replicate 16mm on digital? can it be done

starcentral

starcentral

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What's everyone's opinion on this - is it at all possible to replicate the look of 16mm by shooting digital, come close, or "no way Jose"?

This goes into many areas I realize like DOF of 16mm vs APS-C or similar super 35mm sized sensors, resolution, color science, pixels versus celluloid, etc..

But now honestly what's everyone's opinion on this? Can you shoot on a digital camera which has a crop mode like FS7/F5/F55, make use of some 16mm lenses, and shoot RAW or slog3 then take it through post to really get the look of 16mm?

Cheers mates,
 
16mm can have a wide variety of different "looks."

1. Shoot on B&W reversal with a shaky handheld camera, and it will look something like the early verite films such as "Primary."

2. Put in Ektachrome Commercial (a whole 32 ASA!), go out in the desert, and you can duplicate the early Disney nature films.

3. Load up some Kodachrome in your spring-wound Bolex and you can make the world's best sharp, highly saturated home movies. Just don't try to pull any prints from it.

4. Shoot the news, or make an instructional or industrial film, with a CP-16, Angenieux 12-120mm, and 7240 stock.

5. Or choose color negative film (7247 was the go-to in my day), put some excellent Zeiss lenses on your Eclair, Aaton, Arri 16BL or 16SR, hire a sound department and full grip crew, and make something that was hard to distinguish from a big-screen Hollywood 35mm release.

These very different styles have little in common except for the width of the film -- which one would you like to duplicate today?

(Personally, I shot mostly news and one-man-band documentary style, but generally used an Arri 16SR, Zeiss 10-100mm zoom, and 7247 color neg stock, with a Nagra and a shotgun for the sound. Somewhere between scenarios 4 and 5.)

- Greg
 
#5 please.

Why I started this thread is because someone I might be working with wants to shoot a film and give it a specific look they think is attributed to film stock, but 1.) haven't film stocks changed over the last few decades and only improved? and 2.) hasn't the advent of DI really given more color control to achieving specific looks which may confuse some as film having a particular look?
 
starcentral said:
#5 please.
Click to expand...

That may be the easiest one because it's not very different from shooting for that elusive 35mm look. Just de-sharpen it a teeny bit more and make the film grains twice as big. The color reproduction and dynamic range are the same. I agree with combatentropy that the Digital Bolex looks like a good place to start; the combination of the CCD sensor and their particular vision of color science does get you in the ballpark out of the box, and you can literally use old 16mm lenses on it with identical DOF results to their original purpose.

Yes, film stocks have evolved some, but that is a fairly slow-moving technology, and the biggest gains have been in faster stocks that perform as well at 500 ISO as the ones of the '80s did at 100 ISO. But the look straight out of the camera is not that radically different. Digital post is what has really changed the look of movies in the last 25 years or so (and makes it possible for video to look like film, or film to look like video, or anything in between that you can dream up).

- Greg
 
Replicate - no.
Come close - yes.

It is impossible to replicate printed and projected film, not only 16mm. There are colors that film can capture and print, but digital display and digital projection can't show (the opposite is also true: film can't capture and display some colors that digital can). But you can get damn close to film scanned, toned and then projected digitally. Using technical LUTs can get you far although most luts are smoothed for acceptable operation with low precision digital footage.
 
I think it really depends on what kind of S16 look you have in mind. While ago I shot couple of projects on 16mm and Super 16, this was after a few years of not shooting film. I was very positively surprised how far the 16mm emulsion evolved. And it is not even about the film stock only - it is about the 16mm, Super 16 (and of course 35mm) workflows, they've evolved. My theory is that somehow, ironically, digital cameras pushed what can be done in post forward dramatically so now we have better control of color, more intuitive workflow, better monitors, etc. My experience has been that 16 and S16 somehow benefited from it, not to mention that modern codecs, color matrices somehow unified both worlds because even if you shoot film there is usually quite a lot of digital steps too. We've been watching films shot on 35mm that have gone through digital intermediate process for years. So, again, it really depends what kind of 16, S16 look you have in mind: before digital revolution or after. Things I shot on Fuji 160 ASA Eterna stock looked great, I'd say almost too close to 35mm if I was after the more gritty "old" 16mm look. What I could do with it in post was far from the old times where you'd have just 50 copier lights, CRT analyzer TV which was usually so old and bad already that the only person who could interpret the preview was the even older colorist.
 
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