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Comment by PKop | Hacker News Reader

It's hinted at here, but film produces a much better overall look than digital. It is just that digital is way cheaper and easier to work with.

There is certainly more versatility in what you can create in post production with digital but the base look of what is captured is more beautiful on film, and this is the same with photographs. Look at high quality old images captured on film, they blow most digital images out of the water. Much higher dynamic range and depth of colors and contrast.

This is why Tarantino, Nolan, and P.T. Anderson still only use film. I think this is most glaring with the mid to low budget range of films that can't make up some of the ground with production techniques and post. Old 80's and 90's mid range films on film look so much better especially in night scenes.

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I'm highly skeptical of the technical claims you're making here.

Quality photography paper has about 10 stops of dynamic range (which is why the zone system for composition and printing goes up to X). While the negatives themselves may have slightly more dynamic range, there's also the clarkvision page[1] indicating they, in fact, have less dynamic range. This makes sense: you have less area to work with, and need to get something done with bigger grains because of light and time constraints.

You may well think it looks better, but more information it captures not. More noise, yes. Bleeding artifacts you like, sure. More information, no.

[1]: https://clarkvision.com/articles/dynamicrange2/

Do you disagree that film looks better than digital?

This is a completely subjective opinion though. One person could prefer film, and another digital. What does this prove?

Maybe it's subjective, but if you ask X million random people and, say, 51% prefer film, then film is better than digital in the only metric that matters (which is, "people liking it"). In practice I'd guess it'd be more 70/80%...

It's the same as with audio: Many people like the effects of common limitations of non-digital tech. Digital processes can choose to add these effects if the creators agree - but they don't have to. And just because something can be done with digital doesn't mean doing it is better (e.g. in audio, mastering for vinyl vs brickwall-masterings for CD releases)

That sort of false binarization doesn't help anything. If it's 51-49, there are lots of good questions to ask, like "who feels which way" and "what do they like about it" and "what things do they see as in each bucket"?

The notion that there's just one "film" and just one "digital" is another false binarization. There are many, many components to each, with notable changes over the years, as with most technologies. And there are cultural aspects to each as well, further confusing the picture.

The way forward isn't in zero-sum arguments over false binaries. It's finding the next step via the sort of careful examination and experimentation that got us the many previous steps.

I'm not sure this is a fair question. An awful lot of people seem to think that instagram filters look "better" than simple photos. Style and clarity are not necessarily congruent.

You could just as easily watch Casablanca and proclaim "black and white produces a much better overall look than color".

I do. The talk of dynamic range, etc. is nonsense. That may have been true in 2008, but sensor technology has improved incredibly,

There is nothing film can do that digital photography cannot do today. Any claims of film superiority must be based on subjective interpretation and existing familiarity with film like look.

Digital cinema can 100% emulate film like look if they wish to add rendering artifacts.

Why is digital trying to look more like film instead of the other way around?

Basically all of film innovation history has been about constantly trying to look more like digital.

Because sometimes digital footage has to be matched to film. Alternatively, some directors enjoy film artifacts just like some people enjoy analog distortion artefacts in audio.

Additionally, you seem to be asking a lot of leading questions but not volunteering any opinions of your own. Is there something you'd like to share?

Because film has a color grade built in to some extent ewhile digital does not. The "look" people built into the film back in the day because they couldn't just do it in post can still be a great look today and is pretty orthogonal to objective quality of the information captured.

Because people are funny.

It's the same reason you'll still find scenes and photos shot in sepia tone and black and white. People prefer the way film looks even though it's less true what was actually shot.

People like typewriters, vacuum tube amplifiers, and Vinyl records; Not because they are better than their more modern counterparts, but because of nostalgia and a preference for the "feel" of these things.

But, it just so happens that it's easy enough to recreate film effects that actual film ends up being just a masochistic activity.

This is it 100%.

Vinyl and Film may technically be less accurate at reproducing the original, but the ways in which they are imperfect gives them a “feel” which many like.

It's rare that people try to do that now, the person you were replying to said that's it's possible, not that it's common.

I liked the argument in the article: film “works” because it can do a bit less: it adds enough hassle that the rest of the production (e.g., lighting) is done more carefully, and thus the whole thing comes out better.

On a similar thread to this is the aspect of how film shoots did not have a video village. The primary people to see what the camera was shooting as the DP and Director. Video Assist came along (the old b&w flickering TV near the film camera) that allowed more people to see the image. Once a video feed could be provided to anyone, every body started to provide opinions. This actually slows things down.

Barriers to entry tend to raise quality. But people tend not to consider that a good argument for keeping them.

I don't think taken to this extreme this is true either. Sure for a given film setup you could come up with a better digital setup but that doesn't mean every digital setup is strictly better now than what you'd use if digital wasn't an option. and you could always construct some monstrosity of a camera that just throws more film at the problem to get a better result, though IMAX seems to be the limit of what people are willing to do on that front.

This just isn't true. Take a 35mm camera and a digital camera side by side to shoot the same scenes, and there will be noticeable differences. Some maybe subtle, but they are there. As I just commented somewhere else here, the highlights are a key area of this difference. Digital clips where film rolls off. I've seen so so many digitally shot scenes where there's an actor against a bright sky. There is nearly zero detail left in the sky as they've pushed the exposure for the actor's face. The details in clouds are absolutely gone. It makes me cringe every time I see it.

Edit: Wanted to add another example of the differences. Digital records by separating the RGB of the light where film does not. As an example of digital oddity from this, I’ve had to work with footage shot on an Alexa (IIRC) where the white whipped cream on top of the desserts had a weird exposure thing where when in post the exposure was pushed the white went to magenta. In order to get it white, you had to keep pushing the exposure to get the third primary color up enough to catch up to white. By then, the other 2 channels were well past useable. Since it was a commercial for desserts, the white in the cream was important to keep the details of the texture. Film would not have this problem.

Doesn’t colour film have different layers of emulsion sensitive to different wavelengths of light?

That’s not so different from digital having RGB filters right?

Could expand on the rolls off phrasing you just used, if you don't mind?

I have a decent amount of experience with digital audio is why I ask.

Hmm, not across the whole pipeline though. For instance, 35mm film tops around the equivalent of 12k columns of resolution, while a lot of digital cinemas are still equipped with 2k projectors.

Film was a lot more expensive, so there's a selection bias. Digital is newer, so we haven't yet benefited from survivor bias.

In the hands of a sufficiently talented team, film does not look better than digital, because digital can be made to look just like film: https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/6/21125680/film-vs-digital-de...

This should not be overlooked.

A film that exists is better than one that never gets made.

Digital reduces the cost required to get certain shots; makes certain shots possible that would be impossible with film; integrates more directly into cheaper digital production workflows that make it possible to pull of effects that would be impossible on film…

Much as we may nostalgically enjoy the aesthetic of the optical compositing of original Star Wars special effects, they were incredibly expensive and - compared to what can be done today for a fraction of the cost with all-digital workflows (eg in the Disney plus Star Wars shows), objectively not as good.

> A film that exists is better than one that never gets made.

Some might disagree. The democratization of content creation that happened with the internet and social media was in general a good thing, but it can't be denied that it also resulted in a massive reduction of the Signal to Noise ratio in content quality. The reason the Google search result page is much worse today is precisely because there exits tons of content today that should never have been made.

Sturgeon's law applies - 90% of everything is crap. 90% of movies shot on film were terrible too. Everything in the direct-to-video bargain bin in Blockbuster in the 80s and 90s was shot on film, and trust me, they were not all Tremors II.

So when more stuff gets made, more crap gets made. But the 10% that's good gets bigger too.

You want a world that contains Everything Everywhere All At Once? You have to also accept The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies as well. Sorry.

If a movie production wants a digitally produced thing to look like film, they can do that, to a degree that you can't tell the difference. So no, film doesn't look better than digital.

Film looks better because it shows less information, not more information.

Gandalf's makeup and nose pores taught that to the moviegoing public.

Motion blur is a more common example.

What part of the process of light coming through a lens, being focused onto film, the film being developed, and then light shone through the film onto a sensor to capture a digital copy of the frame, versus the light from the lens being focused onto a sensor and digitized directly, makes the film based image ‘look better’?

Because the frames are going to be digitized, right? Nobody’s arguing that optical printing and editing by splicing reels of film together produces better looking results than digital workflows, surely?

Emphatically. Film looks bland. People like film for the same reason they like vinyl; it’s psychosomatic.

I'm skeptical, too, since a lot of things shot on film still went through a digital intermediate.

I think this is more about overall production aesthetic/budget/execution, than a film v. digital.

The main difference to me between film and digital isn't the dynamic range, but how the edges of whatever the range is looks. In digital, it's clipped. In film, it rolls off. That is one of the key differences to me. An area that is overexposed in film looks much less harsh than the look of the digital overexposed.

One thing I notice when doing night photography is that digital sensors tend to saturate quickly, leading to loss of color saturation if one of the channels gets fully exposed.

Film tends to deal with that a bit more gracefully so you don't get white centers on colored point lights.

Tarantino uses film because he likes the artifacts film gives, not because it's objectively better. Same for PT Anderson. Indeed, both directors favor grungy 1970s aesthetics, which should give you an indication where they're coming from, stylistically. Nolan typically uses large film gauges like 65mm which are not comparable to 'regular' 35mm film.

Additionally, film does not have more dynamic range than digital. Take the latest sensors used by the Arri Alexa cameras for instance, they have a range of 17 stops. This is better than regular 35mm film. [1]

[1] https://www.arri.com/en/camera-systems/cameras/alexa-35#2730...

Audiophiles who prefer vinyl prefer it for the artifacts, not because it's objectively better.

However if you ask them, they will tell you that vinyl is objectively better, that faithful-up-to-the-Nyquist-limit digital reproductions sound "cold" and "mechanical", that digital doesn't have the dynamic range of analog, and that nothing can come close to capturing the sound of a live performance except an AAA recording and mastering process to vinyl disc.

It's the same with Tarantino. To him only 24fps on grainy flickery celluloid is cinema; the newer technologies are cold and lifeless and they hollow out the performances.

Yeah I always think about that Brian Eno quote:

>“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

― Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices

I'm wondering how much of the critique in the article is down to the Arri Alexa look - it's pretty distinctive, so much so that I can usually pick out if a show or film was shot in it (latest example was watching "Dark" and I double checked, and indeed, it's an Arri Alexa prod).

Digital is vastly superior to film for photography. I shoot both, sometimes side by side. What differs is that film is more pleasing to the eye without significant post processing, digital requires it.

But in both cases, if you get your photo in the viewfinder before you get in the camera, digital always comes out better in the end. There’s simply so much more information captured, and you can in fact get more stops of DR with digital than with film.

Edit: To add to the above, I use a light meter and check DR in post processing. Film is usually good for 8-9 stops of DR (depending on film type) and is better in overexposed scenes with bright lights. Digital generally gets 12-14 stops of DR and handles underexposed scenes better at constant ISO.

Another factor is that in dark scenes due to finer grains, digital is capable of running higher ISO in producing recoverably usable photos with denoise filters (Nik’s Tools). On my current rig, ISO 3200 is usable, on film typically ISO800 is the max I would run, there are a few good ISO 1200 films though, but they are black and white. ISO isn’t directly analogous between film and digital, but it’s close enough for the purpose of this comparison.

Unless you're illuminating through slide film with a somewhat pure white light source, film also requires significant post-processing.

None of this is true, nor does it need to be. As my photography professor says, “digital is better, but I don’t want better.”

Roma is as beautiful as anything shot on film, Amelie from 1995 is as teal-orange medium-shot photo filter as anything on Netflix. The Crown is often beautiful because of impressive practical lighting effects.

[EDIT: Amelie is from 2001, I mixed up the date with the same director’s City of Lost Children from 1995]

Amélie is from 2001, not 1995. Interestingly, it is one of the first films that was colour corrected completely digitally. This is also why the movie's colour palette is so striking. Not necessarily to everyone's taste, but I really found it to 'pop' in the cinema.

Sorry, I was also thinking of the same director’s City of Lost Children, which is 1995 and still has a teal/orange aesthetic. (Apologies to the French for using the translated titles.)

It looks like City of Lost Children was graded by Yvan Lucas via an analog process called ENR. Subsequently, Amelie was the first digital coloring he did, and, since it was before LUTs, his analog experience was crucial.

https://www.digitalmediaworld.tv/post/2917-colourist-yvan-lu...

Is ENR similar to bleach bypass? They seem to be mentioned in the same breath but it's a bit vague.

It believe it’s a specific method for a partial bleach bypass on prints but that’s basically me being ChatGPT from random internet knowledge.

Film has become vastly inferior to digital both in stills and cinema if we're talking about technical aspects like dynamic range and colour accuracy.

The problem is, just like with CGI which has gotten pretty good at modelling light transport, it feels off because it's too clean and clear. Digital it's too good at capturing reality. Film introduces a bunch of artefacts and limitations that 'look' nicer than accurately captured reality. In part this might be because most of us grew up watching cinema styled that way, in part because it leaves more room for the brain to compensate for those limitations with imagination.

With the advent of easily available stylisation AI trained on film, we should see digital close that gap any time now.

Can you do an 8K remaster of a movie shot in 4K digital? With film you can just rescan the negative with a higher resolution.

This will not magically make extra detail appear, though. Film does not have infinite resolution.

For instance, the ARRISCAN film scanner goes up to 6k for 35mm. They could go higher, but there's no point.

Yes? There's a ton of AI upscales coming out and they're becoming really good; plenty examples on youtube including iconic scenes from iconic movies. Perhaps another 12 months max before AI upscales go from enthusiast/amateur remaster community to commercial.

Having an AI generate 75% of the movie pixels that weren’t there in the original work doesn’t really count as a ‘remaster’ imo

It's what most of those "HD remasters" of film are doing. (Well, sometimes it's a human or a chemical/mechanical process rather than an "AI", but either way you're fabricating details out of noise and/or thin air).

I suspect that getting objective improvements from a 4K to 8K film scan would require extremely well-produced film and probably a large-format film like 70mm.

> P.T. Anderson still only use film

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11271038/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_c... it might be shot on film, but its graded digitally. So the argument doesn't really apply here. The colours you see here are a choice made in the DI stage.

> film produces a much better overall look than digital.

no, not anymore, that hasn't been the case since about 2010. (no ignore RED cameras, they are terrible at colour) All the (big) films you've seen since about 2007 and all the films since 2012 have been graded digitally (apart from maybe a mike lynch film) This means that the colours are not because its film, but because of a choice made by the Director of Photography, or producer or director. The thing you think is a filmic look is mostly digital. Yes, that includes films that were shot on film, like the Noland batmans.

Yes, that means even the film you saw at the cinema on a film projector was graded digitally. it was just lasered out to film and printed for distribution. Also, the other bit to remember is that new prints look much nicer than old prints. Old prints look like shite, dirty, scratched and sometimes washed out.

"real" film shot now is nothing like the grainy stuff of 25 years ago, it has a far higher dynamic range than then, and much smaller film grain. Its just that digital film cameras are now even better and more consistent. This crossover happened in about 2012.

Those 80's and 90's night scenes aren't better because they're shot on film. They look better because they're better LIT.

Digital is easier to work with in low light some productions will try and save money by cutting back there. Can't really do that with film w/o it being painfully obvious.

This is utterly false and bordering religious beliefs.

Steve Yedlin has dedicated decades of his life to ultimately prove [1] that digital and film can achieve the same exact look, save for the fact that digital is infinitely easier to deal with.

[1] https://yedlin.net/DisplayPrepDemo/index.html

28 Days Later was one of the first digitally shot movies and has some breathing scenes in it. I don't think digital is to blame.

I'm pretty sure at this point high end digital cinema cameras can straight up outperform film in all but the most extreme cases (like giant IMAX negatives maybe) but that's also a much more recent development than most people would think.

More freedom in post allows more freedom to do things audience may or may not like but I don't think it's technical limitations holding things back anymore.

Similarly I'm a bit dubious on the LED lighting comment by the anonymous redditor. Yes LED color rendering used to be pretty horrible but these days it really doesn't have to be. all the major LED manufactures have high end white parts for color critical applications and even color mixing is actually good now with the advent of phosphor converted broad spectrum colored LEDs.

All this stuff increases the available creative space but at the same time it might not be easier to find the good stuff in a larger space

There is some small truth to this - at least for image acquisition. The bayer filters in modern digital sensors are way to broadband, which perhaps counterintuitively reduces saturation, but more importantly reduces color accuracy from human perspective. This is especially apparent in the green-red spectrum.

The sensitivity curves of Kodachrome 64 and presumably 35mm film stock much more closely match CIE 1931 effective bandpass curves and results in much more accurate color.

However, most this can easily be fixed in post with modern tools. Almost all of what you are seeing today is artifacts of the Director/cinematographer/editor's artistic choices and not the acquisition tech.

Soderbergh has shot his last few films on iPhone and they look fantastic. Lighting and framing while shooting and good editing and grading afterwards are far more important factors.

This surprised me because I’d watched No Sudden Move by Soderbergh relatively recently and thought it looked pretty good. Reading more it seems like only Unsane and High Flying Bird were shot on phones (the latest of which was 2019).

Vignette is a useful and appealing effect. That doesn’t mean a lens with vignette is superior. The images straight out of the camera may be more appealing. Yet on the other hand, with a low vignette lens, you can add exactly as much or little as you want in post.

Film vs digital seems very similar, with a greater degree of “natural processing” happening in film.

> film produces a much better overall look than digital

To add one more data point to all the other sibling comments, Vince Gilligan (a self-described huge fan of film) talked on one of the Better Call Saul podcasts about how they did a blind test, and the consensus was that digital looked better. This was around five years ago.

Star Trek The Next Generation was famously shot on film. The HD scans are so good that the props can be seen to be fake in many places. Later franchise shows that were shot in digital simply cannot be released in HD as there is no HD source material.

So film is better than the digital from that time, but not necessarily better than today's digital

This is completely incorrect. Later shows like Voyager and DS9 were also shot on film.

However, all post-production happened in standard definition, so all special effects, editing and colour correction would have to be redone, which is incredibly expensive.

They did that with TNG, but since those blurays didn't sell enough, they didn't bother doing the same for DS9/VOY.

Thank you, I did not realize that the difference was in post. There's no better way to get correct information on the internet, than to post an incorrect statement on the internet!

No worries! There's a good chance that anything I post that sounds remotely authoritative turns out to be super inaccurate as well :)

> Later franchise shows that were shot in digital simply cannot be released in HD as there is no HD source material.

This is a persistent myth, but false. DS9 and Voyager were shot on film, like TNG and TOS. TOS was also edited on film, TNG and later were scanned and edited on videotape. This makes it much more work to remaster TNG and later shows for HD, which was done for TNG but not later shows because the TNG sales plus the perception that the other shows wwre less popular and would sell less made it not worthwhile from a business perspective.

> This is why Tarantino, Nolan, and P.T. Anderson still only use film.

Or maybe they are just old and incapable of adapting anymore.

There is a saying: "Physics advances one funeral at a time". Meaning that you need to get rid of the old-timers which are preventing the field from advancing.

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