Perya (Town Fair) - a Canon 7D Short

4000+ years old vellum is still there and readable - the cheap paper decomposes after min a few hundred years.

So the in the future we will be able to watch celluloid based films when data on hard disks and tapes is long time dead.

And yeah, I know ....with the dropping prices of disk space and blah...

Frank
 
xbourque said:
LOL. Famous last words.

That's what the stills photographers said 5-7 years ago.

That what the tube guitar amp afficionados said before it started raining amp emulator plug-ins for ProTools.

That's what the typesetters said when PageMaker 1.0 came out on dot matrix printers.

--X
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...ahhh...yeah...go tell that to Christopher Doyle, Rodrigo Pietro, Emmanuel Lubezki, Rob Richardson, and John Toll. All of whom still use chemicals to achieve their looks in post. I don't think you truly understand what "cinematography" is. It's not just picking a camera and a lens. It's picking film stock and processing them chemically too...

Eddy Robinson said:
Of course it can be reproduced digitally. Every film that has had a DI has landed back on film through a digital pipeline. It's the qaulity of the sensor that keeps changing and improving; if you have the time to scan film with a laser it's not like it degrades from being digitized. Digital is not the problem here, only the acquisition technology.
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It cannot be reproduced digitally. To say that "film can be reproduced digitally" is an oxymoron. Film can be scanned into a digital medium, like a PC, and then colour graded and whatnot, but the certain organic look that film produces cannot be re-created digitally precisely because it's not digital. I guarantee that feature-film directors and cinematographers will employ film over digital for a long, long time.
 
NoxNoctus said:
Yes, but taking a movie and editing it down by half the original runtime...haha. Thin Red Line is my all time favorite movie for what he and John Toll did, but the way it was done was horribly inconsistent. Entire parts and cast members cut out...maybe dailies would have helped in the grand scope of things. I don't know. It could just be the 3AM eating my brain
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It was only "horribly inconsistent" if you are thinking in terms of "Hollywood studio filmmaking". Otherwise, it was cinematic perfection.

Check these out:

Emmanuel Lubezki talks about working with Terrence Malick:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfDkI74GAzk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4rAXeeEvMg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lnwl6MJCjcU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbOX7Ccseow
 
I don’t know…I’m sort of in-between with this subject. I think film will be around (in some capacity) for a while (like how vinyl records are for club DJs) but as we see digital getting better and better more and more people will opt to go that route. As far as film being “reproduced digitally” I do think we will eventually get to a happy medium (just like we did with audio) where one would be able to successfully “emulate” the look of different film stocks. I will not say it will never happen. Just look at how, in as little as a year’s time, DSLR’s have changed the industry. Technology moves so fast that in a short period of time anything goes. Film isn’t quite dead as some make it out to be “yet” but it will get there. Even then there will be some who won’t let go of the medium and prefer to keep shooting “retro” style like some of today’s DJ’s who are still using vinyl records. Jm2c
 
Postmaster said:
So the in the future we will be able to watch celluloid based films when data on hard disks and tapes is long time dead.
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This is a common tune heard from film proponents. But what they don't seem to understand is that perfect digital back-up copies can be made that are stored on physical media (hard drives, tapes, flash memory) that are MUCH more space efficient than reels of celluloid. Digital copies don't suffer the same image degradation that celluloid does. Now I know that film preservation has been so perfected over the years that film can last indefinitely with little degradation when properly preserved and maintained. But I say that digital media are infinitely more easy to store and maintain than film is.

I'm going to make the wild prediction that in the future, ALL celluloid will be digitized for archiving, including the classics that are already being carefully preserved, like Citizen Kane. And you know what's really crazy? There's a mass market format available now that allows everybody the ability to own cinema-quality, solid-state copies of their favorite movies. It's called Blu-ray. 1080p is a barely noticeable resolution loss from the 2K masters that are industry standard.
 
And yet..... This pre-supposes a regular backup-transfer regime.
I remember on the beeb a while back a series called I believe "The Lost World of Mitchel and Kenyon" featuring old film from the early 1900's that had lain forgotten for over 100yr. It's not Holywood, no but it is vital historical material, And I worry, that 100 years from now people will know more about the Victorians or even ancient Egypt than about us and our throw-away culture.
As for old technology, there are still people using wet collodian because it gives them an image nothing else will, just as there are artisan printers hand setting real lead type, and even people who know how to knapp a flint axe. And yes, this is important.
Dave
 
Jean Dantes said:
...ahhh...yeah...go tell that to Christopher Doyle, Rodrigo Pietro, Emmanuel Lubezki, Rob Richardson, and John Toll. All of whom still use chemicals to achieve their looks in post. I don't think you truly understand what "cinematography" is. It's not just picking a camera and a lens. It's picking film stock and processing them chemically too...
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I don't think that you truly understand what "cinematography" is. The chemicals and processing are simply a means to an end. If another method or medium is available to achieve the same results, then cinematographers can and will use it instead. Your statement is exactly like saying that one doesn't "truly understand what 'editing' is" unless one cuts and splices celluloid on flatbed machines, and it's "not just assembling clips on a computer." Sure, one can still do that, and it's a great and valuable experience with its own advantages over digital editing. Just ask Spielberg, one of the last holdouts for analog editing.

Besides, those cinematographers that you mentioned, do they all routinely do the chemical processing in the labs themselves? I think not, which doesn't make your statement very meaningful at all.

It cannot be reproduced digitally. To say that "film can be reproduced digitally" is an oxymoron. Film can be scanned into a digital medium, like a PC, and then colour graded and whatnot, but the certain organic look that film produces cannot be re-created digitally precisely because it's not digital. I guarantee that feature-film directors and cinematographers will employ film over digital for a long, long time.
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If you pay attention, then you shouldn't be able to help but marvel at the miracles that genius computer programmers are achieving these days. Consider the RED Ray demo, for instance: 4K at 10 Mbps with no visible compression artifacts. Impossible, right? I have every reason to believe that someday in the not-too-distant future, some programmer will devise an algorithm that will perfectly emulate the "organic look" (the subtle, constantly morphing grain patterns) of film. And besides, film is not organic anyway, except maybe for the backing.
 
Oh yes, a few years back I was given some old glass plates to print that even then were over a hundred years old. The good thing about silver halide is you can hold the negative up to the light and see what's there, and I managed to print something worthwhile even from plates so degraded that a digital equivilent would be totally unrecoverable.
Dave
 
Postmaster said:
...if you can find a bluray player in 50 years and a display wit that antiqe HDMI plug ;-)
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And all of us have or can easily get projection equipment to play our old collection of 8mm or 16mm films without turning to antique stores or eBay? Just like film projection equipment will always exist somewhere and become re-manufactured by someone, so too will digital playback equipment.

daveswan said:
And yet..... This pre-supposes a regular backup-transfer regime.
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No. Why do you need a regular back-up and transfer regimen? Do you regularly back-up and transfer your store-bought DVDs? Hard drives, tapes, and solid-state media can be stored in a vault and left untouched just like film can.
 
untill the technology moves on and people forget. Film or plates can always be printed, but a forgotten file format?
Dave
 
I'm not saying that film will die, that it will disappear from existence or that nobody will use it. I think that the people who truly believe that are ignorant and naive. Film will always have a strong subculture of users, just like 8mm film and film still photography today. Old technology never goes away completely, and that's a good thing.
 
A digital file with 90% missing? The thing was that the impotant (For dating) image was still there and could be printed, even though the plates were very badly dammaged.
Dave
 
daveswan said:
A digital file with 90% missing? The thing was that the impotant (For dating) image was still there and could be printed, even though the plates were very badly dammaged.
Dave
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daveswan said:
untill the technology moves on and people forget. Film or plates can always be printed, but a forgotten file format?
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You're making a lot of unsupported assertions. What is your claim to authority, again?
 
ydgmdlu said:
I'm not saying that film will die, that it will disappear from existence or that nobody will use it. I think that the people who truly believe that are ignorant and naive. Film will always have a strong subculture of users, just like 8mm film and film still photography today. Old technology never goes away completely, and that's a good thing.
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Which is what I'm saying!
Dave
 
If the plates (or the image on the plates) were really 90% damaged, then I highly doubt that the 10% would be very discernible or useful anyway. It must not have literally been 90%.
 
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