Kodak to produce 8mm film camera

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Well, yeah, if they designed a new movement and a new scanner, such could certainly be possible. It would of course necessitate the scanner knowing that it's "doublemax 8" or whatever, but... how hard would that be? I don't know. You could almost still use a conventional scanner (as far as sprocket positioning goes), and just piece together the frames in post... in the vid that I showed above, Pro8mm is clearly scanning wider than the entire negative, and each frame is higher and lower than the negative, so ... yeah, it should be possible...

Then again -- remember that ultimate quality isn't what Super 8 is about; you can get much, much higher quality from 16mm, and higher quality still from S16, and way higher quality from 2-perf 35mm, and on and on...

It's fun to geek out on maximizing the potential but in reality, Max8 already delivers a 16:9 area of about 22.65 square mm... that's compared to Super 8's 16:9 frame size of 17.83 mm2. It's already an increase in frame size of 27%, so it's a pretty decent jump in size. The proposed between-the-sprockets idea would result in a wider aspect ratio, but overall negative utilization would be about the same, so...

I think Max8's a reasonable choice and gets us pretty much "there" for all purposes other than for those who just want an ultra wide frame size.
 
Years ago i was fortunate enough to see 8mm projection of Mark Lapore's films. Really beautiful work. The lack of resolution allowed a dream like quality. Difinitely not a hifi medium. Didn't matter in the context of what he was doing though.

Add the potential beauty of low resoluyion, with the idea that Mark Lapore's film reels will probably out last anything i have captured digitally, and you have a compelling medium to me. I will most likely run some film before i or it dies.

Very fortunate to have a medium that is truly optical.
 
jagraphics said:
Also what is the turn around time? I can start editing almost immediately not a week later.
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Kodak added edge numbers to their film in 1990, which allowed for digital editing to be matched back to film edits later. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keykode. Although these edge numbers don't appear to currently be on Super 8 film and the matching was made possible during the telecine process (edge numbers were read into a file at that point), if they really wanted to they could come up with a clever way to match the output of the HDMI to the final scan of the film in a frame-accurate manner. This would allow you to start editing immediately with a proxy recorded from HDMI and then just automatically replace that once you received the final scan.

As noted the sound will have to be recorded separately. Even where I record separate audio I always have at one channel on the camera which helps with synchronisation and editing.
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Like Barry noted, they could add an automated bloop mechanism to mark the frame and the audio for sync later.

In any case is there anything most people will want to do that can be done with film that can't be done with digital?
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Most, maybe not, but many, probably yes. See Tarantino's, Nolan's, Abrams', and others' dedication to film. They must find that it does something that they can't do with digital.
 
pkw11 said:
It's not an issue of which is "better". Film looks like film (no nostalgia is necessary, there are film images/photos everywhere). Video looks like video! You don't have to be in a theater, either. Video doesn't look like film. Of course today, many younger people never really saw many "film" films and video images are seen as normal and the standard. But that doesn't make video look like film. It has nothing to do with which is better.
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Unless you have a better explaination, this is part of the precise type of bs i was talking about.
 
pkw11 said:
It doesn't matter? Then you've never shot, developed and printed 35mm Tri-X and Plus-X. There are enormous differences when the same shot is made using Tri-X and Plus-X (I'm just using these two as an example). The size of the grain and the tonal differences between films are very large and result in images that look very different.

You might not be looking at the grain, but the overall images are quite different. If this is true for a single image, then what effect would there be with moving images?

I'm printing still images right now from a Nikon V1 and it's obvious how digital images are different from film images. All you have to do is magnify the image. What happens 300% with the digital image? You get really ugly little squares. If I had a film image you would just get grain. If different speed film result in different looking photos, then different types of image sensors (digital versus film) will also result in different looking images. That's unless you make a digital sensor that completely mimics a piece of film.
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More bs.
 
Camera Expert said:
Hopefully the footage from this Kodak camera can look just as good or better than this.

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The colour is better than most super 8 but its still vastly too soft to call that good.And i used to use film and no i would not go back, video may look different but it is vastly superior.Just watching the very few tv progamns that are still filmed with 16mm confirms that compared to the digital ones,thankfuly wildlife programns look great now,when old film clips of David Attenborough are mixed in with modern shot material the difference is immence.
 
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Yes, current technology does look better than those old wildlife films. But, my Kodachrome Super 8 home movies look good when projected - of course this is camera original, not prints or digital transfers. On anything but a large screen HDTV, they look not quite as good as a contemporary TV series such as Elementary, but they look good enough so that no one except a serious nitpicker would even notice. And they have that ineffable quality that video can approach but not quite duplicate. For many years, I surveyed video gear in the hope of finding something affordable that looked as good. And about five years ago, it arrived. What we have now looks really good, and I like it. But Super 8 allows you to get that special film look without a professional crew. Too bad there is no Super 8 reversal film that could be directly projected.
 
pkw11 said:
bs? What makes moving images? A whole bunch of individual images. The qualities of the moving images is a function of the individual images. Have you actually ever done any photography and darkroom work? Video images don't look anything like film images when you take them down to their most basic level. That's not B.S.!
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I spoke too fast then. My applogies. I see what you mean now.

8mm is film. But it is a far cry from 35mm or even s35. So, when you were talking about dark room and printing work vs. digital prints, i was just surprised the comparison was being made on a thread about 8mm.

considering Barry Green's response to this post, i will further explain.


i read your post too quickly and responded in short. Seeing your response (quoted above) i realized better the point you were making, about the very base of these technologies are different. When i read it the first time, i thought you were talking about the 35mm benefits over digital, which is less applicable to 8mm. There is a beautiful analogue feel with s35 motion capture, but when you get to 8mm the grain and imperfections and gate weave are kind of in your face. Sure, the highlight roll off is nice, but shadows are noisey and grainy, and skintonallity not nearly as gorgeous, unless you like grainy blobs for everything except extreme close ups. As much as the technology behind 8mm and s35 and 70mm are the same, the end look is an entirely different animal. Would you take an Arri alexa and crop into a small area of the image and say it is the same? Of course not, it would look like crap. Except with 8mm not just is there resolution loss, but as Barry said, every imperfection gets magnified. 8mm is pixel peeping. Is it amazing that film can still look good at such a tiny crop? Yes. But i hate seeing talks about the superiority of film with references to larger formats when the conversation is about 8mm. So, i mistook your meaning and intent. For that i am sorry.
 
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James0b57 said:
8mm is film. But it is a far cry from 35mm or even s35.
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The only difference is size*. The 8mm film is made by cutting the 35mm film into smaller pieces. The color, the motion, the dynamic range, everything else is the same. DOF is way different of course, in the same way that a DSLR is different from a 1/2" video camera. The Max8 S8 frame is about halfway between a 1/2" video sensor and a 1/3" video sensor.

You'll see lower resolution and more grain from 8mm because it needs to be blown up so much bigger to view it, yes. And accordingly, any dust or hairs or scratches on the film will be proportionally magnified, as will any gate weave or, really, anything else...

A S35 negative is 24mm wide, a Max8 negative is a bit over 6.3 mm wide, so in general the S35 frame is around 4x wider and 4x taller. So S8 will need to be magnified 16x more than S35 to make a comparable viewing size, and that means that the grain will be 16x larger, the dust and hairs and scratches will look 16x bigger, etc.

*addition for the pedantic -- yes there could be other minor differences due to the type of shutter employed on the S8 camera, or the type of iris used in the built-in lens, some S8 cameras used exposure control that used very primitive three-bladed iris, etc. Or, of course, if you shoot at 18fps, that'll look different than film shot at 24fps, obviously. But those are differences caused at the camera level, and are not the film's fault.
 
Barry_Green said:
...You'll see lower resolution and more grain from 8mm because it needs to be blown up so much bigger to view it, yes. And accordingly, any dust or hairs or scratches on the film will be proportionally magnified, as will any gate weave or, really, anything else...
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Precisely the point that it is visually and aesthetically "a far cry from 35mm and s35." 8mm has its own look and feel, even if it is cut from the same roll off the production line. Optical and mechanical physics are greatly influenced by size. There is a bigger difference between 8mm and 35mm than there is between Sony/Arri/Red.
 
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Any software/plug-in solutions people recommend that emulate's Super 8 pretty well instead of actually shooting with a Super 8 Film camera?
 
I have to say that if the image looks as good as the Logmar camera's image, which I will assume it will, then I really don't see the point of this. The only reason I would ever shoot in S-8 today would be to get the "look" one would associate with S-8. The Logmar footage basically looks like fuzzy 16mm. Big deal.
 
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