Hollywood DP finally said it: "Film is over" | Hacker News Reader

Hollywood DP finally said it: "Film is over"

alexandrosmaragos.com

18 pointsSlimArt10 comments

You'll be surprised that the film process is still cheaper in some scenarios. Special effects, for instance - anywhere you have to pull a matte (i.e separate the foreground from a green screen), the film telecine can be tweaked to convenience, whereas most CCDs will still give you a choppy result - for many reasons; Color compression schemes being one, the shape of the ccd cells being another. That means more days compositing and/or revisiting a film set, and in complex shots this actually means breaking up a frame to many individually shot bits, which may mean more shooting days in the first place, and a far higher complexity (just imagine how many angle coordinations one would have to make in order to match 5 parts of the same shot).

It's not that we're not getting there, but there's still a mile or two to tread.

Gamer, while an uninspired movie, was shot fully digital on RED and had a large number of green-screen shots. Even using beta firmware the results are impressive.

The compositing software you can get today does an amazing job of adding and subtracting elements. Maybe you mean film is cheaper because it doesn't mess with your existing work-flow and you don't have to re-tune your tools.

Actually, I mean film is cheaper because under highly complicated circumstances, the standard workflow is less risky. I'm not saying that it's cheaper in principle, or that there for a given situation there isn't a specific solution that's better; But when workflow is everything, it definitely is. It's much cheaper having to spend an hour on lighting, not worry about motion control and ask for 3 different setups in the telecine pull list, to have enough dynamic range to fit everything into the shot.

With RED, even though results are very good (they are, however, short of amazing: it's terribly noisy, but then again so is underexposed film), the dynamic range is lower (and the dynamic density is uniform, which isn't that good), so keying becomes an issue, and so do CCD artefacts - even more so when renting 422 equipment. The complexity/risk isn't necessarily prohibitive, but definitely less lucrative. That's why I say 'cheaper', not 'better'.

On the compositing side, software has been great for quite some time. I'm aware of only a handful of truly novel keying algorithms published in the past 6 years, and none that can deal with digital artefacts very well (if you know of any, please tell me. Better yet, tell someone who works for The Foundry or Autodesk. Much appreciated. x), that's why so many commercials are still shot on 35mm instead of digital.

Based on what RED is doing, the solution to a lot of these problems is to keep bumping the resolution so the impact of artifacts is minimized.

IMAX, long the king of film, might find itself knocked out by a digital alternative. If 28K isn't good enough, then 50K? 100K? Film isn't getting any better, there's too many limitations, but digital film technology is still advancing.

Someone's probably going to invent a "de-artifacting" algorithm that works well enough that in practice nobody can see the difference. There's a lot of Ph.D. students out there in need of a thesis topic, after all.

It's inevitable and unsurprising.

I do hope that it remains feasible to shoot on film for those that want to. It's a fun medium to work in, and there's a romanticism about shooting on film that I think is lost in using digital cameras.

About ten years ago, a musician acquaintance and I were discussing the decline of vinyl. His argument in favour of this archaic technology was passionate. He dispensed with technical arguments, which are generally just not very good, but opened my eyes to a very different argument that I respected: that there is an unbroken physical lineage between the artist and the listener, from the session microphone to the tape to the masters to the copies to the stylus of your turntable.

I have a similar affection for film, even if all editing is done through DIs nowadays, and even though I've been rooting for digital film-making ever since "The Last Broadcast".

The most interesting part is at the end. Online film school by Papa, Pfister & Kaminski? Three of the best. This is big.

The irony is that editors and colorists spend extra time and effort degrading digital footage to make it look like film.

Just as before they spent extra time to clean up the film. It's nothing new. You're always trying to push it in a direction that's slightly different from where you start.

The biggest hollywood guys including Kaminski david fincher and darren aronofsky all just use real grain scans like Cinegrain or Indie Scans.

Hollywood Director of Photography

Reply on news.ycombinator.com