Film is officially dead?

Considering many big films who are shooting film are shooting on Panavision GIIs (1987), or Arri 535B's (1990), or even the amazing MOS 35IIc's (1970's?!), I'm willing to be that with good maintenance, these film cameras will continue to work for decades. Remember, film cameras are not like digital. Their image is based just on lenses and film stock. The older ones are almost all mechanical, while the newer ones are 50% electronic and 50% mechanical.

Point is. If you have spare boards, these cameras will likely last longer than any digital camera out today, and will likely be in perfect working order even after Fuji and Kodak close their doors.

:(

Film cameras last much much longer than digital. As mentioned Panavision GII's are probably in the top three most frequently rented film camera at Panavision, and it's been around for 24 years or so. I'd suspect the newer Millenium's, Arri 435x's, Arri 416's, and etc will last longer than the film stock.
 
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lwright84 said:
Therein lies the issue, no one is making film stock anymore either (that I'm aware of).
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Incorrect. They are very much making film stock. Lots and lots of it.

Of course my opinion is that it is very much in danger of not being made. Kodak is financially ruined (for now and not because of motion picture film production) and sales are dropping. But they are still making it. Trust me, they are.
 
"But digital cinema will become so adept at mimicking the look of film that within a couple of decades, even cinematographers may not be able to tell the difference."...I think he's off by a couple of decades. I think you could pretty much fool anyone at this point except maybe an engineer with some scopes. In a couple years, forget about it.
 
Again, there's a reasonable amount of film cameras out there... and, as it's also stated, will still upgrade/service current cameras.

Of course film is dying, but this isn't the "nail in the coffin", just another receipt of the since-long obvious. As long as there's a few big directors working with film, so the mainstream audience doesn't forget how it looks... oh, like people can tell the difference when we're printing 1080... derp. :cheesy:
 
Ryan Patrick O'Hara said:
Considering many big films who are shooting film are shooting on Panavision GIIs (1987), or Arri 535B's (1990), or even the amazing MOS 35IIc's (1970's?!), I'm willing to be that with good maintenance, these film cameras will continue to work for decades. Remember, film cameras are not like digital. Their image is based just on lenses and film stock. The older ones are almost all mechanical, while the newer ones are 50% electronic and 50% mechanical.

Point is. If you have spare boards, these cameras will likely last longer than any digital camera out today, and will likely be in perfect working order even after Fuji and Kodak close their doors.

:(

Film cameras last much much longer than digital. As mentioned Panavision GII's are probably in the top three most frequently rented film camera at Panavision, and it's been around for 24 years or so. I'd suspect the newer Millenium's, Arri 435x's, Arri 416's, and etc will last longer than the film stock.
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Awe man, I lucked out big time and was able to with a full Panavision GII package for a week long summer arts program during collage summer break. That experience has stayed with me ever since. They truly are all mechanical. I marveled next to the AC at how there was basically only one switch on the camera: on and off!

I used to be scared of film, but once you know what your doing, the mystique falls away and that beautiful celluloid becomes like a canvas to paint on with light.
 
I wonder how many cameras they made a year anyway. That's something I try to remind people here about, whenever we talk about certain features in certain cameras. Economy of scale plays a big part in the price of a camera.

"You can't have uncompressed RAW in a sub-$5,000 camera. The cheapest camera in the market with that is $100,000."

We need to stop thinking of features from a filmmaker's perspective, and look at them from an engineer's. From an engineering perspective, I think the DSLRs are more complex than the "digital cinema" cameras. They have more pixels per sensor. They have higher compression. They have smaller bodies. All of those aspects make them harder, not easier, to make.

So, why are they cheaper? Because they sell hundreds of thousands of them a year. Meanwhile Aaton sells so few, that they make them by hand. That's kind of cool, but you can bet that if every family wanted an Aaton instead of a Canon Rebel, Aaton would have set up a factory to stamp them out. And they could amortize their R&D over more units. You could probably buy one for a grand.
 
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Preservation is the really big question here. The technical challenges and the costs are staggering. I think the early decades of digital cinema (and it may be quite a while before we emerge from those) are going to be somewhat analogous to the era of nitrate film. Many many years down the road, a vast amount of our current cinema may be, for all practical purposes, lost forever.
 
KMR said:
Preservation is the really big question here. The technical challenges and the costs are staggering. I think the early decades of digital cinema (and it may be quite a while before we emerge from those) are going to be somewhat analogous to the era of nitrate film. Many many years down the road, a vast amount of our current cinema may be, for all practical purposes, lost forever.
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Really? Sure stuff has to be transferred from one type of file format to another every 10 or 20 years (to make sure it can be opened in modern software) but how hard is it to keep a copy of a film? We live in the digital age when archiving is an art in itself and taught at university. There's an awareness of the importance of film as an art form and social document that just wasn't the case in the 1930s.
 
Searcher said:
Really? Sure stuff has to be transferred from one type of file format to another every 10 or 20 years (to make sure it can be opened in modern software) but how hard is it to keep a copy of a film? We live in the digital age when archiving is an art in itself and taught at university. There's an awareness of the importance of film as an art form and social document that just wasn't the case in the 1930s.
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Here I have to side with film. While it degrades or is destroyed, one never be able to rerecord over the film.

An example of this is some portion of the US tapes of the first moon landing have been reused and the originals lost. As it was a set were found in australia which allowed most of the recordings to be recovered.
 
Searcher said:
Sure stuff has to be transferred from one type of file format to another every 10 or 20 years (to make sure it can be opened in modern software)
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And that is a big part of why preservation is a huge issue. (And "10 or 20 years" might be quite optimistic in some cases; hardware and software evolution doesn't really seem to slow down.) I have a very strong feeling that there will be a whole lot of digital content that ends up effectively, and in some cases actually, lost forever. As hardware and software formats evolve, it will become harder and harder to keep up with the ever increasing amounts of data to be preserved.
 
Yes. I am VERY happy. I also read this response... but if you really think about it, does this say anything at all? What do you expect them to say?

My point is, the motion picture film people at Kodak, I am sure are doing their jobs to 110% everyday. They will continue to do their jobs, because they like what they do and they have passion... but sadly that does not change the fact that the company is on unstable ground, and as employees of that division, they don't really have control over the big picture.

The truth is, Kodak has a very dim future, (As of now) and is eating through their cash rather quickly. They can start selling patents, like we all expected, (and as they did to IMAX), but that's not a permanent fix. It's like loosing your job and in order to stay away from being bankrupt, you sell your nice belongings... that will fix your cash problem now, but doesn't really establish a new revenue stream. So once the patents are either old or all sold, kodak will have needed a dire restructuring by this time. Lucky for them, they have an estimated $3b in possible patents, so they have a little bit of time to figure out how to move the company in a positive direction. However, that may seem like a lot of money, but it isn't. The cash they are eating through now, is 700$ million, I believe, so it won't last as long as it sounds.

Not to be negative... but Kodak is much bigger than it's motion picture division, and the fate of the company will be because of a number of factors before it comes down to the performance of the motion picture film division. If the company does go under (Look at General Motors, United Airlines, Enron, lehman brothers, compUSA, Circuit City, Borders, etc) which is still a big possibility considering... their passion and dedication to the industry doesn't mean anything when the board of directors and top investors start selling the company off bit by bit to make their last dollar.

I'm sure the people at Saturn, Hummer, Pontiac and Oldsmobile liked designing cars... but at the end of the day, when a giant company is bankrupt or in dire straights.... it's not up to the passion of the employees or the passion of the customers.

So good news is... The people who make motion picture Kodak film, are passionate and not going to stop. Well duh. But those people have very little control if the stock market or investors run away scared and leave the board of directors to some very hard decisions.



Kodak is a very large company in a very big problem. As comforting as their response is... it's their response. To put out a response of any other nature would be business suicide. They won't tell you if the house is on fire. Kodak may very well pull out of this, but this message isn't quite from a balanced source. As of now, almost all financial analysts, who will likely paint a more realistic picture of kodak's future, show much more concern. I think those articles are much more honest and straight forward.
 
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