Interesting read(s), end of film...

[Rob Gardner]

From Current Salon

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/13/r_i_p_the_movie_camera_1888_2011/singleton/

From New York Press, 1999 (referred to in the above article)


http://www.nypress.com/article-180-the-death-of-film_the-decay-of-cinema.html

 

[Zeb B]

Arrrrrg! Enough about the death of film. Let's celebrate the life of Digital

 

[Rob Gardner]

Well, you can't have one without the other. I think that is what these articles are saying. If nothing else, the transition shouldn't be thought of as trivial. We can't deny that it is happening. What are we gaining? What are we losing? Perhaps it is not simply an exchange of hardware, though that is part of it.

 

[Tim Whitcomb]

Film is still the PREMIER archival medium - all you have to do is hold it up to light to view it.

Will there even be LTO players that work in 30 years?

Film will never die / like gun fighters / it will simply fade away

 

[Marc Wielage]

Film is still the PREMIER archival medium - all you have to do is hold it up to light to view it. Will there even be LTO players that work in 30 years?

I have run into projects where the LTOs (and in another case, the DTF-2 data tapes) failed and could not bring back a project less than seven years old. In that case, we had two additional backups: a digital 35mm negative, and an HDCam tape. The client opted to go with the HDCam tape, and everything went fine -- but that would not have been my first choice.

This was a major studio film, BTW, that made about $100 million. It did make me stop and wonder, how long are these digital archives going to last? And who's in charge of migrating the data to newer, better backup formats and image formats? Will an R3D file from 2011 be recoverable in 2031? 2051? Tough questions. (I'd ask the same of Alexa or Sony or anything else, too -- this is an industry-wide problem, not a camera-specific one.)

 

[Karim D. Ghantous]

Will an R3D file from 2011 be recoverable in 2031? 2051?

Of course it will. The question really should be - and your post already made this point - whether or not the file will survive. But I think it will.

However... I think it's great that we can have both media. In still photography, a lot of people got onto digital too quickly, being fooled into thinking that 6Mpx is better than 8-perf 35mm. Heck, you need at least 25Mpx or so to match 35mm.

The bigger the sensor, the better film gets. Micro 4/3 is better than 16mm, but 6x4.5 is better than a 40Mpx Pentax 645D. 6x7 is better than the best current MFD backs. That's in still photography though, not motion photography. Not even Spielberg would want to shoot his movies in 65mm!

 

[David Battistella]

Marc,

I have offered (and will do so here again) to help author a whitepaper on how to make r3d data the replacement for film.

Replacing film cameras is not "good enough" you have to replace the entire system that is film.

It's not "just up to everybody". I hope that RED and the users of this community can use our collective will to ensure r3d can be a viable replacement for film.

Anyone interested in forming a committe of professionals to share ideas and i'd be happy draft a white paper.

Anyone?

This is a very important job and it helps protect our investment in RED.


David

 

[Marc Wielage]

I have offered (and will do so here again) to help author a whitepaper on how to make r3d data the replacement for film.

Well, the Motion Picture Academy kind of did this back in 2007, with a white paper report called "The Digital Dilemma." It's 85 pages long, runs about 50,000 words, lots of graphs and charts and interesting opinions. It ought to be updated, but things change so radically, so quickly, what makes sense one year seems to get obsoleted the next year -- it's quite a moving target.

You can download a PDF at this link:

http://www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/projects/digitaldilemma/

Start there, and then check with the Hollywood chapter of SMPTE. I guarantee you, there are already committees hard at work on an updated plan. The problem as I see it is, what file format will be the standard? Will it be readable (or convertable) decades from now? What data recording will last longest? At the moment, the only thing they know for a fact that can be read in 50 years is film -- not videotape, not hard drives, not data tapes. It's a sobering thought.

BTW, the Library of Congress is still using 1/4" analog 2-track audio tape to archive analog audio files. They're suspicious of the long-term reliability of digital audio files -- not necessarily because of file standards changing, but more over concern that CDs, CD-Rs, digital tape, hard drives, and other digital formats tend to fall apart over time. They have 60-year-old analog tapes that will still play. I've already encountered 15-year-old DATs that will no longer play, and some 1990s 3/4" PCM digital album masters that are shedding like crazy. Scary.

 

[David Battistella]

Thanks for the heads up marc.

For those interested in KodaChrome this is a really great student film I saw on Vimeo the other day.

David

 

[M Most]

I have offered (and will do so here again) to help author a whitepaper on how to make r3d data the replacement for film.

Replacing film cameras is not "good enough" you have to replace the entire system that is film.

It's not "just up to everybody". I hope that RED and the users of this community can use our collective will to ensure r3d can be a viable replacement for film.

The first thing that would have to happen for something like that would be for Red to open up the codec. I don't see that happening any time soon. The second thing would be a "reverse Bayer" processing step that I really don't see being particularly practical.

People here seem to overlook the fact that even on projects that are primarily shot on Red cameras, there are almost always other devices involved, be they other digital cameras, DSLR's, or film. I can't remember the last time I worked on anything that was shot solely on one digital camera, be it Red or anything else. Archival formats must account for all data, regardless of where it came from, and they must be in open formats that are documented and freely available. The current R3D file format doesn't fit either of those criteria.