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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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.

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.

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.

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