Film Is Dead! Long Live Film!

Timmyjoe

Timmyjoe

Active member
It's no secret that for years I pushed film, especially with the Arriflex 16S cameras. I've been away from it for a while, shooting still photography and working with digital video in the GH-1 realm, trying to mate cine lenses with inexpensive digital cameras.

Yesterday I ran across a bunch of old test clips that I'd shot years ago with an Arriflex 16S and some "cheap" lenses, an old Schneider 16mm, and 25mm, one of those old Zeiss 8mm lenses that I always thought was sub-par, and an old Angenieux 12-120 zoom. And I took all the clips in their most raw form (some were from miniDV tape transfers, some from hard drive transfers) and converted them all to ProRes HQ at 23.98 fps. Threw them into Final Cut and strung them together, then output them in AVHCD and .mp4 to view on my Sony Bravia 32" flatscreen. And I was amazed at how good they looked.

So I compressed them (which definitely degraded the image) and put them up on the web site. You can view the long (19MB) clip below:

How 16mm holds up

Again, these were just test shots, and the hand held camera work is awful (probably had way too much caffeine that day) but the image quality is much better than I remembered. Everything was shot 16:9 with a taped off ground glass.

The church stuff was an attempt to create a dark/spooky religious environment. The train, flags and pan street shots were a lens test for the 8mm, 16mm, and 25mm respectively. And the end stuff of the young lady walking around, talking on the phone, was a test of the 8mm lens and was a miniDV transfer (which looked really good on the 32" flatscreen).

All of this was Regular 16, with cheap lenses. Makes me rethink shooting a project in 16mm, especially with the prices of 16mm gear at an all time low.

Just thought I'd share.

Best,
-Tim
 
Check the latitude on your wider street footage. Plenty of room - no clipping, nice roll-off! Miss my 16S/B, sorry I sold it, but glad I did when it was still worth something!
 
Can't beat film.

Can't beat film.

There is a resurgence in the ultra-16mm market still and film is still film. It's still the highest density format and it if well kept, it would last a lot longer than digital tape will.
 
Ultra 16 looks really cool, a way to bring old cameras back to life, too bad more transfer houses haven't made it available. If you want to look like film shoot 16, 35 is so sharp now that it doesn't even look like film anymore and have to wonder if it is digital. It's hard to justify the cost of film for personal projects, especially long form. But for a commercial or music vid a carefully shot roll can bring a lot of character, for less money than renting a high end camera.

I've contemplated the ultra 16 route for my eclair NPR, but as far as I know there is all of one transfer house handling the format, and it is in LA, the same reason I've yet to try super8 negative. I've looked at the test footage comparing ultra to standard, and other than being a bit wider for the same focal length, the difference in grain was not noticeable. I can get standard 16 transfered just about anywhere from relatively cheap one light to mini-dv all the way to spirit data-cine and 2k scans. 4/3 can be reframed in post as is the argument for shooting 4perf 35. If super 16 can handle being cropped to 2:40 widescreen for theatrical presentation, then standard 16 can handle the hd crop for tv, just saying. Need a new name for regular 16 to make it sound cool like classic16 or full16. For people who like grain and texture, and have a little budget I think it will make some comeback as all digital looks pretty much the same. It could easily become the super8 for the hd age.

As for cheap lenses, quality is in the eye of the beholder. I have the standard 12-120 angenieux that is known as the coke bottle, but in one tranfer session the colorist asked me if I had shot arri sr or Aaton, obviously modern zeiss glass was assumed. Its been a while since I've shot anything, demand died off with the dvx, and cheap hd and dslr's don't make it any easier to sell the upside. But I don't regret hanging on, In fact given some of the prices I've seen on ebay I wish I had the cash to give more cameras a good home, with a little care those cameras will last forever and they get a sensor upgrade every time a new stock is released. Lets hope enough pros continue to use it so that kodak keeps making it. Someday I'll have a film with a budget more than pizza and gas, and film stock won't be an issue. I remember seeing the budget breakdown for data management on SlumDog Millionaire, and said holy crap you could shoot 16 for less than that, and you'll know your master will last.

Time will tell, super8 has survived as a boutique format long past its mainstream death. 16mm was a long mainstay of TV, but many channels have banned it for HD use and so producers have switched to digital. As long as 35mm remains to gold standard there is hope.
 
dop16mm said:
Ultra 16 looks really cool
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Ultra 16 is clever as heck. It's a way to get substantially better images from a regular-16 camera, without needing S16 lenses. It uses the exact same image circle as regular 16, but the shape of it is far more conducive to widescreen televisions.

I've got a couple of S16 cameras and an Ultra16 camera. When you crop to 1.85, Ultra uses about 93% as much film surface area as Super16. So it's just about as good, image wise... S16 might be a tiny bit cleaner in grain, but Ultra's 93% of the way there. It's massively, hugely better than R16. And it's much, much cheaper to do the conversion -- it's just filing the gate; you don't have to re-center the lens mount or convert the magazines. And any standard-16 lens will work with it, you don't need pricier S16 lenses. We used Ultra16 on the "A Verse Before Dying" shoot, and I was really happy with how it turned out.

However, there's no denying that Super16 is "the" accepted widescreen 16mm format. Everyone, everywhere, is equipped to process and transfer S16. If you have a properly-converted S16 camera with a properly-centered lens mount and a properly-converted viewfinder with re-etched ground glass, then it's just so much better to go with S16.

I've contemplated the ultra 16 route for my eclair NPR, but as far as I know there is all of one transfer house handling the format, and it is in LA
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While there may not be a lot of places advertising for U16 compatibility, if the transfer house has the ability to pan 'n' scan around the negative, they should definitely be able to handle Ultra16. I don't remember exactly who Stephen had ours transferred at, I think it was a lab in Minneapolis.

the same reason I've yet to try super8 negative.
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I'm sure there are many places that can handle S8 negative. Yale could do it, I'm sure; I had some done at Pro8mm and wasn't thrilled with the service or quality, but that was over a decade ago so who knows, they may be better now, I don't know.

If super 16 can handle being cropped to 2:40 widescreen for theatrical presentation, then standard 16 can handle the hd crop for tv, just saying.
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The logic of your argument is reasonable, but -- can Super16 handle being cropped to 2.4:1 for theatrical? Not all that well, and definitely not on faster stocks. 800 ISO on an AF100 is infinitely cleaner than 800 ISO 16mm film. 50 ISO, yes, I'll agree. 250, yeah, probably. 800? Nope.

Need a new name for regular 16 to make it sound cool like classic16 or full16. For people who like grain and texture, and have a little budget I think it will make some comeback as all digital looks pretty much the same. It could easily become the super8 for the hd age.
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The aspect ratio is dead though, and cropping is just wasteful... go for the Ultra. Pop your gate out, take it to a machinist, have them widen it by .7mm on each side, and you'll be back in the game and competitive with Super16, for pennies.

But I don't regret hanging on, In fact given some of the prices I've seen on ebay I wish I had the cash to give more cameras a good home, with a little care those cameras will last forever and they get a sensor upgrade every time a new stock is released.
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Ain't that the truth! People are spending $1700 on a 7D; I picked up a complete Ultra16 CP GSMO with 10-100 and 5.9mm lens, two mags, batteries, all that stuff... for $1200-ish. And I snagged a complete Super-16 CP16R with video tap, proper S16 conversion, PL lens mount, four mags, four batteries, and three PL-mount Ultra-T lenses... for $2300. Less than the cost of a 5D body-only.

Now, to be fair -- when I was first loading up the mags on the GSMO, I'm sitting in the car shoulder-deep in a changing bag trying to find the frickin' sprocket hole to line up the film cutter to trim the edge so it'll go through the frickin' gate, and I said out loud "why in the HELL would anyone EVER shoot film again?!?!" But five minutes later, when we were on set and I'm lookin' through that beautiful optical viewfinder, and Stephen called action and I hit the button and the wonderful flickering viewfinder started its flickering and the purr of the film moving past the sprockets... I fell in love all over again...

Time will tell, super8 has survived as a boutique format long past its mainstream death.
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Well, sort of. It died, dead as a doornail. It was resurrected from the dead by ebay. Ebay fueled a massive craze for nostalgia in its early days, man I spent a fortune buying old S8 gear, and I made a ton of money buying old cameras, cleaning 'em up, and reselling them.

16mm never died the way S8 did. It's been actually rather constant up until the DVX. The DVX really pimpslapped 16mm, and HD has gone a long, long way to finishing it off. You may be right, 16mm (including S16 and U16) may become a boutique format. I hope it soldiers on. Nothing teaches you to film like film does. I used to use an Eyemo -- sixty seconds of footage per roll of film. You learn discipline, you learn to think ahead, you learn the value of rehearsals, when you hear that film camera running and know that you've only got 23 seconds of runtime before the spring runs down, and you've only got sixty seconds before you have to load up a new $100 roll of film... Even though the film came on daylight-load spools, I used to load 'em in a changing bag to get the extra six seconds of runtime out of them...

People can argue about the "look" of film vs. digital 'til the cows come home, but until you've actually shot film (and paid for it), it's hard to understand the very different dynamic and thought processes that you go through. It really does make you work in a different way, and that will show up in the finished product.
 
Barry_Green said:
Now, to be fair -- when I was first loading up the mags on the GSMO, I'm sitting in the car shoulder-deep in a changing bag trying to find the frickin' sprocket hole to line up the film cutter to trim the edge so it'll go through the frickin' gate, and I said out loud "why in the HELL would anyone EVER shoot film again?!?!" But five minutes later, when we were on set and I'm lookin' through that beautiful optical viewfinder, and Stephen called action and I hit the button and the wonderful flickering viewfinder started its flickering and the purr of the film moving past the sprockets... I fell in love all over again...
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Hey Barry,

I know it's not an artistic decision, but there really is something about the optical viewfinder, the beauty of an image on a piece of ground glass, the flicker when the camera comes to life, and the purr of the film moving through it, that just gets my heart racing. It really is, for me, where part of the passion comes from. As much as my head tells me on certain projects digital is more practical, my heart will always be in love with the motion picture film making experience.

Best,
-Tim
 
Agreed. It's just ... different. It makes you think about it differently.

It's like I always say -- would Hemingway have written any better if he'd had Microsoft Word? I doubt it. But I do think he would have written differently. When your mind is free-associating at 100wpm on a word processor, I think you just write differently than when you're using pen and paper -- you have so much more time to concentrate on each and every letter, and it takes so long, that you write differently. You think more about what you're going to write, and what the best way is to say it, because it's so much more effort to commit the letters to paper... I do think that the end result of the two writing methods would be different. And for me, film is that way. In video, the "tape is cheap" mentality rules, and I've seen people do ten, twelve, even twenty takes of a given scene. In film... you've got a film budget for maybe three takes, that's it. And then we're moving on. So you approach it differently. Better? Maybe. Worse? Maybe. But differently. I think that for low-budget folks, it's a different art form, maybe only as different as watercolors vs. oils for a painter, but still, different.

(for the multi-hundred-million-dollar budgets, it makes no difference, of course -- the film budget is such a tiny percentage of the overall budget that they'd probably shoot the same way whether they had film or video). But for the low-budget guy, I think it changes the art form... at least enough that I think every aspiring artist should try to do at least one shoot on film, to experience it.

The other thing about shooting film, and how enjoyable the process was on "Verse" -- there were so many fewer things to worry about. Was the monitor connected properly? I didn't care -- I didn't have a monitor. Was the white balance set properly before the take? Pshaw -- are you kidding? I had daylight film loaded, and we're shooting in daylight, so of course the white balance is set right. What about the shutter speed? Who cares? I can't change it, so -- I'm not gonna worry about it. With video there's so many things the camera can do, but it's incumbent on you to make sure that it's all set properly. With film, you point the lens at the subject, focus, and pull the trigger. That's it. Oh, and yeah, you might want to meter the scene, but as long as you're within a two or three stops, it's gonna be fine(!) Isn't that crazy? Waveform monitors, zebras, clipping highlights, master pedestal settings... bah. Click the button on the light meter, set the f-stop, and pull the trigger... :thumbsup:
 
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