Film

[Tim Hole]

Mind you I much prefer to project digital than film. Film is an annoyance, time consuming and the digital asset as a whole is superior to film IMO.

- Even if KDMs don't arrive on time
- The picture inexplicable gains a yellow hue.
- They take the length of the film to ingest.
- overheat

EDIT: To clarify 'superior', The image, titles are always sharp and clean - The image has not degraded.

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

Good collection! Many of them were a daily companion in my career. But fortunately only a few vanished. Filmmaking is still damage limitation. The shift to digital shifted only the traps, IMHO.

I like film. But I don't miss this stuff:

"Do we have enough in the mag for one more take?"

"Rollout!"
"

I have that with the RedOne as well. I'm shooting mostly/only 8GB CFs since day one for various reasons.

"The lab said there was a scratch on the negative."

"I'm worried about that last roll. Make sure they check it at the lab."

Have that with the RedOne as well. The main reason why I avoid Red's RedRaid.

"Apparently B Camera wasn't holding sync on the stunt"

Sync is a problem with the RedOne as well. If you power cycle the camera and your forget to re-sync your sync is off.

"Did we get it?"

You have that with any camera. But the RedOne is the worst in this regard. Mine needs 90 seconds to boot. I missed not only once important shots.

"We'll know on monday if it came out. Can they hold off on striking the set until then?"

We once had that with a bad CF card. Restoring the data was not trivial.

"We had a bad mag."

Had that with with the RedOne as well. Especially the RedRaid is pretty unreliable.

"Somewhere along the line it got fogged."

Setting the Metadata in the RedOne wrongly can lead to similar experiences.

"The power went off at the lab while it was in the developer."

When copying data, valuable shots can be lost somehow in the process.

"Why does it look washed out?"

Again, metadata problems happen a lot.

"What do you mean it looks soft?"

There are tons of threads here on reduser dealing with this problem.

"Why didn't anyone tell me while we were shooting?"

I Try to avoid that, regardless which type of camera is rolling.

"Its been in the freezer so it should be fine."

This is unique to film. But it is startling how relaxed film stock deals with heat and moisture.

"Every time it goes through the projector it dies a little."

Yes. Film projection is a legacy technology. Digital Projection can do everything better.

"We're going to try and do a wet gate transfer to see if that helps."

We had not only once the case that various shots from our RedOne had to be restored (denoised) due to severe underexposure.

"We had a light leak."

This problem is finally solved.

"That spotting could be from the chemistry."

"This weird looking fence comes from the rolling shutter."

"I know we shot that. Keep looking."

Had a few heart-beat moments with Red footage as well. Luckily all missing shots finally showed up somehow. They either were on a lost CF card or a Nexto or a harddisk or whatnot. Backing up data is so important with the RedOne.

IMO, film production did not become any safer with the advent of the RedOne. Mostly it's not the RedOne's technology fault but the lacking skills of the people working with the system. Same applies to film, of course.

Hans

 

[XiaoSu Han]

Thanks Hans, you saved me a lot of time.

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

Thanks Hans, you saved me a lot of time.

You're welcome.

Hans

 

[Mark Collins]

Film smells good too...

The smell of film is kinda like an adrenaline burst. When shooting test footage, we open the canister and load the film, and you get that distinct smell of class, like a fancy wine, and then you roll it through the camera, take it to the lab and process it, and then when it comes back to show the director what you can do as a cinematographer you still have the negative, which smells awesome, and you simply go out on set and shoot.


Sorry, I'm ranting incoherently again.

Film is awesome and I love working with it. My school has an Arri SR2, which though it has been used and abused, it still works decently well, and it's still so much fun to shoot on. Since we primarily work with prosumer cameras such as the EX1 and the HVX200, it feels really good to just pull a beefy camera out and build it up. Granted you can do that with Red, which is also fun to build up, but it's just not the same as having something that it more or less pure mechanical and just works really well.

If we have a problem with the SR2 or any film camera, ripping it apart to find and fix the problem is simple. With Red, if there's a major problem with it, well, it's time to crack out the shipping containers or go see some technicians at places like Sim Video (though those techs are miracle workers).

Despite learning the craft in the digital age, I still prefer film, I prefer to light to film, to tell a story with it, and getting the film back from the lab is kinda like christmas morning, and it's exciting.

 

[Shawn Booth]

Jeff, most of your quotes have nothing to do with format - it's just human error and filmmaking...

"Do we have enough in the mag for one more take?"

Uh, is there room on the drive for another?

"Rollout!"

Still happens only without the cool tails...

"The lab said there was a scratch on the negative."

And? The lab can also do a lot to fix it. With digital it's now "we have dropped frames." Which would you rather deal with?

"I'm worried about that last roll. Make sure they check it at the lab."

Same with digital minus the wait.

"Apparently B Camera wasn't holding sync on the stunt"

As Hans said, still around.

"Did we get it?"

Common question uttered by directors and ADs regardless of camera system used... Really? You were desperate at this point weren't you Jeff?

"We had a bad mag."

You can fire that AC if the mag is deemed bad after the first week of shooting.

"Somewhere along the line it got fogged."

Fire your loader.

"The power went off at the lab while it was in the developer."

Shit happens. What if there's a power failure while transferring files? Or a power surge that fries the RED Drive? What do you do when the entire day's footage goes bye-bye? Kinda hard to do in film without direct human involvement.

"Why does it look washed out?"

"why is there all this "grainy crap"?" (read noise)

"What do you mean it looks soft?"

Fire the first. Unless the green director refused to give a camera rehearsal...

"Why didn't anyone tell me while we were shooting?"

I have actually never heard this one.

"Its been in the freezer so it should be fine."

Yup.

"Every time it goes through the projector it dies a little."

So? Theatrical run isn't forever...

"We had a light leak."

How bad was the leak? Again, fire the loader. It is their responsibility to check for such things.

"That spotting could be from the chemistry."

Or any other reason...

"I know we shot that. Keep looking."

How does this only apply to film?

Most of your quotes have nothing to do with format - it's just human error and filmmaking...

 

[Ian Laurie]

"Shit happens. What if there's a power failure while transferring files? Or a power surge that fries the RED Drive? What do you do when the entire day's footage goes bye-bye? Kinda hard to do in film without direct human involvement."

Its called a battery backup.

"I have actually never heard this one."

I have... on a red shoot.

 

[Jeff Coatney]

Common question uttered by directors and ADs regardless of camera system used... Really? You were desperate at this point weren't you Jeff?

Can I borrow some film?

 

[Fredrik Callinggard]

Can I borrow some film?

LOL Hahahaa a good one.

Come on. Film is film. There's nothing like it and it's still a format that has proven itself to be very reliable.

I'm surprised that so many are slagging it off? It should be the other way. I love RED and what I can do with it, but if I had the chance I would LOVE to role off some film.

I don't get it? I don't? What's the big scare with film. Why are there so many new film makers that slags it off without really having any experience?

Where's the curiosity of learning it? When I started I couldn't wait until I could suggest a bleach bypass process for a job or pushing some stock.. or mixing stock and film format. Let's shoot bolex and 35mm reversal!!!!

But i guess my film days started when Stoone and Richardsson went crazy with their collaborations (natural born killers etc). When you read about Savides working closely with Romanek on how to make the look for their music video collaboration.

We wanted to experiment find ways of trashing or perfecting. Today it's all meta data, shoot as clean as you can and NO FILTERS. Why should you have filters? You can do that in CC.

 

[Shawn Booth]

Can I borrow some film?

What for? To look at? I doubt i'll want it back when done with it...

Can I borrow your house?

 

[Kevin Rasmussen]

I still don't understand why people compare the two.
If I want it to look like film I'll shoot film. If I want it to look hyper real and noiseless, clean, I'll shoot digital.
Why people spend so much time and money trying to make all these digital formats LOOK like film without just shooting film I'll never know.

I have a few dozen side by side budget comparisons for a number of projects if anyone is interested, not going to post them publicly, but for the record, unless you own a camera, the costs are identical and these days, despite the number of cameras out there it's actually a little cheaper shooting film in most cases.

Panavision and others will give you a film camera package for $1000 for a month if you ask nicely and buy your rental guy a bottle of scotch, and since most professional companies charge $1000 a day for a Red package the differences you spend buying film and processing works itself out. Since most big productions shooting Red have their footage processed etc. at rack rates which most post companies base on film processing rates, that is comparable too.
Kodak and Fuji both give FANTASTIC deals on film especially to students and other independent productions.

I think the Red one is a great affordable tool, especially as it empowers a younger generation of film makers to get out there and get a great image, but film will always remain my first choice 90% of the time and it's going to stay like that for a long, long time and I really don't need to list all the reasons why because if you don't KNOW the greater image quality available from film your not interested in it and that's your choice and ultimately, you'll never understand the magic of shooting film.

Every time we shoot film I observe everyone, the cast, the crew, the director all take a little more time to make sure things are perfect before rolling the camera and it's totally sub-concious.

I'm currently shooting a feature film on Red and if the producers didn't own the camera we'd be shooting film since the costs are equal and image quality superior. Every day on set the director and I sit there and look at each other and I say "Neil, we'll shoot the next movie on film".
On the film we've had both Red drives die for no apparent reason and as a result I'm shooting on CF cards at a lower quality setting. We've had countless problems with gunfire and the shutter, and I've struggled with the lack of latitude as the film is mostly day exterior. I wouldn't have any of these problems with film. I've only once had a bad mag, which was loaded by a trainee who was given too much responsibility from me before he was ready and I've had one mag get flashed on the same show again by un-trained assistants. We all learned our lesson from that and it hasn't happened since. Never had a single element of a film camera break or die and I've never had any other problems with bad mags and the like.

The electronic shutter/rolling shutter is the worst thing to happen in professional digital cinema camera design.

I love shooting my commercials and music videos on Red as much as the next guy but it doesn't cut it for films and the looks I'm after for those films.

And for people to write film off and say things like film isn't "artistic" and film is dying, take a look at the list of directors who shoot strictly film and re-think your idea of "artistic" and your idea of the industry at the top levels. I would say that Scorsese and Spielberg and Coppola and the Coen bothers are all top class artists who love the look of film and know that they don't need to fix what ain't broke.

They are two different things and like the intelligent people posting here are saying, they both have their uses and they're both great tools and neither are going to disappear anytime soon.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Beautifully said, Kevin.

 

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

I still don't understand why people compare the two.
If I want it to look like film I'll shoot film. If I want it to look hyper real and noiseless, clean, I'll shoot digital.
Why people spend so much time and money trying to make all these digital formats LOOK like film without just shooting film I'll never know.

It's not so much about looking like film as it is trying to avoid making it look like a soap opera or the behind the scenes featurette.

 

[Kevin Rasmussen]

It's not so much about looking like film as it is trying to avoid making it look like a soap opera or the behind the scenes featurette.

Yeah totally fair enough, I'm speaking more specifically about producers and directors (usually without much film experience) saying "I want it to look exactly like film, is there a filter that does that? What if we add some grain in post?"

 

[C. Jagan Mohan]

How can you do this?

How can you do this?

How can you keep FILM and DIGITAL next to next and analyze?
One is tried and tested for about 100 years and other one is just a 4 to 5 year old kid. Let the kid grow and show what he is capable of. Ultimately story telling is more important than the media used for.

 

[Thomas Wright]

Are you saying film is old man?

Just kidding

 

[Dan Hudgins]

Coppola's last two movies were shot on HD

Coppola's last two movies were shot on HD

And for people to write film off and say things like film isn't "artistic" and film is dying, take a look at the list of directors who shoot strictly film and re-think your idea of "artistic" and your idea of the industry at the top levels. I would say that Scorsese and Spielberg and Coppola and the Coen bothers are all top class artists who love the look of film and know that they don't need to fix what ain't broke.

Coppola's last two movies were shot on HD, and as far as I know he has no plans to ever shoot 35mm movie film again in the camera.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0481797/

http://www.tetro.com/

http://videography.com/article/85034

Quote: [Initial Tetro reviews have commented on the striking visual style of the film. All modern day scenes are in 2.35 widescreen black and white, while flashbacks appear in more classically-formatted 1.77 color. This is Coppola’s second digital film and it followed a similar workflow to that used on Youth Without Youth, shooting with two of the director’s own Sony F900 CineAlta HD cameras. As in the earlier film, the signals from both F900s were recorded onto one Sony SRW field recorder in the HDCAM SR format. ]

Quote: [Mihai [Malaimare, DP] brought in a RED for a few days when we needed to shoot with three cameras. The RED material integrated well with the Sony footage, ]

 

[Shawn Booth]

:emote_headwall:

And once again, this thread isn't a comparison of the two formats...

 

[Jeff Coatney]

:emote_headwall:

And once again, this thread isn't a comparison of the two formats...

Shawn, I'm just having some fun with this topic. I love film. I think you're getting a lot of comparisons to digital because people assume a pro-film stance is an anti-digital stance. Nothing could be further from the truth.

My problem with film is that the cost of it is shackled to the huge industrial infrastructure that still exists to produce it. While film's market share has shrunk, the facilities and industries needed to manufacture it haven't. This has created a pricing structure that hasn't adjusted itself to the base of film shooters that will remain loyal to film in the coming years.

Film has a bright future as a complementary technology to digital acquisition. There is no better archival medium than film. Film is the archival medium of choice, for reasons that I've outlined in earlier threads.

But what really excites me is the probability that Kodak's film production will implode under its own weight. At some point in the very near future, Kodak will simply not be able to sustain its leviathan manufacturing business and they will be forced to contract with a newer, leaner, more efficient factory to make their film stock under license.

This would be great for people who love film and can't bear to see it go away. There are huge advances in manufacturing technology that can be brought to bear to make film in a new facility that can exist without the huge footprint, in a correctly scaled factory. Film could actually get cheaper in such a scenario. Film could retain and sustain as much as 15% to 20% of the acquisition market, potentially, and they could own a huge chunk of the archival market in the process. Guess which one is bigger? Archiving will be huge in the coming years.

This is really doable. The desire on the part of artists and filmmakers is strong enough to give film a another shot at life, the legacy of education and core photographic principles is huge. Film just has to be separated from its legacy industrial manufacturing boat anchor that's been stifling its innovative flexibility and artificially inflating its price relative to its market share.

Apart from long term storage stability and survivability, true archival mastery requires these two things:

1. The archived content must be readable by the human eye.

2. The content must be able to be re-constituted using more than one technology.

Film does all of this effortlessly. We're staring down a greater than 4K imaging future and the only technology that appears able to handle the archival needs of this future is 70mm film. Not as projector prints, but as a information substrate capable of holding color-separated uncompressed frames on par with a 28K image.

 

[Bill Anderson]

I've watched Tetro a number of times and feel it is made with every bit of premeditated care as any other Coppola film. It's as beautiful as any film ever made. I watched American Graffiti last night and couldn't help but wonder how it would have played out if Copolla had been able to shoot it on digital. Last I read, Coppola's in no mood to go BACK to film. That's his choice, I'm sure Spielberg wouldn't argue with him. Will you?

And as far as saying that film promotes more care or greater pre-visualization - subliminally or otherwise - compared to digital acquisition: that is not in the least bit accurate.

There is a new energy within filmmaking these days, and it has nothing to do with film. Filmmaking is moving out of the dark ages, and towards enlightenment.