j1clark@ucsd.edu
Veteran
I'm wondering how many people actually have 'shot film'... and seen it all the way to a projected print... while 'still film', my background, may be slightly different than 'movie' film... when these numbers of 13 or umpty ump stops of 'dynamic range' (never heard that term used for film until the digital age...), I wonder if they ever really 'shot film'...
Here's what one had to do to 'compress' a contrast range... shoot film, note contrast, and... CHANGE DEVELOPMENT TIMES TO REDUCE THE HIGHLIGHT AREAS... WHY? BECAUSE THE PRINT MATERIAL ONLY HAD ABOUT 7 STOPS OF RANGE TO PRINT.
While Ansel Adams may have used 8x10 contact prints on 40's vintage papers, to get 10 Zones (aka stops...), by the time the 70's rolled around, when I started photography, and using 35mm or 2 1/4 film, and the then current print papers, 7-8 stops of print range was it.
Of course with stills one could 'fiddle' with the print, wave wands or hands over shadow areas to keep them from going blank black, or burning in highlight areas to bring high density ranges in to some sort of texture in the print. But that was what one could do with a 'single frame' for still printing.
Movie printing had far less ability to adjust the range of what ever may have been on the negative to what ever the 'projection print' material may have been.
So, in terms of output, 7-8 stops was it.
To be sure until the early 2000's digital still cameras didn't cut it for representing scene values in terms of the final print. But 14 years later, almost no one in the 'commercial' world uses Film film.
From my view for 'commercial', and that includes Hollywood productions, the ARRI Alexa is impressive in terms of image capture and the ability of post processing such that I in particular don't even think of 'Film film'. RED also has produced impressive results. etc...
I'm reminded of the 'Tube' vs 'Transistor' type arguments in the audio world... To me, a person with reasonably hearing, I would not pay the premium for 'tube', 'vinyl', etc. and the 'hot house' atmosphere one has to maintain to keep these things in pristine condition.
As for the DSLRs as far as I can tell in terms of 'exposure control' the engineered 'S' curve and the lack of the user to really adjust parameters on that curve, is a significant element of why 'film' vs. 'digital' crop up.
The manufacturers don't help by publishing detail diagrams of the camera's various 'curves', but use fuzzy terms to describe the various alternatives... which when really closely tested, don't give much more 'latitude' one from another.
I would also note, that in the days when Film was king, one absolutely never had much better for 'movie' film than ASA 200-250 until recent times with ISO 500T (to use it outdoors with a 'daylight filter'... one had to cut that ISO down due to the filter... unless one wanted 'bluish' cast (or perhaps could be done with timing of development...)).
These days numbers like 800 or 1280... even 1600... are more or less frequently heard. For Film a 1600 ASA film would have grain the size of spit balls... and only a few situations that would have been tolerated... and mostly not in Hollywood productions... (If taken into consideration from the beginning of movie making to the present day, I'd claim that 90% of all Film films where shot on a range between 32 ASA and 250 ASA)...
There are some specific things about 'digital' that I don't like... jaggies being one artifact of the rasterized scanning. Ok... so get better 'jaggie' filters (at popular prices...). Better control of the capture 'transfer curve', not for the sake of some marketing broshure but that can be controlled by the camera person. That is putting out a DSLR that has 14 stops of 'dynamic range' but still using an S curve with no option to control the S... doesn't cut it.
Better yet would be 14 stops of DR that has 12 stops of 'linear' response... Then one could possibly work in post to reduce the range in an intelligent way to match the ultimate (or set of ultimate) output devices.
Here's what one had to do to 'compress' a contrast range... shoot film, note contrast, and... CHANGE DEVELOPMENT TIMES TO REDUCE THE HIGHLIGHT AREAS... WHY? BECAUSE THE PRINT MATERIAL ONLY HAD ABOUT 7 STOPS OF RANGE TO PRINT.
While Ansel Adams may have used 8x10 contact prints on 40's vintage papers, to get 10 Zones (aka stops...), by the time the 70's rolled around, when I started photography, and using 35mm or 2 1/4 film, and the then current print papers, 7-8 stops of print range was it.
Of course with stills one could 'fiddle' with the print, wave wands or hands over shadow areas to keep them from going blank black, or burning in highlight areas to bring high density ranges in to some sort of texture in the print. But that was what one could do with a 'single frame' for still printing.
Movie printing had far less ability to adjust the range of what ever may have been on the negative to what ever the 'projection print' material may have been.
So, in terms of output, 7-8 stops was it.
To be sure until the early 2000's digital still cameras didn't cut it for representing scene values in terms of the final print. But 14 years later, almost no one in the 'commercial' world uses Film film.
From my view for 'commercial', and that includes Hollywood productions, the ARRI Alexa is impressive in terms of image capture and the ability of post processing such that I in particular don't even think of 'Film film'. RED also has produced impressive results. etc...
I'm reminded of the 'Tube' vs 'Transistor' type arguments in the audio world... To me, a person with reasonably hearing, I would not pay the premium for 'tube', 'vinyl', etc. and the 'hot house' atmosphere one has to maintain to keep these things in pristine condition.
As for the DSLRs as far as I can tell in terms of 'exposure control' the engineered 'S' curve and the lack of the user to really adjust parameters on that curve, is a significant element of why 'film' vs. 'digital' crop up.
The manufacturers don't help by publishing detail diagrams of the camera's various 'curves', but use fuzzy terms to describe the various alternatives... which when really closely tested, don't give much more 'latitude' one from another.
I would also note, that in the days when Film was king, one absolutely never had much better for 'movie' film than ASA 200-250 until recent times with ISO 500T (to use it outdoors with a 'daylight filter'... one had to cut that ISO down due to the filter... unless one wanted 'bluish' cast (or perhaps could be done with timing of development...)).
These days numbers like 800 or 1280... even 1600... are more or less frequently heard. For Film a 1600 ASA film would have grain the size of spit balls... and only a few situations that would have been tolerated... and mostly not in Hollywood productions... (If taken into consideration from the beginning of movie making to the present day, I'd claim that 90% of all Film films where shot on a range between 32 ASA and 250 ASA)...
There are some specific things about 'digital' that I don't like... jaggies being one artifact of the rasterized scanning. Ok... so get better 'jaggie' filters (at popular prices...). Better control of the capture 'transfer curve', not for the sake of some marketing broshure but that can be controlled by the camera person. That is putting out a DSLR that has 14 stops of 'dynamic range' but still using an S curve with no option to control the S... doesn't cut it.
Better yet would be 14 stops of DR that has 12 stops of 'linear' response... Then one could possibly work in post to reduce the range in an intelligent way to match the ultimate (or set of ultimate) output devices.
