Death of 35mm Film

Vivek

Master Member
I'm sorry, can I get a synopsis? The first two pages seemed to be 'cost to theaters = bad' Seriously, would the same argument about the death of silent films by the new requirement for projectors to be able to play 'talkies' be any different?
 
Also, film degrades, scratches, freaking melts even. It's like why would anyone ever want to swap from VHS tapes to a DVD or Bluray? Why? Because you can play a DVD or Bluray 50,000 times and the quality is as good as the first day you played it. A VHS tape degrades as you rewatch it over and over, as anyone who had a copy of "Caddyshack" on VHS found after watching the high diving scene!
 
Never realized how many problems there were with storing digital movies. Couldn't 35mm film continue to be manufactured in smaller quantities just for archival purposes?
 
To play devil's advocate (and again, I prefer real film thank you), the argument that formats change is disingenuous. Technology chnages too. So the projectors that show the 35mm prints may be so obsolete in a century you can't project the prints you've preserved. Try finding an 8 track player for instance.
 
I've been wondering the same thing about the photos I have taken and all that digital information and media that I have stored. In most cases, beyond a backup harddrive or some storage on the internet, it's gone once the drive or device fails.

What happens if the internet goes and all the computer servers and backup-drives are fried ?

Should something really go wrong, we might find ourselves in a true dark age, lose vast amounts of information that only exists in a digital format.

About the article, they said somebody accidentally erased Toy Story 2, but unless they wrote new data over it, they should be able to get it back, there are companies that can salvage a lot of information on the drive of a laptop that lay in a swamp for days or weeks, they shouldn't have had any problem in getting most if not all the files back.
 
I prefer film too.

But everyone complains when their job or business is threatened by technology.

That's why they call it progress.
 
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I've been wondering the same thing about the photos I have taken and all that digital information and media that I have stored. In most cases, beyond a backup harddrive or some storage on the internet, it's gone once the drive or device fails.

What happens if the internet goes and all the computer servers and backup-drives are fried ?

Then again, we all take thousands more photos than we ever could have with film...so most of them would never have existed anyway without digital...
 
The fact is, nothing, in any format, lasts forever.

Jeyl, I agree that non-film movies can look great. So maybe I shouldn't have said "period." But generally I feel that film is more...inviting? Of course, part of that is a comfort and familiarity thing. I'm not even nuts about blu-ray to be honest. It's so crisp it almost looks hyper-real. I don't always care for it. I guess "soft and warm" is what I'm accustomed to and digital often (not always) looks "hard and cold." Like my ex wife.
 
Hi guys. I was projectionist up till December last year. My cinema went fully digital. Shame to see it die off. Loved working with 35mm. Making the films up. Testing them before the public breaking them back down at end of run. Shame. All good things come to an end.

Sent from my HTC EVO 3D X515m using Tapatalk 2
 
Hi guys. I was projectionist up till December last year. My cinema went fully digital. Shame to see it die off. Loved working with 35mm. Making the films up. Testing them before the public breaking them back down at end of run. Shame. All good things come to an end.

Sent from my HTC EVO 3D X515m using Tapatalk 2

I used to love doing all that as well. Big old downtown theater, ancient bohemoth of a projector...lots of character in that booth, lots of history. :thumbsup
 
Thing with film is if you enlarge a frame you find an infinity of organic gradation - it gets grainy but it's still 'stepless'. You can enlarge as much as you like but you'll never find 'steps'. You do the same with digital and in the end you get down to pixels. Which is rubbish.
 
I don't know about cinematography but digital still photography has some way to go to match the dynamic range of film. I was told this by a pro when I was questioning him as to why digital images tend to break flesh tones into noticeable bands and zones - in the way old master painters do, in fact. He told me that, like painters, the digital eye has to take short cuts to recreate what it sees, due to its lower dynamic range compared with film. This is a serious flaw with digital. And it's scandalous that film went out before digital was able to match film's dynamic standard. Plus, the problem is something I certainly noticed on early digital film transference of films to dvds. I remember thinking the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon dvd looked like every garment was inhabiting its own separate 'colour universe', unrelated to the actor's flesh, which in turn was unrelated to the environment etc. The precise same effect was present in a British kitchen sink film from the 60s, 'Poor Cow' - bizarre disconnection between all the colours, as if each object had been separately hand-tinted.
 
Thing with film is if you enlarge a frame you find an infinity of organic gradation - it gets grainy but it's still 'stepless'. You can enlarge as much as you like but you'll never find 'steps'. You do the same with digital and in the end you get down to pixels. Which is rubbish.

Why would we do that though?
 
It's a good question....I just like knowing that film is an organic, seamless response to the organic, seamless environment it's recording, and feel uncomfortable knowing that at some micro-level digital comes to a dead end of unnatural perfect squares, that at its root, digital is plastic, synthetic. I suppose it's a philosophical thing, lol... but it's not only that. In amateur digital photography you don't have to enlarge much before digital is pixelated crap, where film will still give something beautiful - the grain effect of a film blow-up can still be aesthetically pleasing.
 
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