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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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
@@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).
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
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 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!
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.
Props for using true 24.000fps on this RUclips upload. Not that gaudy 23.9̅76023̅ frames per second just to satisfy some 1950s NTSC workaround for an audio subcarrier on a broadcast system nobody is using anyway, let alone RUclips.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Oh my goodness, the soft colors and detailed highlights just look so much better on film than on digital! I really hope this isn't the last time we see a RUclips video shot on film, because it just looks so much better than digital in my opinion
Today with post-processing tools, you can adjust film and digital colors so they are almost identical. The one difference the technology will always provide is that film shadows are deep, with no details to recover, but highlights are almost never blown out, you can always see details in them. For digital, it's the other way around, clipped highlights are gone forever, you can brighten shadows and recover details in a crazy way.
Shadows are lost and highlights are recovered if you use negative film, if it is positive it is the opposite and works like digital film. In my opinion there is something in the depth of the image that seems better captured on film, the diferents planes change more organically, without the "collage" feeling that the excess definition of digital has. But it's subtle, not so noticeable. but we must consider that we are seeing it digitalized and on RUclips. A good analog copy with a good projector increases the image quality a lot. In any case, the digital format is a blessing due to production costs.
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.
"Why shoot on film when digital is more efficient, forgiving, & cheaper?" The same reason why some artists still draw on paper instead on digital drawing tablets, some people just enjoy the 'less efficient' artform more because of the challenges it gives & the discipline that you can get & it can be useful when applying it to more 'efficient methods' like digital cameras if you're a filmmaker. So in a nutshell: it's a preference of the process
Resistance of the material is an important thing and many artists do prefer it because it benefits their process. But this comparison is not great, because the resistance of film as a material is so enormous that it completely PREVENTS a person from making most of the possible films they would otherwise make. Not to mention it's a resistance that's mostly monetary, not creative. It's as if, say, you could only get drawing paper through a lottery with contest of motivational letters, in a single place in a single city, and would have to raise $100 000 for each series of drawings, then another $100 000 to exhibit your series. If you didn't get your paper, you cannot draw - only describe your potential drawings to other people, pitching your drawing idea until someone gives you half a mil to do it.
@@ayebrainewell, that comparison doesn't quite work: firstly, compared to the total costs of shooting a movie, the price difference is rather that of having a collective of 150 artists working on a project for several months, paying each of them a salary, hotel, catering, travels etc. - and then deciding they have to watercolours because acrylic color is too expensive. But the material costs aside: some film makers prefer using film also because of it influences the work process. People suddenly start focusing on what is important to shoot rather than having the digital camera roll all day long and leave it to the editor to find if there is anything usable in the hours of footage. Not a good choice if filming with amateurs, animals, etc. though, obviously 😅
@@thewaldfe9763 Many hand drawn films still have artists using pen and paper. The difference is that all of their drawings are scanned into a computer and colored digitally. The last major film to use traditional physical cels was Pokemon Destiny Deoxys. That movie released in 2004/2005. The question really comes down to artist preference as for animation the most expensive part isn't necessarily the animation, it's stuff like Backgrounds
I don't normally watch videos this long end to end in one sitting but I felt like I owed you for the cost of this. And it was mighty interesting! Cheers!
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 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.
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.
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 😂
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.
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
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).
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 🙏
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.
film doesn't even approximate the resolution of 8k... it actually technically doesn't even approximate 4K resolution wise, the only real benefit is the codec and bitrate that youtube allows for 4k... film is actually closer to 2k
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.
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.
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!!
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.
Thank you so much, Matt. Filmmaking and photography are two fields that really disciplined me to understand math. I never did well in math class. It was in my late twenties, early thirities did math click for me as I kept asking questions about ratios, f-stops, inverse square, speed. It all lead to mathematics. You don't have to be a math genius nowadays to really be a photographer, but as someone who just wanted to understand why it was for certain things, it always lead me to mathematics. When I was returning to college in my mid-thirties, I self-taught myself some math fueled by this passion and confidence I gained from this love for film and photography. I tested out all the way to pre-calc. I was astonished. Again, thank you Matt for delving into film stock and world of numbers associated. ❤
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!
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.
One weird advantage film had over digital is it hasn't aged as badly because as long as the original film is undamaged you can recapture it to upscale up to the resolution of the film. This means some films originally recorded for VHS have been able to be converted to 2k bluray without looking terrible because the original data was still there in the film reel.
An excellent example of this is the music video for Last Christmas by Wham. Most of the the original film was found and digitized with modern equipment, and the video was recreated, edit for edit, in 4k. It looks unbelievable.
It actually means you get the strange situation that there are movies 100 years old, like idk, The Wizard of Oz or Metropolis, shot on 35mm, that could be transferred comfortably to 4K, whereas some films shot early on in digital HD, like the Star Wars prequels, are limited strictly to 2K, a lower resolution than these much older movies.
Star trek TNG used 35mm to acheive a more cinematic feel, and has bright crisp detail even on modern displays (It even looked pretty good after being transfered to video, broadcast, and picked up with an antenna for analog CRT); then Deep Space 9 which overlaped TNG by a season used an analog video camera like most sitcoms and it looks like a terrible smudge regardless of the display equipment (Not just cheaper recording, but it helped cover the lower budget costumes and sets).
@@TheDuckofDoom. More Star Trek nerd-er-y: The Original Series and TNG were recorded on film, but DS9 and VOY were on tape, or at least, post-production was kept, on tape. With DS9, there's a lot of CGI mixed in which makes it difficult to upscale, and with VOY, there just isn't more detail available. It's strange TOS can be exceptionally crisp, but stuff shot 30 years later can't...
also based on how much an industry cares about preservation. like old episodes recorded on VHS being the only copy because the original tapes got written over.
Those are all really reasonable units for their use cases. You would need very large numbers to measure reels in mm and they would go by extremely fast. If you wanted to measure film size in feet you would need to use fractions or decimals. And perfs are a shorthand to talk about aspect ratios in a less technical way. It all seems complicated until you imagine the effects of trying to streamline.
@@misterscottintheway metric prefixes: are we a joke to you? the simplest reason is just history... celluloid film first started becoming widespread in the early 1910s... which was still 40+ years before the SI units got formalised. there were earlier efforts at metrication before that, but it was mostly in europe, whereas film tech was mostly american.
@@Crlarlyou can make digital look like film BUT the difference is the highlights. Film deals with over-exposure very well, but with underexposure poorly, which means it naturally produces very deep shadows but the highlights are almost never blown out, you can always see details in them. Digital is the other way around, it deals very well with underexposure and you can recover crazy amounts of details from the shadows, but if the highlights clip, they're gone forever, no amount of film simulation will salvage it.
@@simval84 Newer digital cameras like the Alexa 35 are getting very very good at highlight retention now - with the information they keep in the shadows the total dynamic range probably exceeds celluloid. That doesn't mean it's the right choice for every project but for most it's probably the more practical decision.
just ETTL and then grade in post and it's pretty easy to get a film look. Ngl when I was learning to edit, I'd post my digital photos to the film groups, edited to look like a certain film stock and nobody noticed. It was a good experiment to see how well they'd pass. If you aren't expecting it and it's done right, I don't think it's noticable.
@@simval84 this point sort of contradicts you as you say it's the other way around for film vs digital, however it plays into digitals strength as once you bring the highlights into a better exposure, the rest of the scene obviously gets darker, and what did you say digital does well? Digital can pull back detail from shadows :) which is exactly what you get when you expose for the extreme highlights
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
"I've been framed". In my early tv days, I shot monochrome reversal for tv commercials. 100 feet equalled 2 minutes 40 seconds in 25 fps. All of that nonsense. Great stuff Matt. Totally enjoyed it. A definite FIRST.
The fact that this video includes slate clapping and outro is solely because it's too expensive. Matt almost got heart attack when the editor wants to take a cut. So they keep it. lol
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 'full frame' you refer to is 8 perf 35mm. It was commercially called vistavision. There is no cinema film definition of 'full frame'. Imax is 15 perf 65mm negative. 65mm is printed onto 70mm print film. The 5mm is reserved for optical audio. This video was only 1/2 finished since no prints were made. The contrast and color of film is determined by the printing stock. To get the look right you need to use a digital film emulation to fill in the missing process. That is why the video looks flatish and lacking in saturation.
And "full frame" actually means that you're using the full area of however many perfs you have chosen. There's nothing stopping you from masking off even more on any side, either on the camera or later in post. May TV series were filmed full frame but cropped to 4-by-3 later, which allows us to have remasters in 16-by-9 now. In contrast, a movie that was shot 3 perf but cropped to 2-to-1 in-camera can never be remastered by adding existing material to the top and bottom.
Yeah! And the internegtative, and interpositive steps before the release print also introduce film grain and contrast, which is why it doesn't look like what you'd expect a digital transfer to look like from a movie-- that is normally made from an interpositive.
@@Tevruden honestly most of the work is done from negative lately using digital emulation.For the cut negative shows a timed ip can be used. The modern processes introduce minimal grain or contrast. For restoration it’s usually the best quality element that exists, regardless of generation.
So is this the reason for the dull look of this as compared to movies, but 1-why is this so soft? Isn't this supposed to be much sharper since this has not been to other steps like you mentioned? 2- So the Blurays we see for the movies, they are not actually made from the camera negative (talking about pre DI films), and from the later stage printed film? Or when they specifically mention made using camera negative, they use some sort of digital film emulator?
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.
@@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 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.
I'm currently working in a movie shot on 35mm 3-perf (literally got home 1h ago from work), people very rarely get the chance to work with film nowadays and it's a great experience. I've even had the chance to load the film up onto the camera myself, but not into the casettes yet, that's on a whole other level. Arricam LT and ST are the newest film cameras out there, but with 1-3 movies shot on film each year, just in Hungary, I don't get how they didn't make a proper modern film camera yet. Of course the action of shooting film itself is the best you can expect, all the other parts, like powering the camera and accessories is so jank, you need adapters, splitters, whatever else. If you just check out the newest digital Alexa 35 camera, it's so much more user friendly. Btw the production rules state that if less than 70 feet of film is left on a roll, we are allowed to throw it out. Cool thing is though I managed to get like 200 feet of film that has already been accidentally exposed to light, so I can use it as learning material without the risk of actually screwing up big time. And it's interesting to see what a rollout looks like for real, because on monitors (with video assist) it looks way cooler for some reason.
@@Septimus_ii VitaVision was an eight perf horizontal pull with a frame size similar to the one you'd get in a 35mm still camera. I think the last use of it on an American feature for principle photography was in the early 60s although it's been used elsewhere and also for some special effects. Wikipedia has a nice article.
@@AndrewWhise He collaborated with Matt on a video about the Wagon Wheel Effect in "Static Helicopter Blades," and then a more minor and slightly disconcerting Matt cameo in "Orangutan Card Trick DEBUNK" which was what I was referencing
2 things. 1) Vistavision is another sideways 35mm format similar to full frame but a bit wider I believe. 2) one reason why film is often is used is because it is weirdly more future proof? When exposed correctly, developed correctly, etc etc, film can contain for detail that can translate to more resolution later on. Less so 16mm (definitely not 8mm) but modern 35 and 65 can be scanned with detail upwards of 8K, imax may even be 18 or 20K
On the future-proofing point, this is why we can get brand new remasters of old TV shows in incredible HD quality because they were shot completely on film, yet there are many TV shows from around 1995-2005 that are locked in standard definition, because they were made in an intermediary period when resolution formats were changing and digital video also started to replace film. It's especially the case for animation and any shows that used a lot of visual effects. (Give me my Deep Space Nine HD remaster, damn it!)
Fundamentally film still is a pixelmap, but made of color reactive granulars and eventually you will hit the limit and scans will look granular. Granular size is constant (same technology) , so it is no miracle you can fit more information if you increaze area of a frame (it is little shame that Matt didn't clearly mention this fact.). For data conservation film can be good, because you really don't need instructions to read the format, but in other hand polymer degradition can be a problem.
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.
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? 😔
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
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
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 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 😍
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
Perfect video
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.
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
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 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.
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.
Props for using true 24.000fps on this RUclips upload. Not that gaudy 23.9̅76023̅ frames per second just to satisfy some 1950s NTSC workaround for an audio subcarrier on a broadcast system nobody is using anyway, let alone RUclips.
How can you tell that it's 24.0?
1953 ;)
@@World_of_OSes You can right click on the video and display detailed stats there.
@@Paginski But it will just say "24" even if it's 23.976
Nearly every Blu-ray, 4K Blu-ray and streaming film ever released is 23.967
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
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 :-)
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?
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
Oh my goodness, the soft colors and detailed highlights just look so much better on film than on digital! I really hope this isn't the last time we see a RUclips video shot on film, because it just looks so much better than digital in my opinion
Today with post-processing tools, you can adjust film and digital colors so they are almost identical. The one difference the technology will always provide is that film shadows are deep, with no details to recover, but highlights are almost never blown out, you can always see details in them. For digital, it's the other way around, clipped highlights are gone forever, you can brighten shadows and recover details in a crazy way.
Shadows are lost and highlights are recovered if you use negative film, if it is positive it is the opposite and works like digital film. In my opinion there is something in the depth of the image that seems better captured on film, the diferents planes change more organically, without the "collage" feeling that the excess definition of digital has. But it's subtle, not so noticeable.
but we must consider that we are seeing it digitalized and on RUclips. A good analog copy with a good projector increases the image quality a lot.
In any case, the digital format is a blessing due to production costs.
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
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.
The film was so expensive, Matt couldn't afford to plug Love Triangle. I got my copy already though!
"Why shoot on film when digital is more efficient, forgiving, & cheaper?"
The same reason why some artists still draw on paper instead on digital drawing tablets, some people just enjoy the 'less efficient' artform more because of the challenges it gives & the discipline that you can get & it can be useful when applying it to more 'efficient methods' like digital cameras if you're a filmmaker.
So in a nutshell: it's a preference of the process
Resistance of the material is an important thing and many artists do prefer it because it benefits their process. But this comparison is not great, because the resistance of film as a material is so enormous that it completely PREVENTS a person from making most of the possible films they would otherwise make. Not to mention it's a resistance that's mostly monetary, not creative.
It's as if, say, you could only get drawing paper through a lottery with contest of motivational letters, in a single place in a single city, and would have to raise $100 000 for each series of drawings, then another $100 000 to exhibit your series. If you didn't get your paper, you cannot draw - only describe your potential drawings to other people, pitching your drawing idea until someone gives you half a mil to do it.
@@ayebrainewell, that comparison doesn't quite work: firstly, compared to the total costs of shooting a movie, the price difference is rather that of having a collective of 150 artists working on a project for several months, paying each of them a salary, hotel, catering, travels etc. - and then deciding they have to watercolours because acrylic color is too expensive.
But the material costs aside: some film makers prefer using film also because of it influences the work process. People suddenly start focusing on what is important to shoot rather than having the digital camera roll all day long and leave it to the editor to find if there is anything usable in the hours of footage.
Not a good choice if filming with amateurs, animals, etc. though, obviously 😅
@@thewaldfe9763 Many hand drawn films still have artists using pen and paper. The difference is that all of their drawings are scanned into a computer and colored digitally. The last major film to use traditional physical cels was Pokemon Destiny Deoxys. That movie released in 2004/2005. The question really comes down to artist preference as for animation the most expensive part isn't necessarily the animation, it's stuff like Backgrounds
I don't normally watch videos this long end to end in one sitting but I felt like I owed you for the cost of this. And it was mighty interesting! Cheers!
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 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.
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.
genuinely the best youtube video, visually i’ve ever seen, it even looks better than feature films that have came out this year
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.
@@aspuzling 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🤭🤭🤭🤭
Film just hits different man, that last shot just had that underexposed ambiance
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.
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
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).
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?
Matt: There's no sensor.
RUclips: There's always a censor.
This comment literally made me chuckle.
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?
not rendering this out in 8k is such a wasted opportunity but I love the difference between 35 and 16 being shown, absolutely crazy.
RUclips is limited to 4K for now it seems ( correct me if i'm wrong ). Or maybe they did not have a 8K scan.
@@debranchelowtone you can absolutely watch youtube in 8k.. very rare tho
@@TwinkleTutsies ah ! thanks for the info
@@debranchelowtone ruclips.net/video/1KP0d_gmZEo/видео.html
film doesn't even approximate the resolution of 8k... it actually technically doesn't even approximate 4K resolution wise, the only real benefit is the codec and bitrate that youtube allows for 4k... film is actually closer to 2k
God, this footage looks beautiful. Film is such a gorgeous medium.
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
That is an insane claim 00:50
I was watching videos about film scanners and they had some examples. I'm not sure if those count.
Yep thats a lie
You have an example that pre-dates this?
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☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️
17:39 I love the cinematic look in the outro 🤌
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!!
Fantastic! Look forwards to this being released on VHS!
Beta and laserdisc
Alright the thumbnail being on film was a great ending lol. Well done
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.
Thank you so much, Matt. Filmmaking and photography are two fields that really disciplined me to understand math.
I never did well in math class. It was in my late twenties, early thirities did math click for me as I kept asking questions about ratios, f-stops, inverse square, speed. It all lead to mathematics.
You don't have to be a math genius nowadays to really be a photographer, but as someone who just wanted to understand why it was for certain things, it always lead me to mathematics.
When I was returning to college in my mid-thirties, I self-taught myself some math fueled by this passion and confidence I gained from this love for film and photography. I tested out all the way to pre-calc. I was astonished.
Again, thank you Matt for delving into film stock and world of numbers associated. ❤
Hands down the best film explanatory video I've ever seen!
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 :)
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.
The rolling patreon names forming a waveform of his speech is such a lovely nerdy detail worthy of this channel, just *chef's kiss*
This is an amazing amount of effort and money for a RUclips video. Great video as always!
Bec Hill mentioned!
Great explanations as always, Matt.
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.
One weird advantage film had over digital is it hasn't aged as badly because as long as the original film is undamaged you can recapture it to upscale up to the resolution of the film.
This means some films originally recorded for VHS have been able to be converted to 2k bluray without looking terrible because the original data was still there in the film reel.
An excellent example of this is the music video for Last Christmas by Wham. Most of the the original film was found and digitized with modern equipment, and the video was recreated, edit for edit, in 4k. It looks unbelievable.
It actually means you get the strange situation that there are movies 100 years old, like idk, The Wizard of Oz or Metropolis, shot on 35mm, that could be transferred comfortably to 4K, whereas some films shot early on in digital HD, like the Star Wars prequels, are limited strictly to 2K, a lower resolution than these much older movies.
Star trek TNG used 35mm to acheive a more cinematic feel, and has bright crisp detail even on modern displays (It even looked pretty good after being transfered to video, broadcast, and picked up with an antenna for analog CRT); then Deep Space 9 which overlaped TNG by a season used an analog video camera like most sitcoms and it looks like a terrible smudge regardless of the display equipment (Not just cheaper recording, but it helped cover the lower budget costumes and sets).
@@TheDuckofDoom. More Star Trek nerd-er-y: The Original Series and TNG were recorded on film, but DS9 and VOY were on tape, or at least, post-production was kept, on tape. With DS9, there's a lot of CGI mixed in which makes it difficult to upscale, and with VOY, there just isn't more detail available. It's strange TOS can be exceptionally crisp, but stuff shot 30 years later can't...
also based on how much an industry cares about preservation. like old episodes recorded on VHS being the only copy because the original tapes got written over.
mesuring the film in milimiters, the frame in "perfurations" and the roll in feet.
jesus
Well, it is footage.
Those are all really reasonable units for their use cases. You would need very large numbers to measure reels in mm and they would go by extremely fast. If you wanted to measure film size in feet you would need to use fractions or decimals. And perfs are a shorthand to talk about aspect ratios in a less technical way. It all seems complicated until you imagine the effects of trying to streamline.
@@misterscottintheway metric prefixes: are we a joke to you?
the simplest reason is just history... celluloid film first started becoming widespread in the early 1910s... which was still 40+ years before the SI units got formalised. there were earlier efforts at metrication before that, but it was mostly in europe, whereas film tech was mostly american.
@misterscottintheway PSA: meters exist.
@@misterscottintheway bro doesn't understand how to use the metric system 🤡
Film handles speckle light and open bulbs so beautifully that you can hardly ever achieve the same with an electronic sensor.
You should check out Steve Yedlin's film emulation work. He made _Knives Out_ and _Glass Onion_ look like film.
@@Crlarlyou can make digital look like film BUT the difference is the highlights. Film deals with over-exposure very well, but with underexposure poorly, which means it naturally produces very deep shadows but the highlights are almost never blown out, you can always see details in them. Digital is the other way around, it deals very well with underexposure and you can recover crazy amounts of details from the shadows, but if the highlights clip, they're gone forever, no amount of film simulation will salvage it.
@@simval84 Newer digital cameras like the Alexa 35 are getting very very good at highlight retention now - with the information they keep in the shadows the total dynamic range probably exceeds celluloid. That doesn't mean it's the right choice for every project but for most it's probably the more practical decision.
just ETTL and then grade in post and it's pretty easy to get a film look. Ngl when I was learning to edit, I'd post my digital photos to the film groups, edited to look like a certain film stock and nobody noticed. It was a good experiment to see how well they'd pass. If you aren't expecting it and it's done right, I don't think it's noticable.
@@simval84 this point sort of contradicts you as you say it's the other way around for film vs digital, however it plays into digitals strength as once you bring the highlights into a better exposure, the rest of the scene obviously gets darker, and what did you say digital does well? Digital can pull back detail from shadows :) which is exactly what you get when you expose for the extreme highlights
Even the flattest of lighting in the workshop is giving off such vivid and rich tones that I have never experienced shooting digital.
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 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.
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.
Amazing presentation skills, Matt! I love that the film format discourages unnecessary filler content. :)
Why are you so much fun? You're amazing Matt.
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)
A truly wonderful RUclips video. This was my whole film school over 20 years ago in a 20 minute video. Brilliant!
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.
The fact that even the thumbnail was shot on film is great
17:40 the footage from this entire sequence looks amazing
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.
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.
6:35 Dust/scratch/hair lower left frame on "four perf".
"I've been framed". In my early tv days, I shot monochrome reversal for tv commercials. 100 feet equalled 2 minutes 40 seconds in 25 fps. All of that nonsense. Great stuff Matt. Totally enjoyed it. A definite FIRST.
I don't know how much of this is placebo, but the colors and tone falloffs are just -so- pleasing to look at.
The fact that this video includes slate clapping and outro is solely because it's too expensive.
Matt almost got heart attack when the editor wants to take a cut. So they keep it. lol
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.
The 'full frame' you refer to is 8 perf 35mm. It was commercially called vistavision. There is no cinema film definition of 'full frame'.
Imax is 15 perf 65mm negative. 65mm is printed onto 70mm print film. The 5mm is reserved for optical audio.
This video was only 1/2 finished since no prints were made. The contrast and color of film is determined by the printing stock. To get the look right you need to use a digital film emulation to fill in the missing process. That is why the video looks flatish and lacking in saturation.
And "full frame" actually means that you're using the full area of however many perfs you have chosen. There's nothing stopping you from masking off even more on any side, either on the camera or later in post. May TV series were filmed full frame but cropped to 4-by-3 later, which allows us to have remasters in 16-by-9 now. In contrast, a movie that was shot 3 perf but cropped to 2-to-1 in-camera can never be remastered by adding existing material to the top and bottom.
Yeah! And the internegtative, and interpositive steps before the release print also introduce film grain and contrast, which is why it doesn't look like what you'd expect a digital transfer to look like from a movie-- that is normally made from an interpositive.
@@Tevruden honestly most of the work is done from negative lately using digital emulation.For the cut negative shows a timed ip can be used. The modern processes introduce minimal grain or contrast.
For restoration it’s usually the best quality element that exists, regardless of generation.
@HenryLoenwind it's also why the 16:9 remasters feel oddly framed and often have production equipment visible when done poorly.
So is this the reason for the dull look of this as compared to movies, but
1-why is this so soft? Isn't this supposed to be much sharper since this has not been to other steps like you mentioned?
2- So the Blurays we see for the movies, they are not actually made from the camera negative (talking about pre DI films), and from the later stage printed film? Or when they specifically mention made using camera negative, they use some sort of digital film emulator?
This video was super cool. Appreciate you guys paying for this
I understand this isn't using the Optical Sound, but the concept of it has always blown my mind, really ingenious way to store audio data.
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.
I spent the time waiting for the IMAX 70mm...and there it is! Woohoo!
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...
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!
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.
I do very much enjoy that you filmed a film about filming on film on film 😂
I'm currently working in a movie shot on 35mm 3-perf (literally got home 1h ago from work), people very rarely get the chance to work with film nowadays and it's a great experience. I've even had the chance to load the film up onto the camera myself, but not into the casettes yet, that's on a whole other level. Arricam LT and ST are the newest film cameras out there, but with 1-3 movies shot on film each year, just in Hungary, I don't get how they didn't make a proper modern film camera yet. Of course the action of shooting film itself is the best you can expect, all the other parts, like powering the camera and accessories is so jank, you need adapters, splitters, whatever else. If you just check out the newest digital Alexa 35 camera, it's so much more user friendly. Btw the production rules state that if less than 70 feet of film is left on a roll, we are allowed to throw it out. Cool thing is though I managed to get like 200 feet of film that has already been accidentally exposed to light, so I can use it as learning material without the risk of actually screwing up big time. And it's interesting to see what a rollout looks like for real, because on monitors (with video assist) it looks way cooler for some reason.
There's a real charm to the soft colour and edges and abberations.
That outdoor shot is absolutely gorgeous. Idk what it is about film but I love it.
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!
Why nobody have been using 35mm sideways like IMAX?
Correction: It has been done and it's called VistaVision.
It sounds like they have occasionally? It sounded like full-frame usually referred to 35mm full-frame
@@Septimus_ii VitaVision was an eight perf horizontal pull with a frame size similar to the one you'd get in a 35mm still camera. I think the last use of it on an American feature for principle photography was in the early 60s although it's been used elsewhere and also for some special effects. Wikipedia has a nice article.
Where's Captain Disillusion when you need him?
The Captain is probably lying on a beach somewhere while Alan spends 6 months in Blender animating his next epic.
Is Matt going to pay for devouring Dronus at the Colchester Zoo?
Matt had a cameo in one of CD's videos. I don't remember which one though
@@AndrewWhise He collaborated with Matt on a video about the Wagon Wheel Effect in "Static Helicopter Blades," and then a more minor and slightly disconcerting Matt cameo in "Orangutan Card Trick DEBUNK" which was what I was referencing
2 things. 1) Vistavision is another sideways 35mm format similar to full frame but a bit wider I believe. 2) one reason why film is often is used is because it is weirdly more future proof? When exposed correctly, developed correctly, etc etc, film can contain for detail that can translate to more resolution later on. Less so 16mm (definitely not 8mm) but modern 35 and 65 can be scanned with detail upwards of 8K, imax may even be 18 or 20K
His 16 mm did look like 720p resolution, which would suggest 35 mm is (only) about 1440p resolution.
On the future-proofing point, this is why we can get brand new remasters of old TV shows in incredible HD quality because they were shot completely on film, yet there are many TV shows from around 1995-2005 that are locked in standard definition, because they were made in an intermediary period when resolution formats were changing and digital video also started to replace film. It's especially the case for animation and any shows that used a lot of visual effects.
(Give me my Deep Space Nine HD remaster, damn it!)
35 is a bit below 4k typically, though better than 1080p. There's definitely still room for higher res scans of 65 and IMAX though.
Nothing weird about it. Film grain is smaller than the sensor arrays pixels we use for digital.
Fundamentally film still is a pixelmap, but made of color reactive granulars and eventually you will hit the limit and scans will look granular. Granular size is constant (same technology) , so it is no miracle you can fit more information if you increaze area of a frame (it is little shame that Matt didn't clearly mention this fact.).
For data conservation film can be good, because you really don't need instructions to read the format, but in other hand polymer degradition can be a problem.
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.
I just love the look of the anamorphic widescreen footage.