Film - format

W

writerchick

New member
I only just thought about this!

Movies shown at the cinema were always on a reel of film and projected with a projector.

What happens with new films these days? What with the digital revolution I'm wondering if movies are now recorded in digital format somehow - or is it still old-fashioned film stock?
 
Most films are still, ermm, 'filmed' on film and still projected on film, but everything in between is digital - the film is scanned, all the editing, effects, colour grading etc are done on digital intermediate then its just printed back onto film for distribution. Some films are, ermm, 'filmed' with digital cameras and some cinemas have digital projectors, but they're still in the minority. A big issue with this is the economics of it. With film, the projectors are relatively cheap but the film is very expensive, so the cost of distribution falls mostly on the studios. With digital, distribution costs next to nothing but the projectors cost a fortune, so the cost is transferred to the cinema owner, which is why most cinemas haven't gone digital. The reason most of the digital cinemas in the UK exist is because the UK Film Council came up with a scheme where the cinema owners could lease the projector and pay off the cost gradually so the economics worked more like the old model.
 
harddrives
film is scanned at very high resolutions, 4-8k for the development processes these days. its good theaters didn't jump into digital too early, early projectors were low resolution, some only being not much more than hd resolution even, i remember seeing the god awful screen door effect during one of those star wars films. egaRAB.. with digital waiting is always a good bet, things tend to be hyped before they are fully baked.

as for film in digital, many films have been compromised because stupid directors jumped onto the digital bandwagon too soon. collateral being one, it looked like sh*tty video because the digicams were sub par. there is one digicam that might be film level quality, its the red one, with all the depth of field and resolution you could want, but its expensive. films have been shot with lesser cameras...poor decision ..short term thinking. esp now that we are finally seeing old films being restored to hd glory decades after release. whereas early digital shot films will look like sh*t forever.
 
These days, digital is still seen as the poor relation and used generally on movies that require extensive CGI or low budget affairs.

Here's a list of Hollywood films shot on digital:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_films_shot_in_digital

There are a lot of interesting videos on youtube that people have done using digital camcorder footage and post processing it to look like film, it's really quite impressive how imperceptible the difference is.

That list misses out the new Star Wars trilogy of which the last two were shot on Sony HDW-F900s and HDC-F950s.
 
Most of the digital cinemas in the UK use projectors like the Christie CP2000 which are only 2k (2048x1080). On paper that resolution barely looks better than HDTV or blu-ray, but remember digital cinema uses a much higher bitrate with lossless or at least very light compression, greater bit depth than the 24bits (8 per colour) used by HDTV, and no chroma subsampling (4:4:4 compared with HDTVs 4:2:0).
Its astonishing that some digital intermediates are 8k now, I bet that will be a real pain in the arse to work with for a few years yet.
 
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