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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Is film dead?

Les Hillis said:
Film smells better. Old or fresh, processed or unprocessed. It feels better in the hand and between the fingers. In terms of actual taste, I couldn't honestly say, but film is undoubtedly better to chew on. It's physical form is more aesthetically pleasing and sculpturally versatile than digital. It's colours and tones are more tantalizing when held up to a light source and viewed with the naked eye. It has more potential uses as an improvised weapon and rescue or restraining tool than digital media. All in all it still has a lot going for it compared to digital. But times have changed, the world is moving on. As it will, as it must. There's no cause for fretting or mourning though. The film that already is, will remain. And the film that is yet to be, will be. All things in this world are temporary and fleeting and film is part of that. It's only natural that it eventually becomes the stuff of memories and legends. What's important is that you were there with it, sharing all those beautiful, priceless moments together. Moments that, at their essence, continue on today, and tomorrow, and forever. Enjoy it while you can, then let it go. It wasn't the film that you loved, but the love itself that found form in the film. The forms change, but the love remains. That can never be taken away from you, you simply choose to either ignore it or embrace it. So I say, embrace it, be with it, even now in this digital age. The digital, technological means are there, it's up to you to make use of them, just like it always was.

The film is dead, long live the film!
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This is a nice way to put it Les. Its days are numbered for most of us. I'm happy to have whatever time i have left with the medium. And once its gone, its gone but not forgotten.
 
To me it has been ever since I shot with my very first Digital Still Photo camera... Despite obvious quality differences back then, I knew Digital was the way of the feature and got on board immediately... ;)

Now with the Red Epic DRAGON, I was shown an incredible new world of fantastic DIGITAL imagery that looked like nothing I have seen before form any Film Motion Picture or Digital Video or Cinema camera before... ;)
 
I assumed that big studios own film gear and have tons of film stock in the freezer, am I wrong? Perhaps I am. If that were the case then film would be a very viable option for some. I haven't had the privilege of working around the big studios so, what do I know?
 
Christopher Mills said:
Seems high to me.. Having just shot a 1 day shoot on film for $3500.. where film was the entire budget
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I'm assuming about 20,000 feet of 5219 or a similar Kodek 35mm emulsion, $25,000 would be a rock-bottom price for developing & dailies. I have worked on major studio features that shot half as much film, and a few that shot two or three times that much footage, so they spent a lot more on raw stock.

Gavin Greenwalt said:
And I will wager that finding a functioning LTO tape deck will be far easier than finding a functioning spirit or Davinci in 30 years. In fact you could afford with the cost difference of printing out a couple film prints to buy a palate of LTO decks on ebay in 30 years and undoubtedly find a functioning one.
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I know of a dozen features that were archived in the late 1990s and early 2000s to DTF backup tapes. Try to play those back in 2013 and let me know how you do. I've also seen LTO-4 and LTO-5 backup tapes fail -- not a massive failure, but intermittent corruption that still affected thousands and thousands of frames. My fear is that if we encountered this in just a 10-year period, what's going to happen in 40 or 50 years? What if they don't even use the same data format in 50 years? These are hard, difficult questions that even the Motion Picture Academy has no answers for yet.
 
Marc Wielage said:
I'm assuming about 20,000 feet of 5219 or a similar Kodek 35mm emulsion, $25,000 would be a rock-bottom price for developing & dailies. I have worked on major studio features that shot half as much film, and a few that shot two or three times that much footage, so they spent a lot more on raw stock.


.
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Nothing wrong with your math there..
and I just thought of a few features I worked on that did in fact use that range..

though the tv series I once worked on topped out at about 8500 feet a day.. and I have seen a feature get made that only shot 45,000 feet...
(TIGHT shooting ratio, there)
 
M Most said:
Every person involved in archival operations disagrees with you. The archiving of digital assets is the biggest single problem the industry now faces. It's not a matter of finding decks, and it's not a matter of finding scanners. Film retains an image that is recovered simply by shining a light through it, regardless of the technology that records the resullt. All digital formats need not only the hardware that can read the stored media, but a description of the format of the media, the format of the files contained on it, the compression scheme used (if used), and other details. And this is IF it survives. There is no real current solution to digital archiving today beyond constant migration of the assets, something that is costly and not always practical. There are many entities working on the problem, but dismissing film as an archival medium goes against what every archivist is currently doing.
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Really enjoyed reading your two posts there, very informative! But I think while you are 100 percent correct the cost of enterprise drives and LTO is negligible and yes its a pain to do this migration, but it keeps nerds like me working during gaps in shoots or edit sessions so I am down with the war against data loss and will continue to fight the good fight. Server arrays raided and other high end systems coupled with LTO while not perfect, make for a good stop gap. But your light through film description is really quite accurate, though technically the film degrades ever so slightly I hear through every usage, IE if compared new film reels to ones played at the end of their distributions cycles in image quality, there is degradation to a very slight degree every time they rolled through, but it can compound given lots of usage, another interesting limitation of our human technology that is far from immortality as we ourselves.

But this discussion has made me want to go shoot some film, maybe go get my old cameras working again...bunch of super 16s or w/e... Or talk to my local rental house, see if they can't give a course for digital film makers to get an entry level tutorial with some hands on shooting with different film cameras. That would be a fun way to use them as the market does dictate over to digital entirely. For those stuck holding them and the film stocks at the end, schools should always offer a way to use the medium. Rental houses can always offer courses in it, and I do think it would be a cool worthwhile thing. Not every format must die entirely, not every medium should
 
Brice Ansel said:
Is film dead?

No it isn't.
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Funny you should post the ad shot on b/w film. To me, to this day still the holy grail of photochemical film, beyond the latitude, are the colors.

David Fincher's "Downtown" for CK. Red Epic MX Monochrome.
 
Brian Merlen said:
Really enjoyed reading your two posts there, very informative! But I think while you are 100 percent correct the cost of enterprise drives and LTO is negligible and yes its a pain to do this migration, but it keeps nerds like me working during gaps in shoots or edit sessions so I am down with the war against data loss and will continue to fight the good fight. Server arrays raided and other high end systems coupled with LTO while not perfect, make for a good stop gap. But your light through film description is really quite accurate, though technically the film degrades ever so slightly I hear through every usage, IE if compared new film reels to ones played at the end of their distributions cycles in image quality, there is degradation to a very slight degree every time they rolled through, but it can compound given lots of usage, another interesting limitation of our human technology that is far from immortality as we ourselves.

But this discussion has made me want to go shoot some film, maybe go get my old cameras working again...bunch of super 16s or w/e... Or talk to my local rental house, see if they can't give a course for digital film makers to get an entry level tutorial with some hands on shooting with different film cameras. That would be a fun way to use them as the market does dictate over to digital entirely. For those stuck holding them and the film stocks at the end, schools should always offer a way to use the medium. Rental houses can always offer courses in it, and I do think it would be a cool worthwhile thing. Not every format must die entirely, not every medium should
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It's not the cost of drives and/or LTO's. There's a lot more to archiving at the studio level than simply the media. There's security, proper environment, proper tracking, redundancy in multiple locations, a regular migration schedule, and numerous other considerations. There are companies that do nothing but asset protection and data migration because once you get past a certain volume of material it's not something that individuals can manage effectively. As for degradation of film elements, that's true, but archival elements are not in that category. Archival elements are are usually one offs, usually made early in the process, and created for the sole purpose of long term storage.. They are usually in the form of black and white separations, made from the original negative (or generated digitally in some DI processes), QC'd, and immediately stored. You don't access archival elements unless you need to manufacture something from them, and you don't do that repeatedly. That is the modern film archive procedure. For library titles, it is not vastly different in the sense that what is stored is not something that was used for thousands of prints, but something made very early in the process. Restoration projects are usually undertaken for titles that were not properly archived and that often require an element search in order to make a complete picture. The notion of what "archiving" means to an individual or small company is vastly different than what it means to a studio.
 
well right now I happen to find myself in the middle of migrating 40tb of raid 6 material to LTO,. We have two copies of all our media, but only one copy of our avid files and sequences, so this conversation is pretty relevant to me in that I am under taking an archival process right now of sorts, though its probably a small one compared to some. I am not sure what LTO solution they have decided to go with, just finished setting up their Unity system there as well. I don't want to hijack this thread but some point soon I'd love to talk LTO with like minded people. If the failure rate really is that high I guess I am going to be stuck making lots of copies, huh? Plus its an on going shoot, forever and ever gaining library shots so I can see this slowly getting massive.
 
Christopher Mills said:
Nothing wrong with your math there.. and I just thought of a few features I worked on that did in fact use that range.. though the tv series I once worked on topped out at about 8500 feet a day.. and I have seen a feature get made that only shot 45,000 feet... (TIGHT shooting ratio, there)
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Doh, that was a good day when any of the 1-hour episodic shows we worked on at Technicolor only shot 8500 feet. That was trivial. Most of the time, they did a lot of A&B camera coverage, so it'd be a minimum of 10,000-12,000 feet, easy. Lost very often hit 15,000 feet every single day, often 1st and 2nd units shooting simultaneously. A huge feature production like Dreamgirls shot about 700,000 feet as I recall, and there have been a few shows that did millions of feet. The biggest one I know of was Charlie's Angels 2, which I'm told went way past 2 million feet -- somewhere north of 600 or 700 hours of material for a 2-hour film.

Overshooting has unfortunately become a way of life on many modern feature films. There's all kinds of pressure being put on directors to gets tons of coverage, in the desperate hope that if they shoot lots of footage, the studio will somehow be able to "save" the film in post through lots of different editing choices. This did not help disasters like Lone Ranger or Cowboys & Aliens, and those movies would have still been flops whether they shot on Red, Alexa, film, or an iPhone. The medium doesn't make the filmmaker more creative, especially if the script ain't happening. And all shooting lots of footage does is drown the editor in footage.

I once asked a famous-name editor: "what are you going to do with all this footage?" She sighed and said, "I'm not even going to look at half of it. I'm only going to look at the circled takes and maybe one or two others, cut them together as best I can, and just move on. The film has to hit theaters in three months, so we just don't have enough time to look at everything." So all this footage does nothing for the creative process -- and that was an all-digital shoot.
 
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