How are films recorded

SamXavia , 7 months ago

It depends on the film, film (the tape) is expensive to be able to record on and some Directors prefer recording on it. But most smaller filmmakers go digital due to budget as well as the ability to edit it easier.

SzethFriendOfNimi , 7 months ago

Technology Connections did a series of videos that does a good job breaking it all down

youtu.be/rVpABCxiDaU

MentalEdge , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Movies are absolutely still made and distributed on film, the physical dimensions of the film determine how much detail can be fit on it. A larger frame size means you use a bigger photosensitive area to capture the same picture, which effectively means you get better “resolution”. Though on film the image is captured by photosensitive particles or “grains” on the film.

Film is also still used in some movie theaters as the format of choice for their projectors. Often movies are distributed in any format imaginable, both digital and film, so it can be screened in any theater, regardless how the movie was recorded. Though the amount of film projectors around is definitely falling. More often than not new installations are digital.

But film still has its place, it has some image quality benefits that digital systems cannot yet beat. This has lead to fun stuff like movies distributed on film having digital audio tracks, encoded as complex microscopic qr-code style patterns right there on the film.

Film is still able to produce “higher resolution” and it of course reacts to light differently compared to a digital camera sensor. Because of that you get different results with digital vs film, not simply “better” or “worse”.

Which is used is up to the artistic preferences of the people making a particular film.

originalucifer , 7 months ago

i beeelieve i read somehwere that 35mm film is comparable to 4k raw storage. 4k raw storage is a lot of data, and until recently you couldnt really store that kind of data and move it quickly around... you know what is portable though? 35mm film. its incredibly information dense, despite being analog and is ancient compared to new film-less recording systems.

film is still an efficient way to store quality data.

that said, i may be out of date and its days might not only be numbered, but over

Jimmycrackcrack , 7 months ago

It’s not really a practicality thing. Digital equipment is well able to deal with the data quantities of 4k and above that as well and it’s a lot faster and more flexible to deal with because there’s no need to process the dailies in the film lab before you can watch them and people can also make colour corrections live on set to try things out. It’s also easier to make backup copies right away because again, you can do it right there on set so you have backups almost as soon as you’ve shot.

It used to be that the majority of major film releases continued to be film even as the consumer space had already adopted digital formats and this was mainly because of a lack of ability to match the quality of film with digital options and also just inertia from an industry that had a whole infrastructure and set of practices around film.

But quite some time ago now it’s been possible to get digital cinematic cameras “comparable” to film and it has largely taken over as far as I understand, (certainly on the low end where I can speak from experience but my understanding is even major big budget productions too). Where you hear that something isn’t shot digital, it’s usually because that fact is a point of interest in itself and hence remarked upon. In those cases it’s usually an aesthetic choice and part of why I put “comparable” in quotes because it kind of depends on what metric you’re comparing and some maintain that there are unique characteristics to film that they want to preserve in the movies they make, Christopher Nolan is a particularly ardent example of this.

In those cases, even when shot on film, it’s very rare for it to be projected from a film print and is almost always a digital copy of the movie projected through a digital projector and a server.

Drivebyhaiku , 7 months ago

A lot of directors look at shooting on actual film as almost a gimmick at this stage and kind of a costly one. The techs that deal in the loading/processing/storing of the media are getting more rare as the old timers retire out and there’s more things that can go wrong at every level of the use of the older medium because it’s heavy and it is more time consuming which racks up labour costs.

Camera folk work long ass hours compared to the rest of the shoot crew so it’s favours younger techs. Those who were around in the heyday of actual film have all but moved up the ladder to DOP positions or retired meaning the new blood isn’t getting the old process passed along and there’s a certain level of “fuck this shit attrition” that keeps career longevity in the industry low. The techs who specialize in film are very caught up in the romance of physical film the same way some writers use typewriters but all in all it is a dying art that fewer and fewer studios are willing to bankroll.

HobbitFoot , 7 months ago

Most directors now choose digital. There are still analog users like Nolan and Tarantino, but digital has become the industry standard.

Digital cameras offer a lot more flexibility over analog ones, including in dealing with lighting.

FuglyDuck , 7 months ago

so when they talk about length, they’re talking about the physical length of the film. 35mm film refers to the width. depending on the format being used- super35 for example- the length of a single frame or still on that film is about 18 mm.

as for why film- because digital recordings are actually pretty heavily compressed and once you lose that data, it can’t be recovered. the information stored on the film is actually much, much more densely encoded even if it’s analog. additionally, there’s some effects that simply can’t be perfectly replicated using digital, simply because it’s a fundamentally different medium.

You’ll have adherents to both camps, but ultimately it comes down to what produces a better film, and for box office productions, that’s still analog film.

bionicjoey , 7 months ago

digital recordings are actually pretty heavily compressed and once you lose that data, it can’t be recovered. the information stored on the film is actually much, much more densely encoded even if it’s analog.

This is why you sometimes see HD/4K rereleases of very old movies that were recorded on film. It’s not hard to get more resolution as long as they still have the original film reels.

accideath , 7 months ago

Digital video is not necessarily more compressed than analog film. The way your phone shoots it, yes. Modern digital cinema cameras however are both higher resolution and have a higher dynamic range than motion picture film. They shoot raw imagery that is incredibly high quality and detailed (and indeed needs large SSDs and hard drives) and is not behind film in any way, quality wise. This was different, even 10 years ago but by now, if all you care about is quality, digital is more than enough.

However, what digital cameras cannot reproduce is the the texture the feel and the specific look of film. Post processing gets close today but not all the way. Besides, the process of shooting film is very different and some directors and photographers prefer the more difficult yet more down to earth process.

Btw, in practice, most blockbuster films today are actually shot on digital cameras, especially the likes of RED, ARRI and Sony. Analog is only used by some productions although they are a minority now. Fanatics like Tarantino and Nolan are doing their best though to keep film alive and in the case of Nolan, push it to the limits by shooting 70mm and 70mm IMAX film. Especially the latter is better than any current digital camera but due to IMAX being much more difficult and expensive to shoot, almost no one besides Nolan uses it.

crandlecan , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Analoge beats digital in quality.

Edit: ya’all have to take back them downvotes… You know I am right! 😤

bestusername , 7 months ago

What is quality to you? The image size/resolution, the audio sample rate, the noise?

There’s a point where the difference is imperceptible.

I think it’s largely nostalgia behind replies like yours, analogue and digital are different, not a blanket better or worse.

schmidtster , 7 months ago

I believe the difference is analog can be continuously remastered while digital you have to completely redo everything. You can’t just add pixels, well AI is changing this…

MentalEdge , 7 months ago

Analogue will only allow for improved remasters for as long as screen resolutions are lower than the level of detail provided by the film grain on the master. Film doesn’t have infinite resolution, and digital cinema cameras are fast approaching sensor sizes that compete with film.

schmidtster , 7 months ago

Right but even basic 35mm is above 4k in “resolution” though, or am I misremembering?

MentalEdge , 7 months ago

Oh absolutely. In terms of detail, photosensitive chemistry still has digital sensors utterly beat.

I’m just saying the resolution isn’t endless. There’s a limit, digital tech just hasn’t caught up, is all. Yet.

And once you have a movie on film, scanning it into digital form at whatever resolution you want can be accomplished with lights and optics, at levels of detail that recording it digitally in the first place couldn’t have accomplished.

We might see film become the ultimate capture tech, yet digital be the way to actually watch it. We kind of do that already, but right now releases are downgrades compared to the film master.

schmidtster , 7 months ago

Interesting. Things could get really interesting with AI and the sensor tech, a more sensitive sensor could get more information out of film than is currently possible I would imagine?. And then you could also use AI to fill in and enhance more from there.

Now if only we had some screens to make it worthwhile hahah

MentalEdge , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

We have electron microscopes. As long as you have time (which when you’re recording actors doing a scene, you don’t) we have the tech to look at things at any scale we want.

We wouldn’t even need AI, just a way to illuminate the film and some optics to project it at whatever scale we need onto a sensor, and we could scan every frame on a film down to the molecular level if we wanted.

Compositing the resulting scan data into digital video would be trivial, and the resulting file would have a level of quality higher than what any digital sensor could have recorded directly.

schmidtster , 7 months ago

Is it just me, or does that not contradict the statement you said of “film doesn’t have infinite resolution”?

MentalEdge , 7 months ago

What? Not at all.

I’m saying we can already scan stuff at way beyond the resolution film is able to record, how is that mutually exclusive with there only being useful detail in the film up to a certain scale?

schmidtster , 7 months ago

We wouldn’t need Ai just a way….

Yeah you contradicted yourself, that’s why I mentioned you would need Ai and infilling…

MentalEdge , 7 months ago

No, I didn’t. And no, we wouldn’t.

The AI enhancement would be pointless, by then we’d be at detail levels far and above what the human eye can perceive.

You’re suggesting it would be useful to connect dots that are already dense enough to make a line.

schmidtster , 7 months ago

I think you completely misunderstood the conversation here, I don’t need stuff mansplained lmfao. I thought we were having a thought experiment on what things could potentially be.

And yeah you’ve made multiple contradictory statements regardless of that. I even brought up we don’t have screens to make any of this useful, was that not a big enough hint that it’s not a possibility currently…?

MentalEdge , 7 months ago

What the fuck, how did you interpret me saying “not needing AI” as me meaning “because there is infinite real detail”? All I was saying is that AI would be unnecessary to recover the detail available in film with currently existing technology, there are no contradictions in that.

If you misunderstand someone and they correct you, thats not “mansplaining”.

To then act like your interpretation is still absolutely correct, is disingenuous at best, and one-up-manship at worst.

schmidtster , 7 months ago

Because you would absolutely need to fill in information at that point…? You have film with finite resolution and a way to scan it at a higher resolution, you would need to fill in the gaps. The situation is already a possibility even with current tech in certain situations. I’m sorry you can’t understand this.

I didn’t misunderstand you… you missed my point dude lmfao. But if you think you were correcting me… yeah I’m the disingenuous one… sure….

MentalEdge , 7 months ago

I’m not correcting what you said, I’m correcting what you think I said.

AI could add detail that isn’t there in the film, but it is unnecessary to recover detail that IS there because we absolutely have the tech to get the full detail that is available in the film. No need to make up for lost detail with AI.

I though you meant we’d have to use AI to match film, because we can’t scan it at a superior-to-film level.

Film is also so so insanely high detail, that the idea of enhancing it further never even occurred to me. It’d be utterly pointless.

There is only a contradiction if you interpret my words in a way I didn’t intend.

So don’t. If you still do after I’ve told you otherwise, yes, you’d be being disingenuous.

schmidtster , 7 months ago

So we have an electron scanner that scan higher resolution than limited resolution film… and we don’t need AI because the resolution is available if we were to scan it…? What…?

Yeah that’s contradictory and exactly what you said…… sorry.

You also said earlier something completely different about film not being insanely high quality….

I can only interpret the words as you’ve stated them, and you’ve argued multiple conflating and contradictory points.

So what is it? Limited quality? Higher quality than we could ever see? Can’t remaster forever? Can?

MentalEdge , 7 months ago

So we have an electron scanner that scan higher resolution than limited resolution film… and we don’t need AI because the resolution is available if we were to scan it…? What…?

No, we can scan things at a molecular level, I never said that’d produce a result beyond what’s there in the grain, why would you think I meant that?

You also said earlier something completely different about film not being insanely high quality….

I said it’s not infinite, film only carries detail down to its grain size. That detail is still insanely high, but not “infinite” and as such you won’t be able to just keep re-scanning it forever, at ever higher detail.

I can only interpret the words as you’ve stated them, and you’ve argued multiple conflating and contradictory points.

No I haven’t, you read meaning from my words that wasn’t there.

Limited quality?

Yes.

Higher quality than we could ever see?

Also yes. These things can be true at the same time.

Can’t remaster forever?

Still yes, eventually you’d be scanning at a higher level of detail than what is there. And by that point, you’d have achieved resolutions that exceed the human eye. Though this depends on what kind of film the master is on. Some works will be on grain and film sizes that didn’t have that high quality to begin with.

schmidtster , 7 months ago

I’m only addressing your first part and I’m done…

Because you said you don’t need fucking Ai you clown. Jesus Christ, that’s the entire point of this now argument, you missed my entire point because you thought you needed to mansplain something, and have now caught yourself in a contradictory spiral.

The other exchange we already solved everything else, there is absolutely usecases where my “hypothetical” situation already happens. Fucking hell

MentalEdge , 7 months ago

And you don’t need AI to do the thing I was talking about, but you thought I was talking about something else.

And no, there isn’t, you compared consumer film, vhs, and maybe early digital mpeg video with cinema film. Those formats are nothing alike.

MentalEdge , 7 months ago

Yes, you’d need AI to exceed the level of detail that is in the film… But it never even crossed my mind that you’d want to.

I was simply making the point that AI is unnecessary to match the quality of film with a digital image.

schmidtster , 7 months ago

See so after insulting me and badgering me that I was incorrect, you missed my point because you couldn’t comprehend the situation where it’s possible. Yet it already is… home videos being scanned and upscaled it’s already a market dude lmfao.

And you still try and pass it off as you being superior, holy lord lmfao.

MentalEdge , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

I don’t even know how to respond to this one… You thought I was saying something I wasn’t, and attempted to call me on a mistake I didn’t make, and my taking offense to that is somehow my bad.

And those scans are being upscaled because old home video formats suck, no one was buying cinema cameras to use as camcorders. And the methods to scan these old formats suck even more, so upscaling has to be used to create detail to even come close to matching current consumer video formats.

This is no way equivalent to cinema quality film.

Pons_Aelius , 7 months ago

You are correct.

The figure I was given at art college was that a well exposed and developed 35mm negative had a minimum resolution of 90 million pixels, which is higher than 8K at ~75 million.

bestusername , 7 months ago

Well you’re definitely right about remastering/digitising old film…

But if Star Wars was done on old DV, Lucas wouldn’t have been able to digitally butcher it, so there’s that.

MentalEdge , 7 months ago

I dunno. I feel like he would have tried if there had been the same amount of public dissatisfaction with the originals as there was with the prequels.

bestusername , 7 months ago

He probably might have remade them… Give me chills thinking about it

crandlecan , 7 months ago

Ergo, analogue for now still beats digital at the highest ends of the market. There’s no digital camera outperforming the analogue ones.

crandlecan , 7 months ago

Sure… Nostalgia is what drives the movie studios… That’s why they still use analogue despite the superior results of digital, at lower total costs… 🤡!

accideath , 7 months ago

If we‘re talking IMAX, sure. No digital camera can reach that kind of resolution. But the standard 35mm film and even regular 70mm has been surpassed by digital cameras for a little while now, if we’re talking pure quality. Digital has higher resolution, higher dynamic range, higher sensitivity, etc.

What analogue film has is a texture and a feel that digital cannot emulate. It’s not objectively better but subjectively, it’s nicer. It has a certain look. It’s like vinyl records. They’re objectively worse than the digital masters but many still prefer them.

crandlecan , 7 months ago

I give up

njordomir , 7 months ago

I worked at a theater in high-school/college. I think it was Dark Knight, but at some point after going digital they brought back the film projector for certain shows and it was presented as a quality thing. I’m a super auditory person, so the thing that always stuck out to me in the IMAX was the sound. Those subs bump hard.

Conversely, one of my worst experiences, subjectively of course, was HFR (high frame rate) movies. I think it was a LotR film, but it looked so weird that I couldn’t get lost in the story.

accideath , 7 months ago

Interesting. I can attest to analogue IMAX having great sound, however, if you watched an analogue film projection of a current film in the last 20 to 30 years, the audio was most likely digital anyways and I believe that is also true for IMAX, since the film itself does not even have audio on it. I suppose, a good audio master and especially a good audio system do a lot of heavy lifting.

And yea, hfr is meh. The effect it has on film is very underwhelming. The only film I have seen where it worked was Avatar. In Avatar 2 it works well in the scenes it’s in, however, the transition between the hfr and normal parts is extremely jarring and takes you out of the movie. The film you saw in hfr was probably one of the hobbit films, since it was a big marketing thing for them.