Kodak going broke?

[David Mullen ASC]

I concede your point Tom but it's a bit glib or easy to just say that they should have found a way to turn the ship around ten years ago... when no one could think of a solution for Kodak -- except for this mythical "visionary genius" that they failed to hire.

(Also, remember that most visionary geniuses are not successful, some even got nailed to crosses or burned at stakes in the past.)

Kodak is in a unique situation, being a huge company built and centered around a singular product/process that is being obsoleted by a radically different, complex series of products and processes provided by a wider range of companies, some probably bigger than Kodak but many smaller. It's hard to think of a similar company with a similar level of dominance over a single type of product that had worldwide use. Of course Kodak has its hand in many other products, even since the beginning (like inventing the gel caplet for Vitamin E and setting up a separate subsidiary for its manufacture).

And yes, Kodak is unique in that it saw its demise coming for the past fifteen years, not many companies get that sort of advanced warning.

But basically they had three choices:

1) Learn to get smaller and smaller and then fade from history.

2) Diversify so much that film became a smaller and smaller part of their revenues

3) Radically shift the company around an entire new series of products and processes and kill film before anyone else did.

2 and 3 are similar and the truth is that it would turn Kodak into something else, maybe a Sony, and be made up of an entirely new workforce eventually -- it become Kodak in name only. That may be a success in the eyes of shareholders but not it would not be of much interest to me. And many loyal customers would not have been happy for Kodak to be the one to put the knife in film's back.

The ideal thing would be for Kodak, through this imaginary visionary leader that they hired a decade ago, to find the new imagemaking technology of the 21st Century that makes them the world leader again in that field.

But it's WAY TOO easy to say that -- you start to get into the realm of "sure it's possible... but it's not probable". Personally I don't think digital image technology can be dominated by one company the way that film technology was. It's not a self-contained end-to-end technology since it rides on the backs of the computer industry and other electronics suppliers.

Some of this comes down to how one views a company and what's most important about it -- for its leaders, its shareholders, its profits? For its products? For its workers, designers, inventors, sales people? Its values and how it contributes to society? How one thinks of a company will define how one thinks of it as being successful.

 

[Tom Lowe]

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say. The fact that Apple went from making personal computers to music devices and phones does not seem to have damaged their brand or the core/heart of their company.

But as you say, at this point, the conversation about what Kodak might have become is so fanciful as to almost be pointless. Coulda been, shoulda been....

In a way, I feel about this subject of corporations very similar to the way I feel about movie franchises. In order to save or launch a big, legitimate film franchise, the #1 ingredient for success, IMHO, is a visionary director, ala Nolan with Batman. Of course, the trouble is, visionary directors and CEOs are in high demand, and short supply!

 

[Björn Benckert]

It is a bit crazy, they really did try to convert a while back and then they suddenly just stopped. At Syndicate we used to have a Genisis scanner and a Cineon license. And to tell you the truth Cineon was way ahead of the game back then. And it set the standard / built the foundation for nuke and all other node based compositing programs. And some of the cineon nodes where just amazing at the time, like the Cinespeed was far better back then than any other retiming program also their grain features and way of working with proxies, high bit depth and lut's Render que's CPU usage etc was far better than the rest. It made our infernos and flames look like kids toys in comparison in many aspects. Also their Lighting printer and the Genesis was top of class. As the genesis was/is basically a 4k 16 bit super slow CCD camera shooting at 1 frame/16 second. Some of you might not be impresed by such spec but then you should know that it had a picture quality that far exceeds all the cameras we use today and this was back when we all where young and promising and computing was super slow.. about 14 years back....

The all of a sudden they just stopped and discontinued Cineon and only used it at their own post houses, ie Cinesite. IT was about the same time when Sony just halted their "Flame Killer" (forgot the real name) The rumor then was that they both had stepped far out in the patent land of Adobe, Autodesk and Quantel and that they both faced enormous lawsuits if they would continue. Still today it might seem odd if they thought that they could continue work with film forever but again most people that I meet from kodak has been of a certain age and I think most of them did not like computers at all and the rest figured they could go with the flow until they retire. But thats just my guess.

So if they would have used the patent they field for then and continued

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Kodak will probably survive in the digital age, but I doubt that they will be the "big yellow box" that dominated all other competitors, they will be some sort of mid-level imagining technology company -- a little more like what Fuji is today. What's sad is that another major U.S. employer in mid-sized eastern city like Rochester, NY is probably going to shrink to a few corporate offices, with hardly any manufacturing jobs.

 

[Marc Wielage]

We are a few more weeks into the NFL football season. Still, yet again, they go into another season shooting film. They have film aquisition and processing, trnasfer and distribution down to the speed of news organizations.

I believe NFL Films is shooting a combination of film and digital -- but I don't know the percentage split.

They had one designed for the pro market, it was called the Kodak Look Management System and was aimed at cinematographers. I even made the launch film for it (I made quite a few launch films for Kodak Motion Imaging).

Yep, I did the demos for Kodak's Telecine Control System (TCS) many times at Cinesite and other companies. I think its $20,000 price tag gave people pause. But it did actually work, in terms of answering questions DPs often had in telecine dailies: "can you show me what's actually on the negative, without a correction?" With the Kodak TCS system, we could say, "well, according to Kodak, it looks like THIS." And we could instantly dial in a point brighter, a point brighter, and so on, once it was calibrated.

I think the problem was that the system was pitched as a way for facilities to use very low-skilled labor to do dailies. The reality was (and is), there's often no "once size fits all" one light setting that will yield acceptable looks for film dailies. The reason is that labs are inconsistent, exposures are sometimes off, and mistakes happen. I've often said to DPs, "do you really want to see what's on the film, or would you like to see something usable?" The TCS box gave us a good starting point, but it's not necessarily what I'd like to show the director for dailies. You still need an experienced colorist and communication with the DP to get decent pictures.

Digital dailies present a different set of challenges. I keep harping on the issue of on-set monitors, editorial monitors, directors monitors, and final color monitors all not being calibrated identically. If everybody had the same monitors, this wouldn't be as much of an issue. Then, it really would be a case of "what you see is what you get," assuming identical monitors, color spaces, and LUTs.

 

[David Battistella]

Marc

In your last point, this is why labs get into the DIT spot. It's important to have a DIT system that is in sync with what ever lab is doing the post. This is also why the DIT position is so hardto define. Halfthe people want it to be a camera position but I have always believed it's a post position with sound camera knowledge.

If NFL films went all EPIC it would be interesting to see if they could turn around as quickly as they do with film. I would love to see their workflow with digital. For what they have to do film might actually be more practical. I'd bet their crews would all want optical viewfinders too. Interesting to contemplate.

David

 

[Ryan Patrick O'Hara]

i think NFL films is still film because of archival purposes. Isn't that right?

 

[David Battistella]

i think NFL films is still film because of archival purposes. Isn't that right?

That is a large part, but they actually have a very sophisticated method of covering all games (at least four cameras) and they do next day highlights. It's pretty imporessive workflow and it's pretty analog. Analog film, analog camera's, sound sync and cans of film shipped from all over the US to their lab in New Jersey.

I am pretty sure they have looked at digital pretty hard (vs. 16mm film) and still shoot film for various reasons.

Something like what the scarlett promises to be could be an alternative. If the Scarlet was built to be the camera and post system from NFL films, then I think it would make it the most successful digital camera every because NFL films production style and workflow pretty much puts any production to the test.

Fast, high speed photography, quick turnaround, high quality, 16mm DOF.

The big thing though, is the high speed 16mm DOF photography that no digital camera (to date) could unseat.

David

 

[Marc Wielage]

The big thing though, is the high speed 16mm DOF photography that no digital camera (to date) could unseat.

I seem to recall that the Vision Research Phantom Digital cameras can do up to 1000fps. And those are routinely used on motion pictures. I'm not sure how practical they would be in a sports/documentary situation, though, because of the data connections and storage requirements. And it's definitely not nearly 4K (not even 2K at this speed).

In your last point, this is why labs get into the DIT spot. It's important to have a DIT system that is in sync with what ever lab is doing the post.

Unfortunately, I think some indie filmmakers are trying to do everything themselves, and only talking to a post house just as their project is finished. This can be a disaster. I've seen a few cases where filmmakers chose the wrong standard, used faulty LUTs, or otherwise made other mistakes that cost them time and money once it was time to actually deliver their projects for home video or broadcast.