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Am I correct that the grain of 35mm film is about 1Mpixel at full width? Somewhere in that range, maybe 4MPixel. Having lived through the transition from film, I remember the big todo when digital suddenly outdid film. It was a while before the light sensitivity caught up but eventually digital also way outdid film. Kodak invented digital but suppressed it because they weren't really a photography company, they were a chemical film company. Pissing into the wind, they were.
I'm only half as good as most musicians, so at my live shows I often perform two songs at once to make up for it. My rendition of ZZ Mac's "TUSHK" is/are a current audience favorite(s), as is/are Pink John Floydennon''s "Mother²". I'm currently working up Bonead U'Connor's "I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got But I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For". (And you probably think I'm kidding...)
@@donperegrine922 yeah i was also sceptical of this factoid! after doing some research, the wikipedia page for footage does elaborate on this, and to verify it cites a book from 1917. additionally, two other tidbits that seem to corroborate - other [european] languages seem to have all instead created a compound word from "film material" or "measure of film", and before the use of "footage" as word referring to a length of film, it seems to have already had other uses that were all measurement-related. so yes, i think we can conclude that "footage" referring to temporal lengths of film is due to its use as a physical measurement of the film tape's length!
@@moontravellerjul i just realized that the names for feature-length and short films in most european languages are something like "long-métrage" or "court-métrage" - literally long-footage/short-footage, but in the metric system.
@@danl6634 I've actually seen IMAX film being shot of a parade. I chatted briefly with the people involved, and learned that a normal roll of IMAX camera film has about the same run time as a roll of 8mm (250 seconds at 16fps), 16mm (166.6 seconds at 24fps), or Super 8 (200 or 150 seconds for 18 or 24fps).
Yep. 24 fps and the extreme cinema widescreen aspect ratios were never originally meant as artistic choices as much as cost savings. They just later became such distinctions due to a weird sort of stockholm syndrome. People just became used to that being the standard. There is no real reason to limit to them today beyond institutional inertia.
Actually, 24fps was the minimum speed at which the 35mm optical sound track could reproduce an acceptable frequency range, and was not standardized until the release of sound films. For this reason, 24 is often referred to as "sound speed." But the speed varied from 16 to 30 (or other) during the silent era until this standardization took place.
You must have set your quality preference to "higher picture quality" so RUclips helpfully gave it to you in 144p, because 144 is a high number, right? The app keeps giving me videos at 360p or 480p when I have it set to use "higher picture quality" on both mobile and wifi.
I have an extension that helps with that. It forces the quality to be what I set in the extension, but it does mean that I have to change the value in the extension when I want a video in a different resolution. It was initially glitchy, but only for the first few days, and I have no idea why it changed.
It's not just movies shot on film! Lots and lots of television was shot on 16mm (because the lower resolution was impossible to notice on an analog TV) With certain prestige shots being shot in 35mm. Some shows even make the jump between formats as they become more popular. IIRC the first season on Breaking Bad is shot on 16, while later seasons are shot on 35. For a more recent examples, Succession and Euphoria where both shot on 35mm with Succession using traditional color negative film stock (same type as used in this video) and Euphoria using Slide film (Ektachrome) which has much more vivid colors. Some movies also mix formats. Christopher Nolan does this a lot in his films with certain sequences being shot in IMAX while the rest is 35mm to save cost. Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs shot different eras on different formats, with the first part on 16, the second part on 35, and the third part shot digitally. Now if, filled with enthusiasm from reading this comment, you immediately rewatch The Dark Knight, don't come crying to me if you have trouble spotting which sections are shot in IMAX! While the exact digital equivalent resolution of film is pretty debated, it's generally accepted that 16mm = 2k (or 1080p), 35mm = 4k (or 2160p), 65mm = 8k (~3600p) and IMAX is at least 12k (7680p). This means in practice it will may difficult to tell the difference between formats if you're watching on anything other than a top of the line TV connected to a 4K bluray player. However if you stream it, the difference might be easier to spot, as the more visible grain of 35mm would put more strain on the compression algorithm of your streaming platform resulting in a mushier image. Back to the subject of resolution, if you accept that 35mm = 4k don't go to see a 35mm projection in a theater expecting it to look the same as a 4K laser projector. Film like any analog format is subject to generation loss, and while the original camera negative might have a 4k resolution, the copy of a copy of a copy that you see in theaters will retain much less detail. And to add another wrinkle, in the early digital era many movies were shot on 35 but scanned, edited, and composited at 2k because storing terabytes of data was a lot harder to do in 2001. Because of this films like the Lord of the Rings trilogy will never truly have a 4k re-release because all of the post production was done in 2k, which would mean they would have to rescan hundreds (potentially thousands) of hours of footage, open their 2 decade old edit project and reconnect all their offline media, all the while hoping that the timing of the new scans is exactly the same as their original scans (so that they don't have to manually re sync) and then they would have to redo over 3,000 vfx shots in higher resolution, possibly starting from scratch because the software they used in the early 2000s (Shake) isn't compatible with modern operating systems. The end result of all of this would probably look incredible, but come at a cost of at least 50-100 million dollars (for all three movies). The irony of this is that today you can watch the original Star Wars (1977) at higher resolution than The Phantom Menace (1999). And as a reward for reading all the way through this impossibly nerdy comment, I will give you one more fun fact about shooting on film: In the days before digital editing, if you wanted your footage to play backwards you had to shoot with the camera upside down.
I will have to check out Euphoria, I loved shooting Kodachrome 64 (another glorious colour slide film similar to Ektachrome) back in my film camera days. It did produce some of the best photos I ever shot. When not on Kodachrome 64 I would use Kodak Gold 200, and B&W usually Ilford PAN F 100 or even 50 if I found it in stock. As for Lord of the Rings in 4K, sorry fans, but I could barely sit through the trilogy once and sure as hell not doing a second time to be bored by it in 4k.
The sheer amount of work that went in to rescan and recomposite all of Star Trek The Next Generation was phenomenal. I'm hoping that in the coming years they develop an AI system that can simply find and recomposite shots from all of the masters to massively reduce the cost, so we can finally get Voyager and Deep Space Nine in HD.
I work doing film QC, and I kept instinctively hitting my "marker" key every time I saw one! Most of these are white though ("meaning they're on the film, not in the film), they can just be cleaned off an rescanned if needed.
My dad had an 8mm (not even super 8) camera. It actually used 16mm film, but it only exposed half of it when run through the camera. Then you’d take the take up reel out and flip it around to run the other half of the film through the camera. Then after developing, they’d cut the film in half lengthwise, and splice the two pieces together.
Half frame. A few still cameras used a similar trick like the Olympus Pen series. Then you had Advanced Photo System cameras that let the user vary the length the image was captured to either save money or max quality on each shot. It morphed in APS-C digital sensors.
@@kentsutton4973 APS film captured the full image and recorded in the magnetic layer how to crop the negative for the print. And half frame is still using the full width of the film while double eight was shot on 16mm wide film one half at a time.
I spent most of last year transferring 8mm footage to video then enhancing it with AI software. Some of it worked out great. In fact, I did a then-and-now comparison with a compact digital camera and the new material was a bit disappointing - ruclips.net/video/xa5t2zd6kus/видео.html
@@kentsutton4973We refer to configuration when the film width makes up the smaller dimension of the image as "half frame" (like the super 35mm Max is using). The split configuration is technically more like quarter frame, or 1/8 depending on how it is oriented. APS-C is indeed "half-frame" of 35mm
This fits perfectly in to such a lovely little gap in my "stuff I've learned off youtube" brain space. Alec at Technology Connections has done a whole bunch of great videos about analogue photography, Destin at Smarter Every Day did his stellar Kodak factory tour on the making of film itself, and this nestles gently in a delightful maths-shaped gap between those in my mind.
Here is something... the internet is Just Content and nothing more sadly these days.... Shot on 35mm yet the upload is 4k and shoot in a Wide Horizontal Format for RUclips and not a Square Format as 35mm would be, No film artifacts, flicker or anything. = Fake Content for Clicks... When viewing a 3:2 aspect ratio image on a 16:9 screen like 1080p or 4K, it would have black bars on the sides (pillarboxing).
@@FenrisSkoll It's a maths channel, so here is some maths! Assuming Matt's "$1 per second" holds up: a second in this video is 24 frames, so $1 per 24 frames, 3 seconds of 100,000 fps divided by 24 = $12.500. :D But also... if it's shot in the 16:9 resolution then at 3:50 Matt tells us the frame height is 13.9mm. 100,000 frames x 13.9mm = 1.39 million mms of tape (not considering the room between frames), and you're moving that every second. Moving the tape at 1.39 kilometers(!) per second means it's going 5004 km/h, and I think moving the tape through the camera at literally mach 4 will be... quite the challenge for the slow mo guys lol
The 2-perf 35mm format was known commercially as Techniscope. It was intended for low budget productions because of its economical use of film in the camera and because it allowed a very wide aspect ratio without the need for expensive anamorphic lenses. Director Sergio Leone used the format to great effect in his "spaghetti western" productions, many of which became classics, such as _A Fistful of Dollars_ and _The Good, The Bad and The Ugly._
and was reused in Technicolor 3D, while the left and right eye frame was projected at the same time with the special lense (so the frame per second was still 4 perfs high)
Two perf also gives you twice the running time on any given film roll. Lucas used this format for "American Graffiti" to reduce reloads in the long driving shots.
@@chris-hayes yes;) and it also showed, that it was possible to print (copy) excellent 35mm again. They copied cheaper and cheaper after polyester film was in use (thinner, lighter, and youncan tow a car with it. I have a video where I tow-start my Capri with a 35mm polyester. In the 90s I worked in IMAX cinema, and we tow-started a small truck (Mercedes 814 7.5 tonn truck) it stretches if course ;) But this polyester also destroyed the technic in many projection rooms, if it blocked on the film platter.
70mm film is hands down the best format there is. No digital camera can yet match its enormous resolution, dynamic range, and color rendition. For those who haven’t seen a movie shot in 70mm, watch “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Baraka”. They have some of the most stunning shots in all of motion picture history, all of which were shot using 70mm cameras
Film and digital act differently, for example it is safer to overexpose a film to retain detail, and safer to underexpose a digital camera to retain detail. There can be no direct comparison. That being said, 35mm digital sensors have progressed to the same dynamic range (average 14 stops) and resolution (12k+) as 70mm film from a practical standpoint. And so much cheaper it's not funny.
@@gamechannel1271 but for a major Hollywood film with a big budget, there is no excuse. I mean what do you think looks better, IMAX 15/70 and Ultra Panavision 70, or the Arri Alexa 65?
@@andrewparker318 it entirely depends on how you use it. It's up to the director, dop, lighting technians, ect. to make sure it looks good. there are shots from 70mm films that look bad, and shots from digitally shot films that rival 15/70 imax. for example, both dune movies were shot digitally, because its impractical to shoot 65mm and imax for such vfx heavy films, and were then transfered to imax film after to get the film look. so there's the excuse to not shoot film. the point is, its the filmmaker, not the gear, that makes it look good. chris nolan could get hoyte van hoytema (sorry if i spelled that wrong) to shoot a movie with him on an iphone, and i'm sure it would look incredible.
Keep in mind that that's just the MASTER roll. Every single theater you send the movie to also needs that much film again for the whole movie for the copy, 4x more than the film they used here just to make a copy only for your own town's theater
any film that's goes through the entire photochemical process also needs to have an inter-positive created before it goes to print, unless of course you're shooting a positive stock like ektachrome. But nowadays, most films shot on 35 or 16mm are scanned and graded digitally rather than via IP, Printer lights or print stock
@@AxTechs That's why (in my opinion) it was a treat to see Oppenheimer on film. Nolan likes his film versions of his movies to not have a digital intermediate. Especially to keep the highest possible resolution for the IMAX prints. I have the privilege to watch it on both 5 perf 70mm and IMAX 70mm and it was amazing.
@@AxTechsIt doesnt need an interpositive. Motion Picture Print film is a color negative chemistry on a clear base. Negative exposed on negative is a positive. If the origination footage is a positive film, then you will need an internegative.
The chemistry of the crew was what made this a pretty good video. I hope shooting this on 35mm film hasn't negatively impacted your finances, and I hope you get good exposure to cover the costs. I wonder what other great videos are developing behind the scenes...
I love the more raw style of this video in terms of editing because you can't do more takes and want to use as much of the footage as possible because it's so expensive
I worked for 30 years in the film industry, shooting films al over the world starting in the early 90's to today, and i have witnessed the full transition from film to digital starting with Lucas who shot the prequel trilogy on digital in the late 90s. there are positives to both, but what i have noticed and to the utter annoyance of us crews in the industry is the "over grading" of those digital "log" images, colours pushed to the limits of what could exist, to my eyes todays digitally graded streaming shows and films look surreal. a choice is being made by a DP and the grader and im not usually glad of it. you watch Raider of the lost ark was shot on Eastman Colour Negative II 100T 5247 in mostly Tunisian sunlight, it look beautiful and its what we would expect those environments to look like, now if it were filmed today, it wouldn't have the same magical feel. personally i love 2:35:1, i still have a roll of 100T 5247 and one day ill dig out my oldd Eyemo 35mm and shoot some practical effects for old times sake.
I just want to say Dan Ming is a legend. He's responsible for figuring out how to put 8 cinema cameras inside of a jet for Top Gun: Maverick. So awesome that he's involved with this!
35mm movie film was a part of what made 35mm stills cameras affordable, as it meant people could take pictures on the most mass produced film there was, instead of the much more expensive medium or large format films made for photography that people used to have to use.
Oskar Barnack at the Leitz company started development of a stills camera for the purpose of testing movie film's sensitivity in relation with its development chemicals and process, and its characteristics at that (like usable contrast envelope - AKA dynamic range). Note that "correct exposure never was defined and even today the ISO institute does not define correct exposure with its ISO unit that only deals with "equivalence". With a standard frame size of 24mm wide and 18mm high (in the original standard 35mm movie camera where the film runs vertically), this frame size for stills was a PITA and consequently Barnack doubled the frame size for easier assessment and to keep the "landscape" orientation ran the film horizontally. It took quite some time for the concept to get developed and as at the time most "prints" (cheap) were made in contact (1:1 relative to the negative) that would not be attractive even with "double frame" (that's what 35mm full frame stills got called before WW2 in Nat Geo mag ads). So an enlarger would be needed and this complicated the making of simple prints. The advantage of perforated film (both sides) and the sturdy film (the carrier to the "emulsion" sensitive layer) meant that machines could be developed to automate the printing more easily - avoiding hand-holding by operators and associated damage to the film. Barnack built the first prototype camera(s) in 1913. In 1923 production of a preproduction series was approved by Leitz and in 1924 the "go to market" decision was made. It was introduced to the general public in 1925 at the Spring Fair in Leipzig. Part of the problems to solve before commercial release was that better lenses were needed for a larger image circle than standard "35mm" movie format, and another was how to package the film cut to a length for stills. When Leitz released the first commercial camera for shooting stills on 35mm movie film they called it Leitz Camera - LEItz CAmera: Leica.
@@jpdj2715 That is of course true. I don't know for the early aera, but later one did not just load cine film in a cartridge. The emulsions and coatings differed. Cine film has an additional protective layer that has to be removed during the process. Also you copy the film to a different film for projection. Therefore you have different requirements on the response of the film.
@@liselottepulver2819there was a company in the 80s called Seattle Filmworks who did indeed use motion picture film, they cut it into strips and sold it to still photographers. I still have hundreds of negatives from that (and am in the process of digitizing all of it... pain in the butt...)
I remember always finding it wired when watching old shows how shots inside the buildings always looked so different to shots outside the buildings until, I realized the shots inside are done on a 50-60 FPS TV camera and the shots outside are done on a 15mm 24 FPS film camera.
@@RAFMnBgaming Camera is one thing, but the image captured by the camera needs to be recorded somewhere. Cameras, although big and heavy, could be moved, but it was the early recording equipment that was tied to studio and was absolutely unmoveable. Film cameras record on their own - that was the main reason they were used for off-studio shooting.
@@0raj0 huh. Never really thought about the recording equipment being seperate for picture tubes back in the day. That explains the portmanteau at the heart of Camcorder.
@CollinGerberding There's a tool called Filmbox for film emulation that does an incredible job, and it's now used often on Hollywood features. But it's funny that one of the first thing we've done with digital systems is to emulate analog ones.
@@o00nemesis00o it's nostalgia. it's objectively worse. there is noise, the color range is poorer, it's a bit blurry and inconsistent. but some people like that. i personally don't care for it.
IMHO it looks and feels pretty shitty, and I grew up in the VHS era. No rose tinted glasses here. I can recognize the "artisticness" of such format and lens, but when there's no artistic vision behind it(no critic intended at all towards Matt), it is just not great. It does show how much a serious production can elevate film, and how old movies still hold up because of that, and not the technology.
Eh, it's not accuracy. As someone who's worked with digital cameras their whole lives, it's less about accuracy and much more about the 'feel'. The fact that this organic medium is 4K, with over 13 stops of dynamic range, is insane to me. It's too easy to push digital beyond the scope of familiarity, and give an almost CG look to real footage. Some directors are much better at managing this than others. But in a low light scene, we expect to see some noise, because we don't get a clear image from our eyes either. When things are very bright, they don't clip, they roll off softly.
As someone who does quite a bit of photography this was super interesting! Just regarding the way the colour changed when you changed film as that wasn't explained, those names "tungsten" and "daylight" determine the colour temperature that the film will be shot in. "Tungsten" refers to an old fashioned light but in modern use is warm indoor lighting, whilst daylight is obviously for outdoors. The reason the colour got warmer (which we actually refer to as colder but that's another story) after the switch to daylight film is that the sun is a much cooler light so that film in a way compensates to try and keep the colours natural. With modern digital editing this is very easy to fix in post but was more important in the days of film.
I believe I saw a video recently about the whole colour temperature terminology thing. Can't remember who by, but I'm sure someone will be able to tell me.
Edited: After seeing that folks were interested in behind-the-scenes projectionist stuff, I posted a video...ruclips.net/video/JutCfEx9plc/видео.html What a fun film/video! When you were discussing the anamorphic lenses, I was taken back to my days as a projectionist. Most lower-budget films were done in "flat" which was what you called 4-perf, with significant black bars between the frames. Big budget films were done in "scope" (Cinemascope) which used an anamorphic lens for projection to spread out the image. We had two lenses on each projector, a flat lens and a "scope" lens, on a turret. The electromechanical projection automation would run a little motor that would rotate the turret when the non-anamorphic trailers finished and the anamorphic feature began, signaled by a piece of metal cue tape. The anamorphic nature of the film is also visible in the familiar cue dots that show in the top right corner at the end of each 20-minute reel of film--they are ovals in Cinemascope films. Cinemascope films posed an interesting challenge: the frame lines were all but invisible since they used every square millimeter for the image--the thick black bars in traditional flat film (4-perf) were easy to find, but the abutted frame lines of "scope" were more difficult to see, especially in a dim projection booth. This meant that if there were a film break, we would have to go through some extra effort to find a frame line on either side of the break so we could cut and splice the film cleanly and not introduce a partial frame (that would be spotted immediately during the next showing). If the film broke during a night scene, we would have to use frame counter gadget, with a sprocketed-pulley that had frame lines on it, to go from the closest clean frame line we could find, through 10 or 20 feet of film to where the break was.
@@DLWELD Audio info runs along the side of the picture and is offset from the picture by a predetermined amount. If a few frames of the picture have to be cut out to fix a break, then you may notice a small jump in the picture, followed by a small jump in the sound moments later. But because the audio track runs along side the movie on the same strip of film, it always stays in sync. Leading into the 2000's and until about 2013 when Hollywood stopped printing physical film prints, 35mm prints had an array of different digital audio formats on the stip. Sony Digital ran down the edges outside the perforations, Dolby Digital ran between the perfs (almost looking like QR codes) and DTS was a time stamp that ran between the picture and the traditional optical audio track. Since all these formats had a fixed location on the film, audio always stayed in sync regardless of how many splices are made.
@@DLWELD no, it wasn't, but nobody really noticed. I certainly didn't think about it until only recently--the optical sound head is near the bottom of a standard 35mm projector, well below the shutter and lens, so it stands to reason that sound must lead the film scenes. And when I looked it up, the standard says that the sound leads by 21 frames--just under a second. Most movies had a few splices in them by the time they were returned to the distributor, and audiences would notice a jump and an audio click when the splice went through, but it was part of the movie experience and nobody really noticed. The cardinal sin was to leave a projector dirty and cause a film to be scratched: that would put a vertical green line throughout the entire length of the film, and at a first-run movie house that was unpardonable and many people would not put up with that.
I still remember going to cinemas, where the shorts were on 16mm film, well worn, with the pre feature adverts always having jumps from broken film, splices, and juddering audio, along with streaks and stripes from dust and such that got caught in the film gate, and cutting through the emulsion to varying depths. Then the intermission, where the main feature would be placed on the 2 35mm projectors, or the same 16mm projector, and the gates in the projector adjusted to mask the film, along with the curtains in the cinema being adjusted to black out the main screen to mask off the edges. Then the dot in top left corner to indicate near end of film, so the operator could also start the second projector to make a near seamless reel transition. Also saw many movies on film, most memorable being TRON, where mid way through the one reel there was a jam, and you got a nice few seconds of jammed film burning up in the gate. 3 minute intermission, to splice that together, likely losing a few dozen frames of film. Did get at the one cinema a scrap of film stock, Judge Dredd, that had fallen out of the bin as it was being carried out, and I picked it up off the cinema floor.
0:28 literally the dust on the film is what ads to it in my opinion. Also amazing that you decided to keep the raw footage to show the natural differences in film! Thanks for the great entertaining and informative content. Please keep up the good work.
I recently went through my dad's old Super 8 home movies from the 60's and 70's and converted them to digital using a home telecine scanner. Basically it ran the film through one frame at a time and took a photo of it, putting the frames back into an mp4 file. It was amazing to see how much detail is actually in a small super 8 frame, on outdoor shots you can even read car registration numbers and signs in shop windows.
Kodachrome was amazing stuff. At times I got frustrated by the lack of light sensitivity, but when adequate light was available it was gorgeous. Ektachrome color goes wonky, but Kodachrome from half a century ago still looks fine.
@SoundOfYourDestiny the device I used didn't save the stills, it was just a cheap kodak branded thing but it did a much better job than when we tried to digitise the films in the 90s. What would you suggest as being a good way to do it?
Yeah i did all my grandfathers films from 1936 through 1979. I was surprised to find the original aspect ratio of his camera was 2:1, shot edge to edge right over the sprocket perfs. Sometimes there were people & action taking place between the perfs so I realized I definitely wanted the entire image & wasn’t going to crop anything off. But zooming out wide enough to fit it in the 1080p scan meant lowering the digital resolution per film size ratio, so instead I went the other way and zoomed in to fill the frame vertically, making one scan of the left 2/3 of each frame and then a second scan for the right 2/3, then comping them together in FCP, aligning and gradient fading across the overlap. Inconsistencies in light and film speed ultimately meant going frame by frame blending each together. But then, bracketed a second set of scans for of each film one stop apart, to pull more image out of over & underexposed scenes, and blended that in. I have 34 reels and it’s takin me 4 years of spare time, but I have the highest resolution roughly 2k widescreen 2:1 scans I could get out of 8mm films. While at first I wasn’t sure it’d be worth the trouble just to view film grain, the difference in sharpness was visible, and the massive number of splices in those films (which each requires a reset of the machine, yay!) and edits in sequence made me realize my grandfather wasn’t just passively shooting footage, he was actually making films with a narrative in mind. His films switch to color in 1937 and take place all across the country, with pretty amazing historic things going on throughout. So it seemed worth the effort & turned out to be meditative & fun.
@@DanFre40 Ah. Well, there have been several projects published over the last few years to use an SLR-style camera to capture each frame. In most cases people scrounge a film-advance mechanism from a broken camera or projector and then 3-D print whatever pieces are needed to connect that to a motor. Some people overcomplicate it by having a microcontroller fire the camera, but all you really need is a cheap wired remote control and a leaf switch that you can place on the mechanical film-advance mechanism. Anyway, I wonder if the mechanism and backlight from the Kodak thing could be adapted. But that may be fussier and more ambitious than you want. But, if you capture each frame with a camera and don't want to save the thousands of files, I would suggest using a video editor (like Resolve, which is free) to render the frames out to a high-quality codec like Apple ProRes or one of the Avid codecs on Windows.
This is actually excellent, I love this so much, I love the color and the "feel" of the video, and seeing how film is made and how it's shot, really shows the younger generations how movies are used to be made, you're a legend sir Matt
Wow this was epic. Not only did I learn a little more about film and how it can be used to make movies, but I got to see it in action with hands-on prop demonstrations and well put together presentations. Thank you so much for this fantastic video.
If you want an impression of the true scale of IMAX... Oppenheimer is 180 minutes, 9 seconds long (10809 seconds), at 24 frames a second that's 259,416 frames. Each IMAX frame is 3540mm^2, that's a total area of 918.33m^2 for one copy of the final film. There are photos all over the internet of the film reels if you want to see just how massive they are.
Yeah, they had to make extra "guide rails" for the reels holding the film for oppenheimer, as the film would not fit otherwise. As projecters have a standard size for the reels, it is not physically possible to fit more IMAX onto a reel. Oppenheimer might possibly be the longest IMAX film to exist, now and in the future. Not just the longest yet, the longest physically possible, as I don't think we'll be redesigning film projectors.
If I remember correctly, physics starts to get in the way when projecting IMAX. Projection involves shining the image on the screen for 1/24 of a second, moving the film the length of a frame, and stopping it for the next 1/24 of a second. The acceleration/deceleration required is directly proportional to the forces on the sprocket holes, and those forces exceed the strength of the film material. The solution is to have the film travelling in a wave-like motion (imagine sending a wave down the length of a skipping rope by flicking it up and down), so that each frame lands on the projecting gate, and gets shifted off again by the next wave. Again, this if from memory, so don't take my word for it!
It's absolutely shocking, but the entire film is 11 miles long and 600lbs. (18km/272kg). It's delivered in 53 smaller reels and apparently takes about 24hr to prep.
@@jonathanrichards593 I don't know about imax, but i worked in a theater that still aired old 35mm filmes. It's an intricate mechanism where the film itself rolls at a constant speed, but before and after the projection port you have a bit of slack on the film so there isn't any force on the filmitself! That leads to the wave like motion you might have observed, as the film comes in at a constant speed but is only transfered to the projection gate 24 times /second but at a much higher speed. Therefore the slack portion of the film constantly builds up to a larger just to be moved into the projection gate, reducing the slack again. At all other points the film is kept at a constant tension to ensure it doesn't rip! So the part of the film that actually acceleration/deceleration is always only a few inches. on a 35mm maybe 4? So I guess with 70mm 12-15?
8:00 IMHO resolution is still the correct term, since it really just refers to the resolving power of the imaging or display system. The fact it's used now to refer to frames in terms of pixel count doesn't invalidate the broader use of the term
I think it's to discourage direct comparisons, which always has to be brought up in more detailed explanations. Resolutions in pixels vs approx. resolving power in lines
@@ayebraine As a telescope loving Andy resolution has always been resolving power in lines. Pixels per inch or dots per inch or others don't even make sense in regards to resolution because screen distance always changes and our eyes have a fixed resolution. The only time that seems to make sense is in VR headsets and then just using the standard definition of resolution is easier.
As a stills photographer it took me a long time to switch to digital, and in recent years I kept meaning to get a film camera to play with occasionally too, but never have just because of the hassle, so instead I shoot Fuji which is the next best thing.
If there's ever "Apollo 11" 2019 documentary in an IMAX near you, or even an ordinary cinema, definitely go and see it! Not only it's great to watch (you know what's going to happen and that they landed safely and returned to Earth, but watching them land on the Moon feels like a good thriller!), but you can actually see and compare all those different types of films in one go, as it features clips recorded on different film gauges - eg. 16mm taken by the astronauts while in space, but also a lot of high-resolution parts from Earth recorded on 65mm or even 70mm film.
That was a fantastic documentary! I especially liked the split screen to show multiple angles. Unbelievable that NASA lost the original first steps footage though!
This is absolutely the BEST video about film. I've been studying this for years, and I've learned a lot with your video. I can't recommend this enough. It was like I was in school again learning the favorite subject with the best teacher. Awesome work
This is beautiful. Thank you so much. I am forwarding this to my professors at LA Valley College in Valley Glen, CA, US. Wonderful way of illustrating film ratios and resolutions. Especially on a TV at 4K. Kudos!!
Excellent! There was one format you didn’t mention, a large screen format that was shot on 65mm film but with an 8 perf size, shot and projected with the film running vertically. The aspect ratio was similar to IMAX but the frame was smaller, but projected films were on 70mm stock like IMAX. We ran 8/70 films at the science centre in Calgary where I worked for many years. As with IMAX, the cost of prints and shipping was steep. Films arrived on a number of smaller reels that you had to splice together to make up the final projection print. The soundtracks were on separate media synced to the film.
Smarter everyday did a three part documentary on how that film is made at Kodak and its one of RUclips's greatest videos. I quickly realised if they ever stop, its never coming back.
Various other companies besides kodak make film. Fujifilm, Agfa, Wolfen, Lucky, InovisCoat, and Ilford all make film from scratch off the top of my head. As in actually spraying the emulsions and perforating, etc. not just dressing or repackaging.
Black and white film is healthily alive at other manufacturers than Kodak. Non-Kodak manufacturing of color film is starting to happen (see e.g. Harman Phoenix), but it seems that it is a lot more difficult to make than black and white film. And of course Fujifilm is still around. At least for now... But they seem to mostly focusing on Instax these days. They still do make color negative film and color positive film (some of the best ones) though. More easily available in their domestic market, however.
You know, I used to think that too... but Polaroid decided to officially stop making their instant film cartridges in 2008, and it seemed like the end. Then in 2020 they came back under new ownership by passionate former employees; it was called the Impossible Project and is a really cool story. Now it's fully reincarnated, and you can buy a Polaroid camera, with film, at stores like Target. Never lose hope 🙏
For a split second after rewinding, I felt bad because I somehow thought that rewinding would cost Matt money... because it's on film. I am not a smart man 😂
This is, by far, the best explanation I have ever seen. Seeing the first film difference really sent it home, just in the imperfections and light differences. Add that to your ability to feel natural and knowledgeable, not being able to redo shots, made this a truly organic experience where I learned so much. I’d say the cost was well worth it, though I’m not the one fronting the money 😂. Thanks to you and your team for sharing this with the world.
Doing long takes on film without a chance to repeat the take is quite impressive! Coincidentally I just got back into film photography and literally yesterday looked up the price of a 1000 ft video roll of Kodak stock. 10 minutes for 1000 $ feels insane! I want to shoot Cinestill 800T soon, which is taken from cinema film with the anti halation layer removed. The tungsten tuning makes it neutral under tungsten light and quite blueish under day light.
You can use the "85" filter if you plan to shoot in daylight with tungsten stock. It perfectly changes the color temp, from 3200K to 5600K. But of course the 800 ASA/ISO will stay, which is usually not the best for that much light.
It's nerve-racking. And because film is so expensive, throughout the shoot or at the end there are usually some days for "using up whatever's left" (I don't know how to say it in english), where you're making sure you use every last little bit of film, like 50sec, 30sec. The crew has to select stuff to film that could fit in mismatched short lengths of film, and everybody on set has to be creative to go around that limitation. It can be fun, if you don't have massively important stuff that you didn't manage to shoot before.
@@Zsomi8 yes, I thought about buying the 85c, but I guess I'll rather try to find scenes that give a certain feel when photographed with this blue tone. A bright day will be difficult, you are right.
The blue tone of 800T can be edited out whether scanning or doing analog printing fairly easily. Depends on your lab though whether or not they will do it. I've taken the same strip of 800T to two different labs and got two very different results. I've also taken a stab at it with home scanning and it wasn't hard to correct white balance. One benefit of that 85c filter for outdoor shooting though is it will take a stop or two of light out, so you'll effectively be shooting at ISO 400 or ISO 200 or so, and it will save you some editing too I guess.
A comment you might appreciate. Cinestill 800T is quite literally the kodak vision 3 500T stock that some of this video has been shot on, but as you say, without antihalation layer (aka rem-jet). Not just that they look similar, they are the same chemistry, from the same factory (afaik). Cinestill buys the stock from Kodak, and the iso rating goes up to 800 from 500 without the rem-jet layer. The same goes for Cinestill 400D (which is based on kodak vision3 250D, the other stock used for this video) And Cinestill 50D (which is based on vision3 50D)
Back in my protectionist days, changing lenses to fit whatever format the film was in (“Flat” or “scope”, regular vs the oval lens he showed) was a multiple times a day thing. 20 years on I could probably still thread a projector in my sleep.
Reminded me of the first time The Simpsons used CGI in a Halloween episode. Homer was describing the strange landscape and said, "looks expensive," followed by a 10 second shot of him scratching his butt.
I think it would've been interesting to mention vistavision, which runs 35mm sideways for larger frames. Also if you're looking to watch something on IMAX, be careful, the marketing isn't very clear and you might end up just watching something digital.
Thanks for the video. Great presentation about FILM. Back in 1971, while I was a student at RIT, Eastman Kodak invited our class to an illustrated lecture and demonstration about their motion picture films. In a dedicated theater with side-by-side projection equipment and screens they explained all of their film stocks and how each was designed to be used. They went through camera originals, all the intermediate duplicating films, all their different stocks, all the way down to release prints in both 35 and 16. We saw more Kodak models holding multi colored beach balls then we could stand! Then as a final quiz they projected a single screen image and wanted us to guess the film stock and process. No one got it right. It was Kodachrome Super 8. Sadly, I haven’t seen Super 8 look that good since.
For everyone joking about playback speed, since premium members dont get ads, the calculated ad revenue from premium members is (reportedly) based on the portion of time you spend watching any given monetized channel. So more of your premium membership will go towards matt if you watch at normal or slower speed.
I would've assumed it was based on the amount of video you watched, just in terms of raw frames, and regardless of the speed you watched it at. I have absolutely no basis for that assumption though.
@@Tahgtahv It's all about watch time. RUclips just wants people to spend more time watching RUclips. Watching at normal/slower speeds or rewatching a video result in more watch time. RUclips interprets a user watching a video once at 2X speed the same as someone watching a video at normal speed and then leaving at the halfway mark.
viewer retention solves this, I have one hour to watch fun math videos, that's one hour I'm spending on this channel no matter what, 1 episode or more, so I'm gonna watch them at 1.5x or 2x speed so I get more math per minute of my free time
Yeah, even if it was the case that this affected people I enjoy watching, I am NOT watching RUclips at 1x speed. People speak too slowly. Alright, maybe I'd watch something fast like Crash Course in 1.5x but basically everything else is way too slow.
i'm watching on an ultrawide (2.37). i absolutely love when someone uploads in 2.35 or even just 2.37 because it looks amazing filling out this huge screen. when people upload with a video that was rendered out with black bars to "format" the video to 1.78, it makes me want to claw my eyes out.
You know for all of Google's talk of ai and automation, one would think that would be the easiest thing for the RUclips algorithm to do is figure out that there's black bars and remove them at user request.
Yeah, but that's on you for having a non-standard size monitor, lol. Lots of movies in the early widescreen era were around 1.78 in VistaVision, e.g., Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest.
That is the first time I have seen a video that explains all of these concepts in one video. So well explained. I didn't understand the 4-perf concept, but thanks to you I do, now. Thanks. And it looked great on film - quite different.
I have been shooting on film for 7 years and have made dozens of projects on both 16mm and 35mm film for less than $1000. A 400ft roll of Kodak color 16mm film stock is currently $260, which gets you 11.5min of runtime. A 400ft roll of Kodak color 35mm film stock is currently $330, which gets you anywhere between 4.25min (shooting 4-perf) to 8.5min (shooting 2-perf) of runtime, depending on which perf you decide to shoot with. Let's say you wanted to shoot a 3min music video. And let's say you are being very conservative with your shooting ratio, say something close to 1 to 3 (or 9min of footage). If you wanted to shoot on 16mm film, it would cost $260 for raw stock (400 ft). If you wanted to shoot on 35mm film, it would cost $660 for 4-perf (800 ft), or $330 for 2-perf (400ft). Process + Scan costs fluctuate depending on which country you live in, lab you use, and specs you need. For these purposes though, let's say you want a 4K Raw ProRes4444 scan somewhere along the east coast of America. The 16mm would cost you about $275 to process + scan at 4K, for a grand total of $535. The 35mm would cost you about $550 for 4-perf, or $350 for 2-perf, for a grand total of $1,210 on 4-perf, or $680 on 2-perf. Conservation is key when shooting on film. If you have a strong plan and sense of what you're doing, it is 100% worth it. Removing the ability to endlessly shoot as many takes and shots as you want will make your filmmaking skills grow exponentially.
It's definitely not cheap shooting with film but I was actually expecting it to be more expensive than it was. Helps if you can avoid multiple takes. I'm glad it's more attainable than I realized.
This is so awesome! Wish I had this video a couple years ago when I was taking Film I in college & learning this stuff! Much easier to conceptualize seeing it all come together like this
So you bought 609.6 METERS of film. METERS Matthew!! Do not swear on your educational RUclips videos. ps: Love the colours. Really. (I do not want you to feel I am just about critiquing your SI units).
It's weird, to me it just looks really blurry like he's not in focus the whole time, and the end shots just seem well underexposed and hard to even make Matt out and that's on an OLED...
@@ElvenSpellmaker They only did one take for everything and probably didn't have many days to setup everything perfectly so don't expect to get something comparable to a Stanley Kubrick movie...
They were obviously limited on time to setup lighting and the film stock available. If it was filmed on a nicer set with more interesting lighting and colour graded it would have looked much better. They made the best of a limited opportunity and as an explainer video it was spot on.
I appreciate that you uploaded in 24p. old super8 long play has to be scanned in and edited and output in 18p and up until recently some video editing programs didn't have that output option. Thank goodness they listened to us retro preservation fans. Now the only problem is getting modern TV's to play 18p...
A horizontally running 35mm process in the 50s and early 60s was called VistaVision, notably used by Alfred Hitchcock for his films of the time, like “Vertigo” (1958). It was 8-perf non-anamorphic horizontal, more than doubling the negative area per frame as compared to regular 35mm processes. John Dykstra and his shop famously revived the process for effects shots in “Star Wars” (1977).
One of my local theaters (a nonprofit) that still shows movies on 35mm and 70mm (as they usually call what is actually 65mm.) They do have digital projectors too, to show current movies that are digital distribution; but they do both screenings of old movies on actual old movie stock, as well as modern "released on film". Quentin Tarantino has shown up for showings of his movies at the theater regularly. (Which is *NOT* anywhere near Hollywood. Okay, it's also *VERY* near Hollywood, since it is called the "Hollywood Theater," but it isn't in California.)
In a movie theater it would be literally 70mm, because that is where the soundtrack goes. It is only 65mm in a camera because the sound is not recorded to a camera, but to a seperate device.
It is a shame Matt didn't explain the clapping board. Most people think it is a handy way of registering what take it is and when to start acting. However the clapping was originally for synchronizing the sound and the the visual. I doubt however that, with modern camera's, this is still needed and the clapping of the clapboard was (probably) for show only.
For film cameras it's definitely needed as these days you're most likely recording separate audio, like Matt is here. The clap is used to sync the audio to the film in post. With digital it's still smart to get the clap, but these days you can set timecode (TC) to 'time of day' which is a TC that doesn't stop between takes. As long as your camera and audio recorders match that can make syncing much faster (you just match timecodes). That said, the TC could get recorded wrong, and even if the sound was sent to the camera to be paired with the video it isn't always frame accurate, so getting a clap can help confirm the audio is in sync more easily. (If you forget to record a clap you can always fall back on looking at actors mouths for particularly obvious consonants.)
We can still need to clap if the sound is recorded separatly. The board can also show to the editor which scene is which, so this is important. In the case of audio recorded to the camera only, there is no need to clap.
It plays a vital role for digital formats too. It's not only for syncing sound but to record the scene and take numbers so the editor knows which shot it looking at and correlate with the director notes. The also write technical info on it, such as frame rate, white balance and other necessary info for the colonists and the vfx departments. And there is a correct procedure of using the clapper board, it's not just holding it in front of the lens.
One advantage of film IS the cost! Let me explain. Because every take costs money, not just in the film in the camera but in processing those rushes later so you can make edit decisions (and therefore, only transfer to digital what is worth transferring), the incentive to get the performance right in preferably one take is massive. So, not only would one use cue cards or autocue, proper rehearsals were mandatory. When I worked on even corporates filmed on film (in the 70s), a lot of time was spent rehearsing the talking heads - especially company workers who had never done such a thing before. With any luck, they got it right in just a couple of takes, to produce a single, smooth sequence. Modern digital techniques mean that takes only cost time, not film. So, people are lazy. They don't spend ages rehearsing, and in consequence, segments to camera are frequently filled with annoying and pointless jump cuts. We never had those in the days before video and then hard drives. Or very few. And they were covered with cutaways. So, just the high cost of film meant we couldn't be lazy. We couldn't afford to be. The productions were carefully planned and rehearsed ahead of time, just to keep costs lower, and that benefitted the entire production.
This is interesting. I've worked in TV documentary for 25 years and only on video. Rehearsal is little more than planning what people will say. Your post made me wonder if the increasingly fast cutting rate that has gradually come into screen content, was actually partly through necessity , as the number of takes grew. Aesthetics must've come into it too of course. Amazing that we are now at the point where jump cuts are deliberately added, even on a good take (especially by youngsters making social vids) to increase the visual interest
I bet if you read your own words out loud a few times you'll talk yourself out of your own opinion. I understand what you're trying to argue, but in the real world, if something costs many many times more, it still costs many times more. You're conveniently forgetting all the obvious advantages of being able to capture footage for free. Jackie Gleason would strongly disagree with you about strict rehearsals improving the quality of the content, and so would many other greats from the 20th century. Most filmmakers (especially comedians) would have loved to be able to film everything and build their movie on the cutting room floor. It's baffling that you think everyone would want to throw away so many opportunities. Remember, most people who make money from making videos and movies have very small budgets. You only hear about the multi million dollar movies because they have multi million dollar marketing budgets. Most people have no money or patience for film, and you seem knowledgeable enough to know why.
This was also true in for home/vacation movies. I remember the agony to sit through the hour long VHS vacation video of a relative who was the first to buy a video camera. Up until then, he had super 8, which had only about 3 minutes run time per cartridge. They weren't that cheap and it was a hassle to splice them together, so the vacation videos were rarely longer than 10-15 minutes, much better suited to his limited story telling abilities. With super 8, he had to carefully choose what to film. With VHS and no equipment for video editing, scenes that should have lasted 5 seconds went on and on for minutes.
@@pedrofreitas4662 Great video, 100% would recommend (entirely seriously here, just to be clear) but those views have been popular in the Trek fandom for decades
I love that you can actually see film grain artifacts throughout the video. It's especially noticeable in the intro near your head, it's awesome to see.
I used to be "Why are movies still shot on film, that's silly!", but then I saw remastered old movies and now I'm convinced film is the way to go. They hold up so much better with time and remastering.
Digital didn't get good until the Arri Alexa in 2010. Everything prior to that (surprisingly few, though some notable entries like the Star Wars prequel trilogy) was shot on slightly better than ENG cameras with very limited dynamic range - for example the Sony F900. By no means bad cameras, but they had nothing on the quality of celluloid.
Digital video has improved a lot in the past 15 years and I would argue that digital today is technically better. This why film remasters are a big deal because our ability to scan film and the way we distribute digital video also improved by a lot. Remember when you watched movies on DVD in the early 2000s? That's only 720x480 with older H.262 or even older MPEG1 compression. Add to that whatever technical limitations we had back then to scan the film so it can be distributed to digital format. Today we now have 4k Ultra HD Blu-ray with more sophisticated H.265 HEVC compression, not to mention significantly faster internet connections for streaming video. Remasters are also done using the original master film and then edited with today's more powerful video editing software to eliminate faults on the film. Insane come to think of it.
They don't exactly hold up in terms of aging and preservation but they do allow for higher quality with the lesser tech requirements. The biggest downside nowadays is the cost of shooting and reshooting as Matt points out. With digital you can simply wipe shots you don't like over and over with effectively no cost in that department.
My grandfather's 16mm films have sprockets on both sides. My father had an 8mm movie camera, before Super 8, and he had to use 16mm film which had to have the reels flipped after only a few minutes. No sound, but the 16mm film was processed and split down the middle to create the 8mm film.
There are three different formats here. Super 16 (which they shown in the video), which has perf only on one side; regular 16mm, which has perf on both sides; 2x8mm - the last one you mention - which looks like 16mm film, but has perf twice as dense as 16mm
This video is simply genius! I am editing a video for one of my clients as I watch this and I'm having a ball, and also very thankful for APC prices for "film"... Much love from Tim Lee and Legacy Studio Network!
Being a photography nerd, I didn't learn anything from this video, but I absolutely loved it. I love weird film formats and technologies. In addition to being an artistic choice, I love film cameras because of the mechanical systems.
The difference between 16mil and 32 mil is the same as SD (720x480) to HD720 (1280x720) to HD1080 (1920x1080) to UHD4k (4096x2160). It's like exactly one step down. That's so cool!
Yeah, I had the same thought. The lighting in the warehouse is so uncinematic that it "doesn't look like film", but that makes me wonder how much the look of film is just the look of skilled photographers/cinematographers, who also opt to use film because they think it looks better. I suspect in an experiment testing the ability of filmmakers watching footage from a modern digital camera compared with 35, the shots with better lighting would be guessed as film, even if they were digital.
@@glenmorrison8080good point. Set design, lighting etc. definitely contributes much more to a "film look" than the capturing medium. Regarding color, texture etc.: what many people are not aware of is that a lot of what makes a film look like film is happening in the process of copying the camera negative to a (positive) print film. A scan of the camera negative itself does not look particularly interesting, so that's down to the colorist to get right.
What your push processing statement at the end brings to my mind are the other tweaks that can be made. Such as cross processing, where you shoot colour positive film and run it through the colour negative process. You get crazy contrasty colours. A similar one is bleach-bypass where silver is left the negative for a super contrasty look (Three Kings, 1999). Again, as you say, for artistic purposes.
DVD basically works the same way as anamorphic film. It’s always saved at 720x576 but stretched to 768x576 for 4:3 and 1024x576 for 16:9 (in most of the world at least)
For NTSC regions (most notably US, CA, JP), 720x480 -> 720x540 (4:3) / 854x480 (16:9) (In reality it's far more complicated, with various standards crops, overscan and so on, but this is a rabbithole not worth getting into)
@@romangiertych5198 I took a peek into the overscan rabbithole the other day, apparently the actual 4:3 image is supposed to fit into 704x480 and the extra pixels in a 720x480 stream are supposed to be overscan. Analog has variable tolerance and sometimes part of the image can seep past the overscan boundaries, so capturing the overscan helps to prevent against accidentally throwing away part of the image. Thus, analog-sourced SD content typically has those thin black bars at the left and right preserved from capturing the overscan at 720x480. Since only the middle 704x480 part is supposed to be 4:3 (640x480), technically a 720x480 stream when squished to square pixel format should be 654x480. Though with modern digital content there is no such concept of overscan and 720x480 is a common resolution, so we end up simply using the entire 720x480 resolution for the image and such a 720x480 stream should be displayed at 640x480 instead of 654x480.
Thank my patreon supporters for making this possible! If you'd like to be retrospectively responsible and get a piece of film, sign up before the end of August (plus probably a few days grace). Details here: www.patreon.com/posts/110841267
A digitized representation of 35mm film. It's like I'm watching Martin Scorsese on my phone! Really cool actually, great video.
I would say do one of these in 70mm but I don't want you to get a big head.
Am I correct that the grain of 35mm film is about 1Mpixel at full width? Somewhere in that range, maybe 4MPixel. Having lived through the transition from film, I remember the big todo when digital suddenly outdid film. It was a while before the light sensitivity caught up but eventually digital also way outdid film.
Kodak invented digital but suppressed it because they weren't really a photography company, they were a chemical film company. Pissing into the wind, they were.
if only i wasn't in debt
Congratulations for your RUclips First!
I hope this video gets a good amount of exposure
D’oh!
It started out a bit negative, but it developed nicely.
iso wish I didn't see that terrible joke
I think they needed to spend a bit more time developing the concept
Bravo!
Now release this on a 16mm reel so we can watch it at home.
Optical or mag sound?
@@quintrankid8045 Optical of course. What am I, a hipster?
Joke’s on you I’m watching this at home right now! 📱 😜
Nah, it would be crushed and converted to VHS for home release.
I am poor, will there be a super 8 release? 😔
The poor guy at RUclips who get to rewind the reel for this 35mm movie everytime someone plays this. ;-D
*GIGGLE*
nah bro they use a platter
Not how it works.
This is probably the best joke i've read this year, so simple yet so well placed
@@Look_What_You_Didr/woosh
I played it at 2x speed to cut your costs in half
You doubled his costs! You'd have to watch at .5 speed to half his costs.
And I watched it at half speed so there.
@@jonahhekmatyar Yeah, it only took 5 seconds to rack up $10 lol.
I'm only half as good as most musicians, so at my live shows I often perform two songs at once to make up for it.
My rendition of ZZ Mac's "TUSHK" is/are a current audience favorite(s), as is/are Pink John Floydennon''s "Mother²".
I'm currently working up Bonead U'Connor's "I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got But I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For".
(And you probably think I'm kidding...)
@@KenLieck I wanna get tix to your live show 😍
I bet this is the only RUclips video that Christopher Nolan will ever watch.
Who?
@@Look_What_You_DidThe guy who shot an entire 3 hour Oscar winning film on custom 70mm IMAX, made just for this movie
@@Look_What_You_Didone of the biggest directors in Hollywood (look up his works, he has quite a few notable ones!)
quentin tarantino too
i'm sure he watches some things lol, everyone does
This was an exceedingly interesting watch. I knew a lot of it, but it was still very educational. Also loved the scaled props.
That film is measured in feet is the reason spans of movie-ness is called "footage".
This FEEELLLZZZZ like a completely made up factoid. Now I gotta find out...
Well, I will be damned. Wikipedia says exactly the same thing. It sounds so FAKE?!
@@donperegrine922 , well?
@@donperegrine922 yeah i was also sceptical of this factoid! after doing some research, the wikipedia page for footage does elaborate on this, and to verify it cites a book from 1917. additionally, two other tidbits that seem to corroborate - other [european] languages seem to have all instead created a compound word from "film material" or "measure of film", and before the use of "footage" as word referring to a length of film, it seems to have already had other uses that were all measurement-related. so yes, i think we can conclude that "footage" referring to temporal lengths of film is due to its use as a physical measurement of the film tape's length!
@@moontravellerjul i just realized that the names for feature-length and short films in most european languages are something like "long-métrage" or "court-métrage" - literally long-footage/short-footage, but in the metric system.
Of note - running the Super35 and the Super16 at the same time was still cheaper per second than running just the 4-perf Super35.
Woah! That's really interesting!
So 125% and 133% more costly compared to only running Super35 alone, right?
Kinda makes me want a cost comparison for imax
This actually depends on the processing costs.
@@danl6634 I've actually seen IMAX film being shot of a parade. I chatted briefly with the people involved, and learned that a normal roll of IMAX camera film has about the same run time as a roll of 8mm (250 seconds at 16fps), 16mm (166.6 seconds at 24fps), or Super 8 (200 or 150 seconds for 18 or 24fps).
This is probably the reason for 24 fps - literally the fewest frames we could get away and not have the movie look like a slideshow.
yep that's why
Yep. 24 fps and the extreme cinema widescreen aspect ratios were never originally meant as artistic choices as much as cost savings. They just later became such distinctions due to a weird sort of stockholm syndrome. People just became used to that being the standard. There is no real reason to limit to them today beyond institutional inertia.
Actually, 24fps was the minimum speed at which the 35mm optical sound track could reproduce an acceptable frequency range, and was not standardized until the release of sound films. For this reason, 24 is often referred to as "sound speed." But the speed varied from 16 to 30 (or other) during the silent era until this standardization took place.
@@scythelord And the fact that it makes the large number of people who grew up watching 24p feel like they're watching a cheap TV show.
@@johnziniewicz6860 Also, traditional hand-drawn animation was often animated ‘on twos’ giving an effective framerate of 12 fps.
Matt: “I’m going to film in 35mm.”
RUclips: “I’m going to display in 144p.”
put it on the highest def - I found 2160 I could then see the grain on the 16mm images
oof
RUclips: “I’m going to display 240i and claim it is compressed 1080p”
You must have set your quality preference to "higher picture quality" so RUclips helpfully gave it to you in 144p, because 144 is a high number, right? The app keeps giving me videos at 360p or 480p when I have it set to use "higher picture quality" on both mobile and wifi.
I have an extension that helps with that. It forces the quality to be what I set in the extension, but it does mean that I have to change the value in the extension when I want a video in a different resolution. It was initially glitchy, but only for the first few days, and I have no idea why it changed.
It's not just movies shot on film! Lots and lots of television was shot on 16mm (because the lower resolution was impossible to notice on an analog TV) With certain prestige shots being shot in 35mm. Some shows even make the jump between formats as they become more popular. IIRC the first season on Breaking Bad is shot on 16, while later seasons are shot on 35. For a more recent examples, Succession and Euphoria where both shot on 35mm with Succession using traditional color negative film stock (same type as used in this video) and Euphoria using Slide film (Ektachrome) which has much more vivid colors.
Some movies also mix formats. Christopher Nolan does this a lot in his films with certain sequences being shot in IMAX while the rest is 35mm to save cost. Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs shot different eras on different formats, with the first part on 16, the second part on 35, and the third part shot digitally.
Now if, filled with enthusiasm from reading this comment, you immediately rewatch The Dark Knight, don't come crying to me if you have trouble spotting which sections are shot in IMAX! While the exact digital equivalent resolution of film is pretty debated, it's generally accepted that 16mm = 2k (or 1080p), 35mm = 4k (or 2160p), 65mm = 8k (~3600p) and IMAX is at least 12k (7680p). This means in practice it will may difficult to tell the difference between formats if you're watching on anything other than a top of the line TV connected to a 4K bluray player. However if you stream it, the difference might be easier to spot, as the more visible grain of 35mm would put more strain on the compression algorithm of your streaming platform resulting in a mushier image.
Back to the subject of resolution, if you accept that 35mm = 4k don't go to see a 35mm projection in a theater expecting it to look the same as a 4K laser projector. Film like any analog format is subject to generation loss, and while the original camera negative might have a 4k resolution, the copy of a copy of a copy that you see in theaters will retain much less detail. And to add another wrinkle, in the early digital era many movies were shot on 35 but scanned, edited, and composited at 2k because storing terabytes of data was a lot harder to do in 2001. Because of this films like the Lord of the Rings trilogy will never truly have a 4k re-release because all of the post production was done in 2k, which would mean they would have to rescan hundreds (potentially thousands) of hours of footage, open their 2 decade old edit project and reconnect all their offline media, all the while hoping that the timing of the new scans is exactly the same as their original scans (so that they don't have to manually re sync) and then they would have to redo over 3,000 vfx shots in higher resolution, possibly starting from scratch because the software they used in the early 2000s (Shake) isn't compatible with modern operating systems. The end result of all of this would probably look incredible, but come at a cost of at least 50-100 million dollars (for all three movies). The irony of this is that today you can watch the original Star Wars (1977) at higher resolution than The Phantom Menace (1999).
And as a reward for reading all the way through this impossibly nerdy comment, I will give you one more fun fact about shooting on film: In the days before digital editing, if you wanted your footage to play backwards you had to shoot with the camera upside down.
I'm happy you found a place for all your random film facts! That was an interesting read, thank you!
I will have to check out Euphoria, I loved shooting Kodachrome 64 (another glorious colour slide film similar to Ektachrome) back in my film camera days. It did produce some of the best photos I ever shot. When not on Kodachrome 64 I would use Kodak Gold 200, and B&W usually Ilford PAN F 100 or even 50 if I found it in stock. As for Lord of the Rings in 4K, sorry fans, but I could barely sit through the trilogy once and sure as hell not doing a second time to be bored by it in 4k.
Fabulous! Great comment - thanks for your effort 😃
Great comment! I leaned a lot 🤓
The sheer amount of work that went in to rescan and recomposite all of Star Trek The Next Generation was phenomenal. I'm hoping that in the coming years they develop an AI system that can simply find and recomposite shots from all of the masters to massively reduce the cost, so we can finally get Voyager and Deep Space Nine in HD.
I just love the look of the anamorphic widescreen footage.
Honestly, it's so fun to spot the film artifacts throughout the video
I wonder if they are real or added.
@@LostLargeCats Being that this was shot on film, I am leaning on real.
I remember we used to watch little circles appear on VHS copies of movies shot on film, deliberately put there to indicate a reel change AFAIK.
@@LostLargeCats Would be kinda ironic to add that to a video ABOUT film, ON film, when they even left the different temperatures of film in
I work doing film QC, and I kept instinctively hitting my "marker" key every time I saw one! Most of these are white though ("meaning they're on the film, not in the film), they can just be cleaned off an rescanned if needed.
The analog cinematography crew is *here for this*.
ETA: we need a follow-up YT film about shutter angles from the trigonometry lover himself!
If they weren't here for this, he'd have to do all the stuff himself, and that'd be more awkward.
And follow up on shutter types! There are many different ways of blocking light in cameras.
Shutter angles, exposure and frame rate would an excellent math topic. As well 24/25 to 29.97 and 30 fps pull down
@@josephslomka8161 and the difference between imax digital and imax analogue would be a natural extension of this
Captain Disillusion did a video on shutter angle recently.
17:39 I love the cinematic look in the outro 🤌
My dad had an 8mm (not even super 8) camera. It actually used 16mm film, but it only exposed half of it when run through the camera. Then you’d take the take up reel out and flip it around to run the other half of the film through the camera. Then after developing, they’d cut the film in half lengthwise, and splice the two pieces together.
Yep, by cracky, I remember those too - quite a challenge flipping that film 1/2 way through in the day light.
Half frame. A few still cameras used a similar trick like the Olympus Pen series. Then you had Advanced Photo System cameras that let the user vary the length the image was captured to either save money or max quality on each shot. It morphed in APS-C digital sensors.
@@kentsutton4973 APS film captured the full image and recorded in the magnetic layer how to crop the negative for the print.
And half frame is still using the full width of the film while double eight was shot on 16mm wide film one half at a time.
I spent most of last year transferring 8mm footage to video then enhancing it with AI software. Some of it worked out great. In fact, I did a then-and-now comparison with a compact digital camera and the new material was a bit disappointing - ruclips.net/video/xa5t2zd6kus/видео.html
@@kentsutton4973We refer to configuration when the film width makes up the smaller dimension of the image as "half frame" (like the super 35mm Max is using). The split configuration is technically more like quarter frame, or 1/8 depending on how it is oriented.
APS-C is indeed "half-frame" of 35mm
This fits perfectly in to such a lovely little gap in my "stuff I've learned off youtube" brain space. Alec at Technology Connections has done a whole bunch of great videos about analogue photography, Destin at Smarter Every Day did his stellar Kodak factory tour on the making of film itself, and this nestles gently in a delightful maths-shaped gap between those in my mind.
What a great line up of great content creators.
Here is something... the internet is Just Content and nothing more sadly these days....
Shot on 35mm yet the upload is 4k and shoot in a Wide Horizontal Format for RUclips and not a Square Format as 35mm would be, No film artifacts, flicker or anything. = Fake Content for Clicks... When viewing a 3:2 aspect ratio image on a 16:9 screen like 1080p or 4K, it would have black bars on the sides (pillarboxing).
Perfect video
hello gav and dan
hi gav or dan
Hi dav and/or gan
How much would it cost for you guys to film 3 seconds of 35mm film at 100,00fps?
@@FenrisSkoll It's a maths channel, so here is some maths! Assuming Matt's "$1 per second" holds up: a second in this video is 24 frames, so $1 per 24 frames, 3 seconds of 100,000 fps divided by 24 = $12.500. :D
But also... if it's shot in the 16:9 resolution then at 3:50 Matt tells us the frame height is 13.9mm. 100,000 frames x 13.9mm = 1.39 million mms of tape (not considering the room between frames), and you're moving that every second. Moving the tape at 1.39 kilometers(!) per second means it's going 5004 km/h, and I think moving the tape through the camera at literally mach 4 will be... quite the challenge for the slow mo guys lol
The 2-perf 35mm format was known commercially as Techniscope. It was intended for low budget productions because of its economical use of film in the camera and because it allowed a very wide aspect ratio without the need for expensive anamorphic lenses. Director Sergio Leone used the format to great effect in his "spaghetti western" productions, many of which became classics, such as _A Fistful of Dollars_ and _The Good, The Bad and The Ugly._
and was reused in Technicolor 3D, while the left and right eye frame was projected at the same time with the special lense (so the frame per second was still 4 perfs high)
Two perf also gives you twice the running time on any given film roll. Lucas used this format for "American Graffiti" to reduce reloads in the long driving shots.
Neat! I was expecting it to be used for some throwaway filming, not on film classics.
@@chris-hayes yes;)
and it also showed, that it was possible to print (copy) excellent 35mm again.
They copied cheaper and cheaper after polyester film was in use (thinner, lighter, and youncan tow a car with it. I have a video where I tow-start my Capri with a 35mm polyester. In the 90s I worked in IMAX cinema, and we tow-started a small truck (Mercedes 814 7.5 tonn truck)
it stretches if course ;) But this polyester also destroyed the technic in many projection rooms, if it blocked on the film platter.
cinemascope but mummy took away my wallet
I really love the part where they zoom out of the black bars and show the perforation of the film.
It's so obvious but still blew my mind.
70mm film is hands down the best format there is. No digital camera can yet match its enormous resolution, dynamic range, and color rendition. For those who haven’t seen a movie shot in 70mm, watch “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Baraka”. They have some of the most stunning shots in all of motion picture history, all of which were shot using 70mm cameras
70mm film is expensive, especially at higher frame rates
Film and digital act differently, for example it is safer to overexpose a film to retain detail, and safer to underexpose a digital camera to retain detail. There can be no direct comparison.
That being said, 35mm digital sensors have progressed to the same dynamic range (average 14 stops) and resolution (12k+) as 70mm film from a practical standpoint. And so much cheaper it's not funny.
@@gamechannel1271 but for a major Hollywood film with a big budget, there is no excuse. I mean what do you think looks better, IMAX 15/70 and Ultra Panavision 70, or the Arri Alexa 65?
Arri Alexa! @@andrewparker318
@@andrewparker318 it entirely depends on how you use it. It's up to the director, dop, lighting technians, ect. to make sure it looks good. there are shots from 70mm films that look bad, and shots from digitally shot films that rival 15/70 imax. for example, both dune movies were shot digitally, because its impractical to shoot 65mm and imax for such vfx heavy films, and were then transfered to imax film after to get the film look. so there's the excuse to not shoot film. the point is, its the filmmaker, not the gear, that makes it look good. chris nolan could get hoyte van hoytema (sorry if i spelled that wrong) to shoot a movie with him on an iphone, and i'm sure it would look incredible.
Keep in mind that that's just the MASTER roll. Every single theater you send the movie to also needs that much film again for the whole movie for the copy, 4x more than the film they used here just to make a copy only for your own town's theater
any film that's goes through the entire photochemical process also needs to have an inter-positive created before it goes to print, unless of course you're shooting a positive stock like ektachrome. But nowadays, most films shot on 35 or 16mm are scanned and graded digitally rather than via IP, Printer lights or print stock
I'd love to see how a copy and scan works tbh
@@AxTechs That's why (in my opinion) it was a treat to see Oppenheimer on film. Nolan likes his film versions of his movies to not have a digital intermediate. Especially to keep the highest possible resolution for the IMAX prints. I have the privilege to watch it on both 5 perf 70mm and IMAX 70mm and it was amazing.
@@AxTechsIt doesnt need an interpositive. Motion Picture Print film is a color negative chemistry on a clear base. Negative exposed on negative is a positive. If the origination footage is a positive film, then you will need an internegative.
@@GregoryVeizades you’re right, I miss worded there, meant to say and if you’re working with positive stock you also need an IP
The chemistry of the crew was what made this a pretty good video. I hope shooting this on 35mm film hasn't negatively impacted your finances, and I hope you get good exposure to cover the costs. I wonder what other great videos are developing behind the scenes...
The film was so expensive, Matt couldn't afford to plug Love Triangle. I got my copy already though!
No offense, but the quality is subpar on this one. I've seen 4K videos looking better...
I love the more raw style of this video in terms of editing because you can't do more takes and want to use as much of the footage as possible because it's so expensive
I worked for 30 years in the film industry, shooting films al over the world starting in the early 90's to today, and i have witnessed the full transition from film to digital starting with Lucas who shot the prequel trilogy on digital in the late 90s. there are positives to both, but what i have noticed and to the utter annoyance of us crews in the industry is the "over grading" of those digital "log" images, colours pushed to the limits of what could exist, to my eyes todays digitally graded streaming shows and films look surreal. a choice is being made by a DP and the grader and im not usually glad of it. you watch Raider of the lost ark was shot on Eastman Colour Negative II 100T 5247 in mostly Tunisian sunlight, it look beautiful and its what we would expect those environments to look like, now if it were filmed today, it wouldn't have the same magical feel. personally i love 2:35:1, i still have a roll of 100T 5247 and one day ill dig out my oldd Eyemo 35mm and shoot some practical effects for old times sake.
I just want to say Dan Ming is a legend. He's responsible for figuring out how to put 8 cinema cameras inside of a jet for Top Gun: Maverick. So awesome that he's involved with this!
Those were all custom-made Sony Venice cameras shooting at 6K as I recall, correct?
Okay, wow, that might be the most badass thing anyone did during the production of Top Gun: Maverick.
35mm movie film was a part of what made 35mm stills cameras affordable, as it meant people could take pictures on the most mass produced film there was, instead of the much more expensive medium or large format films made for photography that people used to have to use.
They did not use the same films though.
Oskar Barnack at the Leitz company started development of a stills camera for the purpose of testing movie film's sensitivity in relation with its development chemicals and process, and its characteristics at that (like usable contrast envelope - AKA dynamic range).
Note that "correct exposure never was defined and even today the ISO institute does not define correct exposure with its ISO unit that only deals with "equivalence".
With a standard frame size of 24mm wide and 18mm high (in the original standard 35mm movie camera where the film runs vertically), this frame size for stills was a PITA and consequently Barnack doubled the frame size for easier assessment and to keep the "landscape" orientation ran the film horizontally.
It took quite some time for the concept to get developed and as at the time most "prints" (cheap) were made in contact (1:1 relative to the negative) that would not be attractive even with "double frame" (that's what 35mm full frame stills got called before WW2 in Nat Geo mag ads). So an enlarger would be needed and this complicated the making of simple prints.
The advantage of perforated film (both sides) and the sturdy film (the carrier to the "emulsion" sensitive layer) meant that machines could be developed to automate the printing more easily - avoiding hand-holding by operators and associated damage to the film.
Barnack built the first prototype camera(s) in 1913. In 1923 production of a preproduction series was approved by Leitz and in 1924 the "go to market" decision was made.
It was introduced to the general public in 1925 at the Spring Fair in Leipzig.
Part of the problems to solve before commercial release was that better lenses were needed for a larger image circle than standard "35mm" movie format, and another was how to package the film cut to a length for stills.
When Leitz released the first commercial camera for shooting stills on 35mm movie film they called it Leitz Camera - LEItz CAmera: Leica.
@@jpdj2715 That is of course true. I don't know for the early aera, but later one did not just load cine film in a cartridge. The emulsions and coatings differed. Cine film has an additional protective layer that has to be removed during the process. Also you copy the film to a different film for projection. Therefore you have different requirements on the response of the film.
@@liselottepulver2819there was a company in the 80s called Seattle Filmworks who did indeed use motion picture film, they cut it into strips and sold it to still photographers. I still have hundreds of negatives from that (and am in the process of digitizing all of it... pain in the butt...)
Medium format photography is mind blowing, I love digital but if i were to use film it would be medium and large formats.
I remember always finding it wired when watching old shows how shots inside the buildings always looked so different to shots outside the buildings until, I realized the shots inside are done on a 50-60 FPS TV camera and the shots outside are done on a 15mm 24 FPS film camera.
NTSC would be 60hz and PAL would be 50hz. PAL also filmed at 25fps instead of the NTSC 24fps
I guess TV cameras back then must have been too unweildy to lug around early on, what with being electronic.
@@RAFMnBgaming Camera is one thing, but the image captured by the camera needs to be recorded somewhere. Cameras, although big and heavy, could be moved, but it was the early recording equipment that was tied to studio and was absolutely unmoveable. Film cameras record on their own - that was the main reason they were used for off-studio shooting.
@@0raj0 huh. Never really thought about the recording equipment being seperate for picture tubes back in the day. That explains the portmanteau at the heart of Camcorder.
God, this footage looks beautiful. Film is such a gorgeous medium.
@CollinGerberding There's a tool called Filmbox for film emulation that does an incredible job, and it's now used often on Hollywood features. But it's funny that one of the first thing we've done with digital systems is to emulate analog ones.
I don't get it, the colour stock doesn't look good from here, very greyed out.
@@o00nemesis00o it's nostalgia. it's objectively worse. there is noise, the color range is poorer, it's a bit blurry and inconsistent. but some people like that. i personally don't care for it.
IMHO it looks and feels pretty shitty, and I grew up in the VHS era. No rose tinted glasses here.
I can recognize the "artisticness" of such format and lens, but when there's no artistic vision behind it(no critic intended at all towards Matt), it is just not great.
It does show how much a serious production can elevate film, and how old movies still hold up because of that, and not the technology.
Eh, it's not accuracy. As someone who's worked with digital cameras their whole lives, it's less about accuracy and much more about the 'feel'. The fact that this organic medium is 4K, with over 13 stops of dynamic range, is insane to me. It's too easy to push digital beyond the scope of familiarity, and give an almost CG look to real footage. Some directors are much better at managing this than others. But in a low light scene, we expect to see some noise, because we don't get a clear image from our eyes either. When things are very bright, they don't clip, they roll off softly.
As someone who does quite a bit of photography this was super interesting!
Just regarding the way the colour changed when you changed film as that wasn't explained, those names "tungsten" and "daylight" determine the colour temperature that the film will be shot in. "Tungsten" refers to an old fashioned light but in modern use is warm indoor lighting, whilst daylight is obviously for outdoors. The reason the colour got warmer (which we actually refer to as colder but that's another story) after the switch to daylight film is that the sun is a much cooler light so that film in a way compensates to try and keep the colours natural. With modern digital editing this is very easy to fix in post but was more important in the days of film.
Good explanation! Tungsten refers to the material used to make the filament in incandescent lights, if I'm not mistaken :)
@@fredrikfredrikfredrik yep that’s right!
I believe I saw a video recently about the whole colour temperature terminology thing. Can't remember who by, but I'm sure someone will be able to tell me.
Cooler = more blue
@@hughcaldwell1034 could be by minutephysics about a month ago :-)
Bec Hill mentioned!
Great explanations as always, Matt.
Fantastic! Look forwards to this being released on VHS!
Beta and laserdisc
Edited: After seeing that folks were interested in behind-the-scenes projectionist stuff, I posted a video...ruclips.net/video/JutCfEx9plc/видео.html
What a fun film/video! When you were discussing the anamorphic lenses, I was taken back to my days as a projectionist. Most lower-budget films were done in "flat" which was what you called 4-perf, with significant black bars between the frames. Big budget films were done in "scope" (Cinemascope) which used an anamorphic lens for projection to spread out the image. We had two lenses on each projector, a flat lens and a "scope" lens, on a turret. The electromechanical projection automation would run a little motor that would rotate the turret when the non-anamorphic trailers finished and the anamorphic feature began, signaled by a piece of metal cue tape.
The anamorphic nature of the film is also visible in the familiar cue dots that show in the top right corner at the end of each 20-minute reel of film--they are ovals in Cinemascope films.
Cinemascope films posed an interesting challenge: the frame lines were all but invisible since they used every square millimeter for the image--the thick black bars in traditional flat film (4-perf) were easy to find, but the abutted frame lines of "scope" were more difficult to see, especially in a dim projection booth. This meant that if there were a film break, we would have to go through some extra effort to find a frame line on either side of the break so we could cut and splice the film cleanly and not introduce a partial frame (that would be spotted immediately during the next showing). If the film broke during a night scene, we would have to use frame counter gadget, with a sprocketed-pulley that had frame lines on it, to go from the closest clean frame line we could find, through 10 or 20 feet of film to where the break was.
On such splices, was the audio next to the correct frame? Or did that pose more of a problem on splicing?
You should call Marketplace APM with this story for their segment "My Analog Life" - it would make a great inclusion.
@@DLWELD Audio info runs along the side of the picture and is offset from the picture by a predetermined amount. If a few frames of the picture have to be cut out to fix a break, then you may notice a small jump in the picture, followed by a small jump in the sound moments later. But because the audio track runs along side the movie on the same strip of film, it always stays in sync.
Leading into the 2000's and until about 2013 when Hollywood stopped printing physical film prints, 35mm prints had an array of different digital audio formats on the stip. Sony Digital ran down the edges outside the perforations, Dolby Digital ran between the perfs (almost looking like QR codes) and DTS was a time stamp that ran between the picture and the traditional optical audio track. Since all these formats had a fixed location on the film, audio always stayed in sync regardless of how many splices are made.
@@DLWELD no, it wasn't, but nobody really noticed. I certainly didn't think about it until only recently--the optical sound head is near the bottom of a standard 35mm projector, well below the shutter and lens, so it stands to reason that sound must lead the film scenes. And when I looked it up, the standard says that the sound leads by 21 frames--just under a second. Most movies had a few splices in them by the time they were returned to the distributor, and audiences would notice a jump and an audio click when the splice went through, but it was part of the movie experience and nobody really noticed.
The cardinal sin was to leave a projector dirty and cause a film to be scratched: that would put a vertical green line throughout the entire length of the film, and at a first-run movie house that was unpardonable and many people would not put up with that.
You mentioned 20 min reels. When watching a movie how did you switch reels? How was it seamless to the viewer?
I still remember going to cinemas, where the shorts were on 16mm film, well worn, with the pre feature adverts always having jumps from broken film, splices, and juddering audio, along with streaks and stripes from dust and such that got caught in the film gate, and cutting through the emulsion to varying depths. Then the intermission, where the main feature would be placed on the 2 35mm projectors, or the same 16mm projector, and the gates in the projector adjusted to mask the film, along with the curtains in the cinema being adjusted to black out the main screen to mask off the edges. Then the dot in top left corner to indicate near end of film, so the operator could also start the second projector to make a near seamless reel transition.
Also saw many movies on film, most memorable being TRON, where mid way through the one reel there was a jam, and you got a nice few seconds of jammed film burning up in the gate. 3 minute intermission, to splice that together, likely losing a few dozen frames of film. Did get at the one cinema a scrap of film stock, Judge Dredd, that had fallen out of the bin as it was being carried out, and I picked it up off the cinema floor.
seeing TRON in 16mm anamorphic was my gateway to being a projectionist in college...
ah yes i remember the blinking dot. i wondered what that was for.
0:28 literally the dust on the film is what ads to it in my opinion. Also amazing that you decided to keep the raw footage to show the natural differences in film! Thanks for the great entertaining and informative content. Please keep up the good work.
Film just hits different man, that last shot just had that underexposed ambiance
I recently went through my dad's old Super 8 home movies from the 60's and 70's and converted them to digital using a home telecine scanner. Basically it ran the film through one frame at a time and took a photo of it, putting the frames back into an mp4 file. It was amazing to see how much detail is actually in a small super 8 frame, on outdoor shots you can even read car registration numbers and signs in shop windows.
Kodachrome was amazing stuff. At times I got frustrated by the lack of light sensitivity, but when adequate light was available it was gorgeous. Ektachrome color goes wonky, but Kodachrome from half a century ago still looks fine.
I hope you also saved the stills, or archived to something better than H.264. Unless the stuff isn't that important to you.
@SoundOfYourDestiny the device I used didn't save the stills, it was just a cheap kodak branded thing but it did a much better job than when we tried to digitise the films in the 90s. What would you suggest as being a good way to do it?
Yeah i did all my grandfathers films from 1936 through 1979. I was surprised to find the original aspect ratio of his camera was 2:1, shot edge to edge right over the sprocket perfs. Sometimes there were people & action taking place between the perfs so I realized I definitely wanted the entire image & wasn’t going to crop anything off. But zooming out wide enough to fit it in the 1080p scan meant lowering the digital resolution per film size ratio, so instead I went the other way and zoomed in to fill the frame vertically, making one scan of the left 2/3 of each frame and then a second scan for the right 2/3, then comping them together in FCP, aligning and gradient fading across the overlap. Inconsistencies in light and film speed ultimately meant going frame by frame blending each together. But then, bracketed a second set of scans for of each film one stop apart, to pull more image out of over & underexposed scenes, and blended that in. I have 34 reels and it’s takin me 4 years of spare time, but I have the highest resolution roughly 2k widescreen 2:1 scans I could get out of 8mm films. While at first I wasn’t sure it’d be worth the trouble just to view film grain, the difference in sharpness was visible, and the massive number of splices in those films (which each requires a reset of the machine, yay!) and edits in sequence made me realize my grandfather wasn’t just passively shooting footage, he was actually making films with a narrative in mind. His films switch to color in 1937 and take place all across the country, with pretty amazing historic things going on throughout. So it seemed worth the effort & turned out to be meditative & fun.
@@DanFre40 Ah. Well, there have been several projects published over the last few years to use an SLR-style camera to capture each frame. In most cases people scrounge a film-advance mechanism from a broken camera or projector and then 3-D print whatever pieces are needed to connect that to a motor.
Some people overcomplicate it by having a microcontroller fire the camera, but all you really need is a cheap wired remote control and a leaf switch that you can place on the mechanical film-advance mechanism.
Anyway, I wonder if the mechanism and backlight from the Kodak thing could be adapted. But that may be fussier and more ambitious than you want.
But, if you capture each frame with a camera and don't want to save the thousands of files, I would suggest using a video editor (like Resolve, which is free) to render the frames out to a high-quality codec like Apple ProRes or one of the Avid codecs on Windows.
This is actually excellent, I love this so much, I love the color and the "feel" of the video, and seeing how film is made and how it's shot, really shows the younger generations how movies are used to be made, you're a legend sir Matt
Gotta love how Bec tried to sneak out of the frame unsuccesfully at 15:31
I'd bet it was a carefully thought artistic choice.
A meta-joke on cropping film for TV, perhaps ;)
97.5% certain Bec did that on purpose.
Mission failed successfully
Wow this was epic. Not only did I learn a little more about film and how it can be used to make movies, but I got to see it in action with hands-on prop demonstrations and well put together presentations. Thank you so much for this fantastic video.
That sync between the music and the clapper board at 20:48 made me giddy! I hope the various humans responsible for that were appreciated!
The rolling patreon names forming a waveform of his speech is such a lovely nerdy detail worthy of this channel, just *chef's kiss*
I just got my section of film from this video. I got half a second of the 35mm portion at 12:50. Its so cool to hold a piece of RUclips history.
If you want an impression of the true scale of IMAX... Oppenheimer is 180 minutes, 9 seconds long (10809 seconds), at 24 frames a second that's 259,416 frames. Each IMAX frame is 3540mm^2, that's a total area of 918.33m^2 for one copy of the final film. There are photos all over the internet of the film reels if you want to see just how massive they are.
Yeah, they had to make extra "guide rails" for the reels holding the film for oppenheimer, as the film would not fit otherwise.
As projecters have a standard size for the reels, it is not physically possible to fit more IMAX onto a reel.
Oppenheimer might possibly be the longest IMAX film to exist, now and in the future.
Not just the longest yet, the longest physically possible, as I don't think we'll be redesigning film projectors.
If I remember correctly, physics starts to get in the way when projecting IMAX. Projection involves shining the image on the screen for 1/24 of a second, moving the film the length of a frame, and stopping it for the next 1/24 of a second. The acceleration/deceleration required is directly proportional to the forces on the sprocket holes, and those forces exceed the strength of the film material. The solution is to have the film travelling in a wave-like motion (imagine sending a wave down the length of a skipping rope by flicking it up and down), so that each frame lands on the projecting gate, and gets shifted off again by the next wave.
Again, this if from memory, so don't take my word for it!
It's absolutely shocking, but the entire film is 11 miles long and 600lbs. (18km/272kg). It's delivered in 53 smaller reels and apparently takes about 24hr to prep.
@@jonathanrichards593 I don't know about imax, but i worked in a theater that still aired old 35mm filmes. It's an intricate mechanism where the film itself rolls at a constant speed, but before and after the projection port you have a bit of slack on the film so there isn't any force on the filmitself! That leads to the wave like motion you might have observed, as the film comes in at a constant speed but is only transfered to the projection gate 24 times /second but at a much higher speed. Therefore the slack portion of the film constantly builds up to a larger just to be moved into the projection gate, reducing the slack again. At all other points the film is kept at a constant tension to ensure it doesn't rip!
So the part of the film that actually acceleration/deceleration is always only a few inches. on a 35mm maybe 4? So I guess with 70mm 12-15?
How many American football fields is that?
8:00 IMHO resolution is still the correct term, since it really just refers to the resolving power of the imaging or display system. The fact it's used now to refer to frames in terms of pixel count doesn't invalidate the broader use of the term
Good old fashioned, resolution. The arcseconds at which you can distinguish two points.
I think it's to discourage direct comparisons, which always has to be brought up in more detailed explanations. Resolutions in pixels vs approx. resolving power in lines
@@ayebraine As a telescope loving Andy resolution has always been resolving power in lines.
Pixels per inch or dots per inch or others don't even make sense in regards to resolution because screen distance always changes and our eyes have a fixed resolution.
The only time that seems to make sense is in VR headsets and then just using the standard definition of resolution is easier.
As a stills photographer it took me a long time to switch to digital, and in recent years I kept meaning to get a film camera to play with occasionally too, but never have just because of the hassle, so instead I shoot Fuji which is the next best thing.
Alright the thumbnail being on film was a great ending lol. Well done
If there's ever "Apollo 11" 2019 documentary in an IMAX near you, or even an ordinary cinema, definitely go and see it! Not only it's great to watch (you know what's going to happen and that they landed safely and returned to Earth, but watching them land on the Moon feels like a good thriller!), but you can actually see and compare all those different types of films in one go, as it features clips recorded on different film gauges - eg. 16mm taken by the astronauts while in space, but also a lot of high-resolution parts from Earth recorded on 65mm or even 70mm film.
FYI, 65 and 70 are the same thing. 65 is the size of the negative and then it’s printed to 70 to make room for the audio track.
One if the most jaw dropping experience I had in cinemas.
Yeah, that was really awesome. Saw it in imax as well.
That was a fantastic documentary! I especially liked the split screen to show multiple angles. Unbelievable that NASA lost the original first steps footage though!
@@zachsbanks makes sense :)
This is absolutely the BEST video about film. I've been studying this for years, and I've learned a lot with your video. I can't recommend this enough. It was like I was in school again learning the favorite subject with the best teacher. Awesome work
Wow! This video (actually, film) should be shown in all film/vfx schools. Great job in making it all so clear and easy to understand.
This is video. You can't upload film. This would be useless in film school.
You are a brilliantly gifted teacher. I’m watching as a 43 year old man and wish I could go to school again with a teacher like you
It’s the only reason I can think of for not having some proper stuff ups in this… even with teleprompters of notes.
This is beautiful. Thank you so much. I am forwarding this to my professors at LA Valley College in Valley Glen, CA, US. Wonderful way of illustrating film ratios and resolutions. Especially on a TV at 4K. Kudos!!
Excellent! There was one format you didn’t mention, a large screen format that was shot on 65mm film but with an 8 perf size, shot and projected with the film running vertically. The aspect ratio was similar to IMAX but the frame was smaller, but projected films were on 70mm stock like IMAX. We ran 8/70 films at the science centre in Calgary where I worked for many years. As with IMAX, the cost of prints and shipping was steep. Films arrived on a number of smaller reels that you had to splice together to make up the final projection print. The soundtracks were on separate media synced to the film.
Smarter everyday did a three part documentary on how that film is made at Kodak and its one of RUclips's greatest videos. I quickly realised if they ever stop, its never coming back.
Various other companies besides kodak make film. Fujifilm, Agfa, Wolfen, Lucky, InovisCoat, and Ilford all make film from scratch off the top of my head. As in actually spraying the emulsions and perforating, etc. not just dressing or repackaging.
Black and white film is healthily alive at other manufacturers than Kodak. Non-Kodak manufacturing of color film is starting to happen (see e.g. Harman Phoenix), but it seems that it is a lot more difficult to make than black and white film.
And of course Fujifilm is still around. At least for now... But they seem to mostly focusing on Instax these days. They still do make color negative film and color positive film (some of the best ones) though. More easily available in their domestic market, however.
You know, I used to think that too... but Polaroid decided to officially stop making their instant film cartridges in 2008, and it seemed like the end. Then in 2020 they came back under new ownership by passionate former employees; it was called the Impossible Project and is a really cool story. Now it's fully reincarnated, and you can buy a Polaroid camera, with film, at stores like Target. Never lose hope 🙏
@@RoyceRemix Still not as good as it used to be though, since they aren't allowed to use the ideal chemicals any more.
@@C.I... Because they were damaging to the environment, or copyright or something?
This made my day and answered alot of questions I'd forgotten I had. Film looks so good, thanks for helping keep the medium alive!
For a split second after rewinding, I felt bad because I somehow thought that rewinding would cost Matt money... because it's on film.
I am not a smart man 😂
Thank you for rewinding the video for the next viewer.
@@aspzx be kind, rewind.
RUclips is trying out a new feature to bring higher quality streaming. They now stream raw film directly to each and every device.
That's an interesting mental experience
@@the-pink-hacker🤭🤭🤭🤭
Matt: There's no sensor.
RUclips: There's always a censor.
This comment literally made me chuckle.
This is, by far, the best explanation I have ever seen.
Seeing the first film difference really sent it home, just in the imperfections and light differences. Add that to your ability to feel natural and knowledgeable, not being able to redo shots, made this a truly organic experience where I learned so much.
I’d say the cost was well worth it, though I’m not the one fronting the money 😂.
Thanks to you and your team for sharing this with the world.
A truly wonderful RUclips video. This was my whole film school over 20 years ago in a 20 minute video. Brilliant!
Doing long takes on film without a chance to repeat the take is quite impressive!
Coincidentally I just got back into film photography and literally yesterday looked up the price of a 1000 ft video roll of Kodak stock. 10 minutes for 1000 $ feels insane!
I want to shoot Cinestill 800T soon, which is taken from cinema film with the anti halation layer removed. The tungsten tuning makes it neutral under tungsten light and quite blueish under day light.
You can use the "85" filter if you plan to shoot in daylight with tungsten stock. It perfectly changes the color temp, from 3200K to 5600K. But of course the 800 ASA/ISO will stay, which is usually not the best for that much light.
It's nerve-racking. And because film is so expensive, throughout the shoot or at the end there are usually some days for "using up whatever's left" (I don't know how to say it in english), where you're making sure you use every last little bit of film, like 50sec, 30sec. The crew has to select stuff to film that could fit in mismatched short lengths of film, and everybody on set has to be creative to go around that limitation. It can be fun, if you don't have massively important stuff that you didn't manage to shoot before.
@@Zsomi8 yes, I thought about buying the 85c, but I guess I'll rather try to find scenes that give a certain feel when photographed with this blue tone. A bright day will be difficult, you are right.
The blue tone of 800T can be edited out whether scanning or doing analog printing fairly easily. Depends on your lab though whether or not they will do it. I've taken the same strip of 800T to two different labs and got two very different results. I've also taken a stab at it with home scanning and it wasn't hard to correct white balance.
One benefit of that 85c filter for outdoor shooting though is it will take a stop or two of light out, so you'll effectively be shooting at ISO 400 or ISO 200 or so, and it will save you some editing too I guess.
A comment you might appreciate. Cinestill 800T is quite literally the kodak vision 3 500T stock that some of this video has been shot on, but as you say, without antihalation layer (aka rem-jet).
Not just that they look similar, they are the same chemistry, from the same factory (afaik). Cinestill buys the stock from Kodak, and the iso rating goes up to 800 from 500 without the rem-jet layer.
The same goes for Cinestill 400D (which is based on kodak vision3 250D, the other stock used for this video)
And Cinestill 50D (which is based on vision3 50D)
Back in my protectionist days, changing lenses to fit whatever format the film was in (“Flat” or “scope”, regular vs the oval lens he showed) was a multiple times a day thing. 20 years on I could probably still thread a projector in my sleep.
On the documentary of _The Shining,_ Kubrick tells his crew to stick various lenses in carry pockets as they head to the maze chase scene.
I appreciate how you demonstrated how much the film costs by having a moment of silence for each dollar. Clever use of funds there mate 🤣
Thoughts and prayers for the budget 😂
Reminded me of the first time The Simpsons used CGI in a Halloween episode. Homer was describing the strange landscape and said, "looks expensive," followed by a 10 second shot of him scratching his butt.
I think it would've been interesting to mention vistavision, which runs 35mm sideways for larger frames.
Also if you're looking to watch something on IMAX, be careful, the marketing isn't very clear and you might end up just watching something digital.
Thanks for the video. Great presentation about FILM. Back in 1971, while I was a student at RIT, Eastman Kodak invited our class to an illustrated lecture and demonstration about their motion picture films. In a dedicated theater with side-by-side projection equipment and screens they explained all of their film stocks and how each was designed to be used. They went through camera originals, all the intermediate duplicating films, all their different stocks, all the way down to release prints in both 35 and 16. We saw more Kodak models holding multi colored beach balls then we could stand! Then as a final quiz they projected a single screen image and wanted us to guess the film stock and process. No one got it right. It was Kodachrome Super 8. Sadly, I haven’t seen Super 8 look that good since.
For everyone joking about playback speed, since premium members dont get ads, the calculated ad revenue from premium members is (reportedly) based on the portion of time you spend watching any given monetized channel. So more of your premium membership will go towards matt if you watch at normal or slower speed.
I would've assumed it was based on the amount of video you watched, just in terms of raw frames, and regardless of the speed you watched it at. I have absolutely no basis for that assumption though.
@@Tahgtahv It's all about watch time. RUclips just wants people to spend more time watching RUclips. Watching at normal/slower speeds or rewatching a video result in more watch time. RUclips interprets a user watching a video once at 2X speed the same as someone watching a video at normal speed and then leaving at the halfway mark.
viewer retention solves this, I have one hour to watch fun math videos, that's one hour I'm spending on this channel no matter what, 1 episode or more, so I'm gonna watch them at 1.5x or 2x speed so I get more math per minute of my free time
Yeah, even if it was the case that this affected people I enjoy watching, I am NOT watching RUclips at 1x speed. People speak too slowly. Alright, maybe I'd watch something fast like Crash Course in 1.5x but basically everything else is way too slow.
@@juhtahel7454 whoa. Now I understand why some of my buddies finish my sentences for me, and start their own thing.
i'm watching on an ultrawide (2.37). i absolutely love when someone uploads in 2.35 or even just 2.37 because it looks amazing filling out this huge screen. when people upload with a video that was rendered out with black bars to "format" the video to 1.78, it makes me want to claw my eyes out.
You know for all of Google's talk of ai and automation, one would think that would be the easiest thing for the RUclips algorithm to do is figure out that there's black bars and remove them at user request.
Yeah, but that's on you for having a non-standard size monitor, lol. Lots of movies in the early widescreen era were around 1.78 in VistaVision, e.g., Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest.
If you're uploading an entire video in that ratio, sure. But the YT system doesn't handle variable aspect ratios well, and a lot is at 1.78.
I guess you scream when watching shorts in portrait mode...
@@cheeseparis1☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️
That is the first time I have seen a video that explains all of these concepts in one video. So well explained. I didn't understand the 4-perf concept, but thanks to you I do, now. Thanks. And it looked great on film - quite different.
6:35 Dust/scratch/hair lower left frame on "four perf".
I have been shooting on film for 7 years and have made dozens of projects on both 16mm and 35mm film for less than $1000.
A 400ft roll of Kodak color 16mm film stock is currently $260, which gets you 11.5min of runtime.
A 400ft roll of Kodak color 35mm film stock is currently $330, which gets you anywhere between 4.25min (shooting 4-perf) to 8.5min (shooting 2-perf) of runtime, depending on which perf you decide to shoot with.
Let's say you wanted to shoot a 3min music video. And let's say you are being very conservative with your shooting ratio, say something close to 1 to 3 (or 9min of footage).
If you wanted to shoot on 16mm film, it would cost $260 for raw stock (400 ft).
If you wanted to shoot on 35mm film, it would cost $660 for 4-perf (800 ft), or $330 for 2-perf (400ft).
Process + Scan costs fluctuate depending on which country you live in, lab you use, and specs you need. For these purposes though, let's say you want a 4K Raw ProRes4444 scan somewhere along the east coast of America.
The 16mm would cost you about $275 to process + scan at 4K, for a grand total of $535.
The 35mm would cost you about $550 for 4-perf, or $350 for 2-perf, for a grand total of $1,210 on 4-perf, or $680 on 2-perf.
Conservation is key when shooting on film. If you have a strong plan and sense of what you're doing, it is 100% worth it. Removing the ability to endlessly shoot as many takes and shots as you want will make your filmmaking skills grow exponentially.
It's definitely not cheap shooting with film but I was actually expecting it to be more expensive than it was. Helps if you can avoid multiple takes. I'm glad it's more attainable than I realized.
This is so awesome! Wish I had this video a couple years ago when I was taking Film I in college & learning this stuff! Much easier to conceptualize seeing it all come together like this
So you bought 609.6 METERS of film. METERS Matthew!! Do not swear on your educational RUclips videos.
ps: Love the colours. Really. (I do not want you to feel I am just about critiquing your SI units).
Unsurprisingly, this video looks beautiful, especially that last outdoors shot.
It's weird, to me it just looks really blurry like he's not in focus the whole time, and the end shots just seem well underexposed and hard to even make Matt out and that's on an OLED...
@@ElvenSpellmaker
They only did one take for everything and probably didn't have many days to setup everything perfectly so don't expect to get something comparable to a Stanley Kubrick movie...
@@Alfred-Neuman That's true of course
@@Alfred-Neuman doesn't explain why underexposure was kept after the digital scan though...
They were obviously limited on time to setup lighting and the film stock available. If it was filmed on a nicer set with more interesting lighting and colour graded it would have looked much better. They made the best of a limited opportunity and as an explainer video it was spot on.
Fantastic video, mate! This would've been such a fun way to learn these film concepts in school. Well done
I appreciate that you uploaded in 24p.
old super8 long play has to be scanned in and edited and output in 18p and up until recently some video editing programs didn't have that output option. Thank goodness they listened to us retro preservation fans. Now the only problem is getting modern TV's to play 18p...
Autokroma After Codecs allows to export almost any FPS from Premiere pro.
A horizontally running 35mm process in the 50s and early 60s was called VistaVision, notably used by Alfred Hitchcock for his films of the time, like “Vertigo” (1958). It was 8-perf non-anamorphic horizontal, more than doubling the negative area per frame as compared to regular 35mm processes.
John Dykstra and his shop famously revived the process for effects shots in “Star Wars” (1977).
genuinely the best youtube video, visually i’ve ever seen, it even looks better than feature films that have came out this year
One of my local theaters (a nonprofit) that still shows movies on 35mm and 70mm (as they usually call what is actually 65mm.) They do have digital projectors too, to show current movies that are digital distribution; but they do both screenings of old movies on actual old movie stock, as well as modern "released on film". Quentin Tarantino has shown up for showings of his movies at the theater regularly. (Which is *NOT* anywhere near Hollywood. Okay, it's also *VERY* near Hollywood, since it is called the "Hollywood Theater," but it isn't in California.)
In a movie theater it would be literally 70mm, because that is where the soundtrack goes. It is only 65mm in a camera because the sound is not recorded to a camera, but to a seperate device.
soo soo glad they were able to keep 70mm alive, and that they still show their print of 2001 regularly.
i was wondering when will he start to film until i noticed a small white spec on the screen for just a single frame, incredible
This is so sick yo!!! best film formats comparison i ever seen because i see how they look like live
It is a shame Matt didn't explain the clapping board. Most people think it is a handy way of registering what take it is and when to start acting. However the clapping was originally for synchronizing the sound and the the visual. I doubt however that, with modern camera's, this is still needed and the clapping of the clapboard was (probably) for show only.
he recorded the sound on an external device. clapping was needed to sync them both up in post.
For film cameras it's definitely needed as these days you're most likely recording separate audio, like Matt is here. The clap is used to sync the audio to the film in post.
With digital it's still smart to get the clap, but these days you can set timecode (TC) to 'time of day' which is a TC that doesn't stop between takes. As long as your camera and audio recorders match that can make syncing much faster (you just match timecodes). That said, the TC could get recorded wrong, and even if the sound was sent to the camera to be paired with the video it isn't always frame accurate, so getting a clap can help confirm the audio is in sync more easily. (If you forget to record a clap you can always fall back on looking at actors mouths for particularly obvious consonants.)
We can still need to clap if the sound is recorded separatly. The board can also show to the editor which scene is which, so this is important. In the case of audio recorded to the camera only, there is no need to clap.
It plays a vital role for digital formats too. It's not only for syncing sound but to record the scene and take numbers so the editor knows which shot it looking at and correlate with the director notes. The also write technical info on it, such as frame rate, white balance and other necessary info for the colonists and the vfx departments. And there is a correct procedure of using the clapper board, it's not just holding it in front of the lens.
One advantage of film IS the cost! Let me explain. Because every take costs money, not just in the film in the camera but in processing those rushes later so you can make edit decisions (and therefore, only transfer to digital what is worth transferring), the incentive to get the performance right in preferably one take is massive. So, not only would one use cue cards or autocue, proper rehearsals were mandatory. When I worked on even corporates filmed on film (in the 70s), a lot of time was spent rehearsing the talking heads - especially company workers who had never done such a thing before. With any luck, they got it right in just a couple of takes, to produce a single, smooth sequence.
Modern digital techniques mean that takes only cost time, not film. So, people are lazy. They don't spend ages rehearsing, and in consequence, segments to camera are frequently filled with annoying and pointless jump cuts. We never had those in the days before video and then hard drives. Or very few. And they were covered with cutaways. So, just the high cost of film meant we couldn't be lazy. We couldn't afford to be. The productions were carefully planned and rehearsed ahead of time, just to keep costs lower, and that benefitted the entire production.
This is interesting. I've worked in TV documentary for 25 years and only on video. Rehearsal is little more than planning what people will say. Your post made me wonder if the increasingly fast cutting rate that has gradually come into screen content, was actually partly through necessity , as the number of takes grew. Aesthetics must've come into it too of course. Amazing that we are now at the point where jump cuts are deliberately added, even on a good take (especially by youngsters making social vids) to increase the visual interest
I bet if you read your own words out loud a few times you'll talk yourself out of your own opinion. I understand what you're trying to argue, but in the real world, if something costs many many times more, it still costs many times more. You're conveniently forgetting all the obvious advantages of being able to capture footage for free. Jackie Gleason would strongly disagree with you about strict rehearsals improving the quality of the content, and so would many other greats from the 20th century. Most filmmakers (especially comedians) would have loved to be able to film everything and build their movie on the cutting room floor. It's baffling that you think everyone would want to throw away so many opportunities. Remember, most people who make money from making videos and movies have very small budgets. You only hear about the multi million dollar movies because they have multi million dollar marketing budgets. Most people have no money or patience for film, and you seem knowledgeable enough to know why.
This was also true in for home/vacation movies. I remember the agony to sit through the hour long VHS vacation video of a relative who was the first to buy a video camera. Up until then, he had super 8, which had only about 3 minutes run time per cartridge. They weren't that cheap and it was a hassle to splice them together, so the vacation videos were rarely longer than 10-15 minutes, much better suited to his limited story telling abilities. With super 8, he had to carefully choose what to film. With VHS and no equipment for video editing, scenes that should have lasted 5 seconds went on and on for minutes.
Finally I understand all these film terms I’ve heard over the years! Fantastic video! Thank you!!
There's a real charm to the soft colour and edges and abberations.
Star Trek lens flares at 14:50
JJ Trek? IMO the best Star Trek was late 80s to early 00s (TNG, DS9, Voyager).
you've watched that acollierastro video didn't you
I don't remember lens flares in my Star Trek.
@@pedrofreitas4662 Great video, 100% would recommend (entirely seriously here, just to be clear) but those views have been popular in the Trek fandom for decades
JJ "Lens flare" Abrams...
I love that you can actually see film grain artifacts throughout the video. It's especially noticeable in the intro near your head, it's awesome to see.
One major aspect of IMAX is that it allows for projection on gigantic screens that fill your entire field of vision, while still being sharp.
I used to be "Why are movies still shot on film, that's silly!", but then I saw remastered old movies and now I'm convinced film is the way to go. They hold up so much better with time and remastering.
Digital didn't get good until the Arri Alexa in 2010. Everything prior to that (surprisingly few, though some notable entries like the Star Wars prequel trilogy) was shot on slightly better than ENG cameras with very limited dynamic range - for example the Sony F900. By no means bad cameras, but they had nothing on the quality of celluloid.
Film just looks more "real", modern 8k CGI heavy movies definitely should stick to digital.
Digital video has improved a lot in the past 15 years and I would argue that digital today is technically better.
This why film remasters are a big deal because our ability to scan film and the way we distribute digital video also improved by a lot.
Remember when you watched movies on DVD in the early 2000s? That's only 720x480 with older H.262 or even older MPEG1 compression. Add to that whatever technical limitations we had back then to scan the film so it can be distributed to digital format.
Today we now have 4k Ultra HD Blu-ray with more sophisticated H.265 HEVC compression, not to mention significantly faster internet connections for streaming video. Remasters are also done using the original master film and then edited with today's more powerful video editing software to eliminate faults on the film. Insane come to think of it.
They don't exactly hold up in terms of aging and preservation but they do allow for higher quality with the lesser tech requirements. The biggest downside nowadays is the cost of shooting and reshooting as Matt points out. With digital you can simply wipe shots you don't like over and over with effectively no cost in that department.
@@EpsilonKnight2 don't forget style points for using film
Amazing presentation skills, Matt! I love that the film format discourages unnecessary filler content. :)
My grandfather's 16mm films have sprockets on both sides. My father had an 8mm movie camera, before Super 8, and he had to use 16mm film which had to have the reels flipped after only a few minutes. No sound, but the 16mm film was processed and split down the middle to create the 8mm film.
There are three different formats here.
Super 16 (which they shown in the video), which has perf only on one side;
regular 16mm, which has perf on both sides;
2x8mm - the last one you mention - which looks like 16mm film, but has perf twice as dense as 16mm
I spent the time waiting for the IMAX 70mm...and there it is! Woohoo!
This video is simply genius! I am editing a video for one of my clients as I watch this and I'm having a ball, and also very thankful for APC prices for "film"... Much love from Tim Lee and Legacy Studio Network!
Small correction at 17:20, the IMAX 70mm aspect ratio is 1.43 not 1.34
Being a photography nerd, I didn't learn anything from this video, but I absolutely loved it. I love weird film formats and technologies. In addition to being an artistic choice, I love film cameras because of the mechanical systems.
Agreed, the mechanical aspect the delayed gratification are the best parts.
That is crazy! What a wonderful video and class
The difference between 16mil and 32 mil is the same as SD (720x480) to HD720 (1280x720) to HD1080 (1920x1080) to UHD4k (4096x2160). It's like exactly one step down. That's so cool!
just a reminder that 720x480 uses non-square pixels
@@gamecubeplayer You bring up a fantastic point. That's more like when Matt was talking about anamorphic images
This certainly demonstrates the importance of lighting when filming to actual film!
Yeah, I had the same thought. The lighting in the warehouse is so uncinematic that it "doesn't look like film", but that makes me wonder how much the look of film is just the look of skilled photographers/cinematographers, who also opt to use film because they think it looks better. I suspect in an experiment testing the ability of filmmakers watching footage from a modern digital camera compared with 35, the shots with better lighting would be guessed as film, even if they were digital.
@@glenmorrison8080good point. Set design, lighting etc. definitely contributes much more to a "film look" than the capturing medium.
Regarding color, texture etc.: what many people are not aware of is that a lot of what makes a film look like film is happening in the process of copying the camera negative to a (positive) print film. A scan of the camera negative itself does not look particularly interesting, so that's down to the colorist to get right.
What your push processing statement at the end brings to my mind are the other tweaks that can be made. Such as cross processing, where you shoot colour positive film and run it through the colour negative process. You get crazy contrasty colours. A similar one is bleach-bypass where silver is left the negative for a super contrasty look (Three Kings, 1999). Again, as you say, for artistic purposes.
DVD basically works the same way as anamorphic film. It’s always saved at 720x576 but stretched to 768x576 for 4:3 and 1024x576 for 16:9 (in most of the world at least)
For NTSC regions (most notably US, CA, JP), 720x480 -> 720x540 (4:3) / 854x480 (16:9)
(In reality it's far more complicated, with various standards crops, overscan and so on, but this is a rabbithole not worth getting into)
Not exactly, those pixels are not squared pixels. This is the aspect ratio of the pixels that is used normally there.
@@romangiertych5198 I took a peek into the overscan rabbithole the other day, apparently the actual 4:3 image is supposed to fit into 704x480 and the extra pixels in a 720x480 stream are supposed to be overscan. Analog has variable tolerance and sometimes part of the image can seep past the overscan boundaries, so capturing the overscan helps to prevent against accidentally throwing away part of the image. Thus, analog-sourced SD content typically has those thin black bars at the left and right preserved from capturing the overscan at 720x480. Since only the middle 704x480 part is supposed to be 4:3 (640x480), technically a 720x480 stream when squished to square pixel format should be 654x480.
Though with modern digital content there is no such concept of overscan and 720x480 is a common resolution, so we end up simply using the entire 720x480 resolution for the image and such a 720x480 stream should be displayed at 640x480 instead of 654x480.