R.I.P., the movie camera: 1888-2011 | Hacker News Reader

R.I.P., the movie camera: 1888-2011

salon.com

67 pointsRyanMcGreal31 comments

Ex-VFX guy here. For me it's more like "don't let the door hit you on the way out."

Consider all of the issues:

* A toxic chemical process for development. Both the source negative and the (thousands of) projected copies.

* Weave, both during filming and projection.

* Aspect ratio madness because of legacy formats. For example, academy formats have an offset center thanks to the audio track.

* Light leak, and other physical film issues you don't have with digital.

* Film is very inconsistent, and between projects, stock choices can make the source material really bad to work with. Take the legendarily bad Vision 500T that many cameramen would use even on critical bluescreen/greenscreen shots it had no place in.

* For IMAX, going digital has the added benefit of losing weight. IMAX reels can only go about 90 seconds at a time. That'll also help high speed. Filming 500-1000 fps will tear through a 35mm reel in about 5 seconds. Again, pretty wasteful when you think about it compared to using a Phantom.

Now it's just a matter of getting all theaters to use digital projection.

I am at the moment working with a guy whose job is to digitalise old (usually amateur) movies filmed on 8mm and 16mm reels.

It's a bit of a shame to see these go, because the quality of 50-yo footage is quite incredible, even without any post-processing. The sheer simplicity and sturdiness of some old mechanical Russian camera is also amazing.

What will happen of the videos we are shooting now? I'm pretty sure we'll be losing a lot more of it to hard drive failures or simple mistakes. Digital is a lot harder to store away in the attic to be re-discovered by your grandchildren.

People have lost troves of footage & pictures due to fire & water damage thanks to physical formats. People will also lose footage & pictures to digital media loss/damage, though it's much easier to duplicate a hard drive or a couple thousand data files than it is to duplicate a physical format.

While it may be sad that the grandkids aren't going to find 8mm film in the attic, there's nothing really stipulating that even if they did find it they'd have the ambitiousness to track down the proper equipment to view the footage. It's not like you can walk into most any store & find an 8mm or 16mm player. If the fear is that people won't be able to play the content a previous generation created, that fear has already been realized with 8mm & 16mm film.

On the other hand, I am hoping people won't be storing content in proprietary formats without a spec, or heaven-forbid with some DRM restrictions, or you might not have the proper software (or the proper rights if DRMed) to play it back 50 years later.

In the realm of master copies for films the issue isn't so much DRM as merely encryption. There's likely to be some pressure to ensure that the master is "secure" from "thievery" regardless of where the bits physically reside, which will probably manifest itself in the use of strong encryption. Which, of course, brings up the question of what happens when the files are still around but the encryption keys are lost.

The bigger problem is the classic fundamental problem of data retention. The people responsible for retention probably do not value the retention of the data independent of other developments to be of sufficient value to guarantee that retention with robust measures. For example, they could leave unencrypted copies (or encrypted copies with the encryption keys separate) in the custody of the library of congress. Or they could use some sort of N of M keys encryption system and distribute copies and keys to numerous individuals or institutions around the world. Etc. However, while such things would retention of the media would be valuable to the world at large even after, say, a global catastrophe (asteroid impact, nuclear war, etc.) or merely the bankruptcy of the company that created the media such concerns the company itself would tend not to share those ideals.

This is more of a management issue than anything to do with the format your information is stored in. Lots of physical reels of film, photographs & documents have been lost due to poor management & I am sure this trend will continue into the digital age.

The biggest advantage of digital formats is that they're easily duplicated in many locations. Making 5 copies of a digital video and distributing to friends means that there are five exactly equal-quality copies of the film in circulation. Doing the same with film formats is far more difficult.

Another enormous advantage is that every copy can be exactly as good as the original. With film it was always necessary to go to great lengths to preserve the master copy, because all other copies were lower quality.

Related enormous advantage at the theater: no scratches, no dings, no reel-change markers... and the quality is exactly the same on the five hundredth showing as on the first.

Oh, and changing from 2 screens of last week's unexpected hit premiere to six is as simple as a call to the distributor. Speaking of which, expect distribution as a business to disappear. There's no reason not to do business directly from production house to theater chain if you never have to ship anything bigger than a FedEx'd hard disk, or an authentication license for download.

More so: the cost of copying and transporting an HD (70mm equivalent) print to a theatre is a tiny fraction of what it is for film. Which enables greater flexibility, as you point out, but also enables more money to go to the theatre or to the artists.

I knew the film camera was dead when I saw the first video coming from the Canon 5D Mark II. It wasn't perfect, but it was close. All coming from a package that fits in your fists and uses no film.

I used conventional movie cameras for most of my life (videographer for my high scholl movie club, family stuff), but you would have to forcefully pry my Sony EX1 from my hands (unless you were swapping in an EX3).

A good hidef digital video camera is a joy to use, and great software like FCP is so much better than splicing film when editing.

Even digital cameras are adequate (http://youtu.be/zIe3EKO43Sg - I took this last week with my Canon T2i) and in some cases when you want a very narrow in-focus zone, better than a digital video camera.

At my previous employer we had a Red One (http://red.com). 5 minutes with that thing and you could see the writing on the wall.

And now cinematographers (like John Schwartzman, DOP on the new Spiderman reboot) say the RED Epic has picture quality like 65mm film, and it shoots full resolution at up to 96 frames per second! All onto a 2.5mm SSD drive.

True, it was a first among new ones. I hate RED with a passion though. Cameras stall, long boot times, damn rendering of R3D files - in the end, whatever time you think you've saved with it, comes back in post. Not to mention picture quality issues with non MX sensor cameras. OTOH, with Alexa and ESPECIALLY Sony SRW9000 I really don't see a point in film anymore. It will survive, but not in mainstream anymore.

James Jannard's Red obviously had something to do with this. If you can buy a Red for less than the cost of renting a film camera from Panavision, then that's the way it will go.

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/16-09/...

I am frequently the crotchety old man in these situations but video (and sound) are ripe for digital technology. New technologies in these fields won't replace good stories, but they will replace old technologies.

I'll miss the grain.

There are filters for that.

They're fake, just like Instagram is a fake.

In that sense, the letters you're looking at on this webpage are also "fake" because these letterforms were not achieved by using hot-metal typesetting.

Art constantly reinvents its methods while retaining forms derived from the past. That's cultural heritage.

If efficiency on a particular medium were the only concern, it wouldn't make any sense to use Latin letters on a computer screen, with all these awkward shapes derived from Roman stonecutting and Medieval handwriting... (The Braille alphabet would probably be the most suitable for digital displays.)

My point was that you can recreate the nostalgia (REcreate, so it's twice removed? heh).

But yeah, they are fake, and one thing I always notice is how these kinds of filters seem to have an obvious loop in them. Are there any filters that are more dynamic and feed from an RNG or something to lessen the perception of looping?

And the colors.

So film has an digital equivalent resolution of 4k If you don't shoot in 4k digital you are screwing yourself badly, and most people are...

Actually, I've read somewhere (somewhere credible, maybe it was cinefex) that 35mm 2-perf has a maximum equivalent resolution of 8.5K, 4-perf is probably then a double or quadruple of that? 2K in output is more than enough today, but there are technical reasons on some cameras to shoot in 4K - for example on RED One. If you don't shoot in 4K, you're not using the whole area of sensor, which results in odd behavior of lenses you're using.

You can scan film at whatever resolution you want, but on average (and this varies between different stocks, different film speeds, different processing) you won't get that much effective resolution from 35mm beyond 4K - you just start seeing the grains in more detail! And that is assuming a camera negative. A 3rd generation release print that has been played a few times can have less than 1.8K resolution.

It's pretty funny that the youtube video the guy posted wasn't even filmed with a camera. Brakhage just put moth wings on film and projected it.

I'm pretty sure IMax still uses a film camera.

Current IMAX cameras use 70 mm film, but they're looking to go to 4K digital with new equipment. Cameras like the RED Epic can already capture at 5K resolutions. There's not much reason to stick with the 70 mm format.

I seem to remember from an interview on the rc podcast that 4k would not be enough for them.

Fascinating read. It's amazing to see such established things become obsolete.

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