I always hear people/actors/directors say, this tape or film is x meters long, it is this size, etc. do they really still use physical film? If so why aren’t they using terabytes of storage in a way more compact form?
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so when they talk about length, they’re talking about the physical length of the film. 35mm film refers to the width. depending on the format being used- super35 for example- the length of a single frame or still on that film is about 18 mm.
as for why film- because digital recordings are actually pretty heavily compressed and once you lose that data, it can’t be recovered. the information stored on the film is actually much, much more densely encoded even if it’s analog. additionally, there’s some effects that simply can’t be perfectly replicated using digital, simply because it’s a fundamentally different medium.
You’ll have adherents to both camps, but ultimately it comes down to what produces a better film, and for box office productions, that’s still analog film.
Digital video is not necessarily more compressed than analog film. The way your phone shoots it, yes. Modern digital cinema cameras however are both higher resolution and have a higher dynamic range than motion picture film. They shoot raw imagery that is incredibly high quality and detailed (and indeed needs large SSDs and hard drives) and is not behind film in any way, quality wise. This was different, even 10 years ago but by now, if all you care about is quality, digital is more than enough.
However, what digital cameras cannot reproduce is the the texture the feel and the specific look of film. Post processing gets close today but not all the way. Besides, the process of shooting film is very different and some directors and photographers prefer the more difficult yet more down to earth process.
Btw, in practice, most blockbuster films today are actually shot on digital cameras, especially the likes of RED, ARRI and Sony. Analog is only used by some productions although they are a minority now. Fanatics like Tarantino and Nolan are doing their best though to keep film alive and in the case of Nolan, push it to the limits by shooting 70mm and 70mm IMAX film. Especially the latter is better than any current digital camera but due to IMAX being much more difficult and expensive to shoot, almost no one besides Nolan uses it.
digital recordings are actually pretty heavily compressed and once you lose that data, it can’t be recovered. the information stored on the film is actually much, much more densely encoded even if it’s analog.
This is why you sometimes see HD/4K rereleases of very old movies that were recorded on film. It’s not hard to get more resolution as long as they still have the original film reels.
Technology Connections did a series of videos that does a good job breaking it all down
It depends on the film, film (the tape) is expensive to be able to record on and some Directors prefer recording on it. But most smaller filmmakers go digital due to budget as well as the ability to edit it easier.
i beeelieve i read somehwere that 35mm film is comparable to 4k raw storage. 4k raw storage is a lot of data, and until recently you couldnt really store that kind of data and move it quickly around… you know what is portable though? 35mm film. its incredibly information dense, despite being analog and is ancient compared to new film-less recording systems.
film is still an efficient way to store quality data.
that said, i may be out of date and its days might not only be numbered, but over
It’s not really a practicality thing. Digital equipment is well able to deal with the data quantities of 4k and above that as well and it’s a lot faster and more flexible to deal with because there’s no need to process the dailies in the film lab before you can watch them and people can also make colour corrections live on set to try things out. It’s also easier to make backup copies right away because again, you can do it right there on set so you have backups almost as soon as you’ve shot.
It used to be that the majority of major film releases continued to be film even as the consumer space had already adopted digital formats and this was mainly because of a lack of ability to match the quality of film with digital options and also just inertia from an industry that had a whole infrastructure and set of practices around film.
But quite some time ago now it’s been possible to get digital cinematic cameras “comparable” to film and it has largely taken over as far as I understand, (certainly on the low end where I can speak from experience but my understanding is even major big budget productions too). Where you hear that something isn’t shot digital, it’s usually because that fact is a point of interest in itself and hence remarked upon. In those cases it’s usually an aesthetic choice and part of why I put “comparable” in quotes because it kind of depends on what metric you’re comparing and some maintain that there are unique characteristics to film that they want to preserve in the movies they make, Christopher Nolan is a particularly ardent example of this.
In those cases, even when shot on film, it’s very rare for it to be projected from a film print and is almost always a digital copy of the movie projected through a digital projector and a server.
A lot of directors look at shooting on actual film as almost a gimmick at this stage and kind of a costly one. The techs that deal in the loading/processing/storing of the media are getting more rare as the old timers retire out and there’s more things that can go wrong at every level of the use of the older medium because it’s heavy, more light and temperature sensitive and it is more time consuming which racks up labour costs.
Camera folk work long ass hours compared to the rest of the shoot crew so it’s favours younger techs. Those who were around in the heyday of actual film have all but moved up the ladder to DOP positions or retired meaning the new blood isn’t getting the old process passed along and there’s a certain level of “fuck this shit attrition” that keeps career longevity in the industry low. The techs who specialize in film are very caught up in the romance of physical film the same way some writers use typewriters but all in all it is a dying art that fewer and fewer studios are willing to bankroll.
Most directors now choose digital. There are still analog users like Nolan and Tarantino, but digital has become the industry standard.
Digital cameras offer a lot more flexibility over analog ones, including in dealing with lighting.
Analoge beats digital in quality.
Edit: y’all have to take back them downvotes… You know I am right! 😤
What is quality to you? The image size/resolution, the audio sample rate, the noise?
There’s a point where the difference is imperceptible.
I think it’s largely nostalgia behind replies like yours, analogue and digital are different, not a blanket better or worse.
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You are correct.
The figure I was given at art college was that a well exposed and developed 35mm negative had a minimum resolution of 90 million pixels, which is higher than 8K at ~75 million.
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We have electron microscopes. As long as you have time (which when you’re recording actors doing a scene, you don’t) we have the tech to look at things at any scale we want.
We wouldn’t even need AI, just a way to illuminate the film and some optics to project it at whatever scale we need onto a sensor, and we could scan every frame on a film down to the molecular level if we wanted.
Compositing the resulting scan data into digital video would be trivial, and the resulting file would have a level of quality higher than what any digital sensor could have recorded directly.
Well you’re definitely right about remastering/digitising old film…
But if Star Wars was done on old DV, Lucas wouldn’t have been able to digitally butcher it, so there’s that.
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He probably might have remade them… Give me chills thinking about it
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Ergo, analogue for now still beats digital at the highest ends of the market. There’s no digital camera outperforming the analogue ones. I want some of them upvotes back!! 😤
Sure… Nostalgia is what drives the movie studios… That’s why they still use analogue despite the superior results of digital, at lower total costs… 🤡!
If we‘re talking IMAX, sure. No digital camera can reach that kind of resolution. But the standard 35mm film and even regular 70mm has been surpassed by digital cameras for a little while now, if we’re talking pure quality. Digital has higher resolution, higher dynamic range, higher sensitivity, etc.
What analogue film has is a texture and a feel that digital cannot emulate. It’s not objectively better but subjectively, it’s nicer. It has a certain look. It’s like vinyl records. They’re objectively worse than the digital masters but many still prefer them.
I worked at a theater in high-school/college. I think it was Dark Knight, but at some point after going digital they brought back the film projector for certain shows and it was presented as a quality thing. I’m a super auditory person, so the thing that always stuck out to me in the IMAX was the sound. Those subs bump hard.
Conversely, one of my worst experiences, subjectively of course, was HFR (high frame rate) movies. I think it was a LotR film, but it looked so weird that I couldn’t get lost in the story.
Interesting. I can attest to analogue IMAX having great sound, however, if you watched an analogue film projection of a current film in the last 20 to 30 years, the audio was most likely digital anyways and I believe that is also true for IMAX, since the film itself does not even have audio on it. I suppose, a good audio master and especially a good audio system do a lot of heavy lifting.
And yea, hfr is meh. The effect it has on film is very underwhelming. The only film I have seen where it worked was Avatar. In Avatar 2 it works well in the scenes it’s in, however, the transition between the hfr and normal parts is extremely jarring and takes you out of the movie. The film you saw in hfr was probably one of the hobbit films, since it was a big marketing thing for them.
I give up
