

Hollywood DP finally said it: "Film is over" - SlimArt
http://www.alexandrosmaragos.com/2012/04/phedon-papamichael-interview.html

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omershapira
You'll be surprised that the film process is still cheaper in some scenarios.
Special effects, for instance - anywhere you have to pull a matte (i.e
separate the foreground from a green screen), the film telecine can be tweaked
to convenience, whereas most CCDs will still give you a choppy result - for
many reasons; Color compression schemes being one, the shape of the ccd cells
being another. That means more days compositing and/or revisiting a film set,
and in complex shots this actually means breaking up a frame to many
individually shot bits, which may mean more shooting days in the first place,
and a far higher complexity (just imagine how many angle coordinations one
would have to make in order to match 5 parts of the same shot).

It's not that we're not getting there, but there's still a mile or two to
tread.

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astrodust
Gamer, while an uninspired movie, was shot fully digital on RED and had a
large number of green-screen shots. Even using beta firmware the results are
impressive.

The compositing software you can get today does an amazing job of adding and
subtracting elements. Maybe you mean film is cheaper because it doesn't mess
with your existing work-flow and you don't have to re-tune your tools.

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omershapira
Actually, I mean film is cheaper because under highly complicated
circumstances, the standard workflow is less risky. I'm not saying that it's
cheaper in principle, or that there for a given situation there isn't a
specific solution that's better; But when workflow is everything, it
definitely is. It's much cheaper having to spend an hour on lighting, not
worry about motion control and ask for 3 different setups in the telecine pull
list, to have enough dynamic range to fit everything into the shot.

With RED, even though results are very good (they are, however, short of
amazing: it's terribly noisy, but then again so is underexposed film), the
dynamic range is lower (and the dynamic density is uniform, which isn't that
good), so keying becomes an issue, and so do CCD artefacts - even more so when
renting 422 equipment. The complexity/risk isn't necessarily prohibitive, but
definitely less lucrative. That's why I say 'cheaper', not 'better'.

On the compositing side, software has been great for quite some time. I'm
aware of only a handful of truly novel keying algorithms published in the past
6 years, and none that can deal with digital artefacts very well (if you know
of any, _please_ tell me. Better yet, tell someone who works for The Foundry
or Autodesk. Much appreciated. x), that's why so many commercials are still
shot on 35mm instead of digital.

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astrodust
Based on what RED is doing, the solution to a lot of these problems is to keep
bumping the resolution so the impact of artifacts is minimized.

IMAX, long the king of film, might find itself knocked out by a digital
alternative. If 28K isn't good enough, then 50K? 100K? Film isn't getting any
better, there's too many limitations, but digital film technology is still
advancing.

Someone's probably going to invent a "de-artifacting" algorithm that works
well enough that in practice nobody can see the difference. There's a lot of
Ph.D. students out there in need of a thesis topic, after all.

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jgw
It's inevitable and unsurprising.

I do hope that it remains feasible to shoot on film for those that want to.
It's a fun medium to work in, and there's a romanticism about shooting on film
that I think is lost in using digital cameras.

About ten years ago, a musician acquaintance and I were discussing the decline
of vinyl. His argument in favour of this archaic technology was passionate. He
dispensed with technical arguments, which are generally just not very good,
but opened my eyes to a very different argument that I respected: that there
is an unbroken physical lineage between the artist and the listener, from the
session microphone to the tape to the masters to the copies to the stylus of
your turntable.

I have a similar affection for film, even if all editing is done through DIs
nowadays, and even though I've been rooting for digital film-making ever since
"The Last Broadcast".

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CineKid
The most interesting part is at the end. Online film school by Papa, Pfister &
Kaminski? Three of the best. This is big.

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snorkel
The irony is that editors and colorists spend extra time and effort degrading
digital footage to make it look like film.

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astrodust
Just as before they spent extra time to clean up the film. It's nothing new.
You're always trying to push it in a direction that's slightly different from
where you start.

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SteveGuttenberg
The biggest hollywood guys including Kaminski david fincher and darren
aronofsky all just use real grain scans like Cinegrain or Indie Scans.

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username3
Hollywood Director of Photography

