited i is not just about Film or Digital its is about CINEMA and TOOLS, no matter the tool is the purpose of Cinema is to tell story to people in an artistic and a good way, life is changing and so the tools are ! and nobody still traveling on a Coal train !

[Heikki Repo]

Yet still there are people, who want to have a picture painted of them instead of just taking a photo and printing it. Somehow they even see some value in the tedious process that is necessary to achieve the picture... :)

 

It's always a question about values: what is good. Sure, those 4K videos look great on large television sets. It was almost as if I was looking through a window. But I'm not sure if that's the aesthetic I like in fictional movies. Sometimes less is more and more is ... well, something else. Some say 24 frames per second is too slow and makes the movement jittering. For them higher frame rates is the thing and even 120 fps isn't too much. For me going higher than 24/25 and it begins to look like bad television drama shot on cheap cameras -- even if it isn't.

[Albion Hockney]

Hello, and thanks for starting this topic!

 

Firstly, I would like to say that I did have time to watch the roundtable interviews - however I feel that this is not really necessary with regard to this debate. Opinions in this case are just that, opinions. We may talk about many aspects of cinematography that we find appealing, but what does this mean? How can we think critically about what we are viewing? How do we view images? How are these images disseminated culturally?

 

​In the worlds of Marshall Mcluhan: "In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology."

 

When studying digital media and images, it is commonplace to study the works of Marshall Mcluhan. The Medium IS The Message. He discusses our relationship with technology and how there are aspects of new innovation that we are unaware of at the time of its birth. This can be observed in the common debate Film and Digital production. So, instead of asking which is "better" (film or digital) - ask "how do we view each medium?"

 

John Berger's book "Ways Of Seeing" explores this topic further. It was later turned into a TV documentary that is quite interesting:

 

Ways of Seeing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnfB-pUm3eI

 

The history of images (and image viewing) provides important insight: What is the story? Why have these cinematic choices been made? What makes an image ascetically pleasing? How do these images make me feel. Personally I have seen images captured on VHS that have made me consider what I am watching. There is more to filmmaking and cinematography than ascetics. Move beyond!

 

That is just my opinion, thanks for the debate!

 

nobody noticed this post.... just wanted to say well said. and ways of seeing is great, read the book and have always wanted to catch the little tv series too.

[Gregg MacPherson]

 

nobody noticed this post....

 

 

How do you know (that no one noticed Zack Healy's post)?

 

In Berger's documentary I much enjoyed the clip and VO from Vertov's work. But I just took something very poetic from it, which was probably ironic to the intentions of Vertov and Berger. Artists (Vertov I mean) create and we should feel free to experience however we want.

 

I watched Berger until he started talking about how formerly the experience of rare icons was only available in the flesh, but now "it" is available everywhere due to the proliferation of media. With this deft sleight of hand (by Berger), the actual is confused with the image. If I was too jumpy and misunderstood that please someone just prompt me.

[George Ebersole]

 

Whether John intended to or not, he pointed out that older images which originated on film and have been restored using digital technologies look gorgeous. Hence, the blending of the two mediums are, in my mind, a great combination.

 

But what does it have to do with choosing film over a hard drive?

 

 

 

So, instead of asking which is "better" (film or digital) - ask "how do we view each medium?"

 

Well, they're different paths to achieving the same result. Years back, and I tell this story every so often, SONY came up with something called "Beta-16" which was short hand for video captured on Super-16mm film. It was a short cut to get Betacam footage to look like it was shot with a film camera by taking advantage of the then new Super-16mm film stock that was going to revive student and independent film making (it never happened).

 

It was supposed to be the new "cheap" thing to shooting commercials that needed a film look to it. It never went anywhere. The production company I was working for showed the footage over and over again until we were blue in the face. Bottom line, if you want a film look, then shoot film. If you have a camera that can mimic it, then use that.

 

I don't think the general audience notices too much difference, unless your footage has a distinct video look to it (29p or 30p?). I'm told that between the 40s and 70s the biggest gripe from DPs was that the footage on the distribution prints didn't look anything like the footage from the original negatives. A couple generations later and all those textures from wood, fabric, stone and skin weren't showing up in the theatrical release.

 

Now the technology is here to get all those subtleties. Why not use it? Phtochemical tends to be softer than digital (or so I'm of the opinion), but it's nothing you can't fix with a good editing bay.

 

With the right coding you can get a programmer to put in a "Movietone" or "scratched footage" option in the software if you were going for a certain look. If you were shooting film you'd have to come up with ways to rough up your film to get the right look.

[Gregg MacPherson]

 

But what does it have to do with choosing film over a hard drive?

 

What does film vs hard drive have to do with the topic? Did someone nudge the thread into the archiving thing? (rhetorical questions)

[Bob P]

I have a couple of thoughts on this... well more that a couple... but for the moment I'll express 2 thoughts...

 

1) I'd like for people to stop calling themselves Director of Photography, when all they have is a digital camera in their hands.

2) I'd like for people to stop 'thinking' that somehow if they shot on film, it would come out 'beautifully' and look like films that were DoP'd by people who had worked years in the craft.

 

Ok... 3 thoughts...

3) I'd like for people to discontinue 'raving' about getting a 'filmic' look out of a DSLR or lower end digital camera, by use of 'creamy/soft/crappy' lenses. (There's a reason why cine lenses cost big bux... and part of that is designed to avoid 'creamy/soft/crappy'... but I digress...).

 

Uh... how about 4 thoughts...

 

4) Digital is here to stay, so I'd like to see more people focused on getting as much out of their camera, at the entry level, whatever the 'price', and use 'art' principles in such areas as lighting, framing, and post-processing for 'look'. Not so much with an eye for 'making it look like film', but with the goal of 'what works for the story'... (if 'creamy/soft/crappy' works for the story, by all means... just watched "Hello Dolly"(1969) and was really irritated by the switching between 'soft' close ups on Streisand to fairly 'sharp' for the master shots... but I digress...).

So your saying that it's not WHAT you do with a camera, it's what kind of equipment you use that determines how good you are? More than just a LITTLE bit arrogant, aren't you?