Distinguishing between Film Work and Digital Work.

[Joe VanCleave]

...When it's all said and done, isn't what one can create with their imagination and the unknown different than what one can create with modern day see ot as it happens technology? I don't think it's an issue which method one prefers, I just think it would be a good thing if both methods could co-exist far into the future and that the viewer understood and appreciated the difference.

If the day comes when art is no longer created under a wait and see environment, I think we all will lose something.

Alesssandro, I'm interested in this aspect of your post, the idea of the "wait and see" aspect of photography. I was just musing on this last week in my blog, and thought that perhaps one of the 'addictive' aspects of photography, for me at least, it the idea that one can work in a creative medium that does not provide immediate feedback; there's the element of surprise and anticipation, like what one experiences when mail-ordering merchandise and waiting for it to arrive. The buildup of anticipation, for me, provides tension that is all the more pleasurable when released by the fortune of good results.

And so I'm interested in this question of "methods" of working that don't provide a sense of immediacy. Which is intimately tied in with the specifics of technological formats and systems and their artifacts, as you've provided allusion to in your post. Specific to 8mm film, just this week I spent some time engaged in 'format swapping' a old, anonymous reel of 8mm film, from a business trip in 1973 to the Konica factory in Japan. I transfered the projected film to MPEG-4 video via my point-n-shoot digital camera, then assembled this in Windows Movie Maker into a 'production' of sorts. I then downloaded the completed MPG file back to the memory stick in my camera, and am able to play back the video to TV - or record to DVD or analog tape, if desired. Yet, the original sense of the 8mm film's quality and unique artifacts are still present in the final playback, despite all the various other format artifacts that may be present.

Reference in another post was also made to the lack of appreciation of VHS video, as compared to small-gauge film. I've also been interested in the 'despised formats' of low-grade consumer analog video, like VHS and Fisher-Price Pixelvision, or just plain old B/W surveillance video. Each have their own, unique qualities that are often found mimicked in high-dollar hollywood productions using costly special effects systems. What is evident from this discussion is that there are other ways of production, and other visual qualities to moving images than the 'standard' hollywood or television (i.e. 'mainstream media') methods. The works that I enjoy the most are off-beat, non-mainstream, alternative, underground or experimental video and film.

This probably won't be appreciated, if at all, until after NTSC is turned off in the States, and there arises an underground video economy, similar to what happened with Fisher-Price pixelvision after its demise. Video artists and experimentalists will find these old formats refreshing and interesting after all. I certainly do.

 

[Helen B]

I don't care if his process involves electronics...it's analog, not digital. So what if it's not "typical." It's unique and creative.

I don’t wish to distract from Alessandro’s creativity, but time-lapse time-exposure Super 8 is far from unique. One of the magic things about Super 8 cameras is that they often have clever features that their big sisters don’t even dream about. One of them is the ease with which you can do time lapse with time exposures.

Though I don’t have one, there are Bauer Super 8 cameras that will do it automatically – they adjust the shutter speed and hence the frame rate to match the available illumination. Those cameras produce some trippy stuff. I use a camera that has the equivalent of an electric T-setting with a pair of timers – one to set the frame interval and one to set the exposure time. You have to hope that it has got the sequence the right way round: for example five minutes open shutter followed by five seconds of closed shutter otherwise you spend a night out sitting by your camera for a black piece of film.

Among its creations (it does the business, I just sit beside it) is some thrilling footage of the gentle moonlit sea – but it is short: at five minutes exposure per frame, then doubled in an optical step-printer, it works out at exactly one second of finished film per hour of moonlight. All very 1970’s Art House, mostly because that’s where I came from.There's another difference between film and video: electronic work is readily accessible. To watch a piece of non-mainstream film as film you have to go and seek it out. It's not an immediate creation, and it's not for immediate consumption.

Best,
Helen

 

[Alessandro Machi]

I'm totally overwhelmed.

lol, I, for once, feel unable to respond because so many different questions have been raised, I won't be able to do justice to the questions and comments raised just in the last several posts.

Super-8 isn't just about time-exposure, I just love the ease with which one can do time-exposure in Super-8. It's perhaps easier than on any other format ever invented. I once did an approximately 150-200 animated time-exposure frames in which each exposure was around 45-seconds to a minute, and I was flashing and filling separate banks of lights and actually walking onto the set during the shot and animating a teddy bear and then going back to the camera and doing more flashing and filling with a zoom mixed in, and after the frame finished being exposed, I would then slide the camera upwards on a bannister, creating the sensation of lifting off.

The shot worked. Well, it took me several take, but each take took around an hour to complete. Ironically, most people who view the shot have no idea that each frame took almost a minute to create and approximately 7-10 different actions.

And yet, if I like, I can also shoot slow motion with this same camera. While my camera is my favorite, as Helene pointed out, there are over a dozen different super-8 camera models that one can claim as the best Super-8 camera ever made, and each camera has a slightly different strength yet usually also has many options found on other super-8 cameras.

I think the key thing about the electronic aspect of transferring film to digital video or analog video is the film does retain it's original look and feel, perhaps because it started as a three dimensionally layered piece of celluloid??? All future adjustments or electronics alterations still hinge on the original exposure that was captured on film.

There are virtually no shots that I do on my Super-8 camera that I would prefer doing on a betacam sp video camera, even though one could argue that the resolution of the betacam sp camera would be higher. If I were to ever attempt a low budget feature film, I would prefer to shoot it in Super-8 versus a high quality video format.

As for what I see the format entailing. I think it would focus on about four or five aspects of motion picture production. Cameras, film stocks, processing choices, camera maintenance, kinds of productions once is working on, that's five.

By the way, the hybrid forum sounds interesting, why didn't it stay part of this website?

 

[Alessandro Machi]

What vintage equipment are you using that is all analogue? But why is it important? I've never heard anyone arguing that analogue processing is preferable to digital processing aesthetically or ethically for video. Audio? Yes - I've heard those debates.

[Explanation of my question for the rest of the world: The box might have analogue in and analogue out, and knobs on the front but have an ADC, DSP and DAC* inside.
* Analogue to digital converter, digital signal processor, digital to analogue converter.]

Best,
Helen

The Betacam SP video format has four primary adjustment dials called "Video", "Set-up", "Chroma" and "Hue". By themselves, I wouldn't be impressed, however, when combined with a low,mid, and high gamma component color corrector, one can do a lot, not to change the image, but to bring out what is already potentially there. By switching the input select knob on my video mastering video deck, I can instantly choose to go through a panasonic MX-50 digital switcher instead of the component color corrector. This allows me the ability for instant video clip and set-up clip adjustment, plus an additional color correction as well, and that is where the additional magic can happen.

Is all of this stuff available on a computer, yes, is it all instantly available via external dials, each set up to control a different function, instantly, no. However, in my world, it all is instantly available. When I make my adjustments, I am turning multiple dials at the same time, yet my signal is following a left to right "flow". This enables me to do certain combinations that result in a generally better looking image than someone doing the identical job on a computer. I am able massage the signal to see what combination produces the ideal result. I have come up with some interesting real time techniques that usually will enhance scenes shot in video
but that were shot E.N.G. style. This technique is a goldmine on lower budgeted productions, especially the ones shot in situations where control over the lighting contrasts is not possible.

I've also discovered that those red carpet events where flash bulbs are going off all over the place many times simply set the overall level to make sure the flash bulbs don't go over a certain I.R.E. level, however, it turns out that with the right combination of clip and other color correction techniques I have developed in my analog world, I can always make the image better than the camera original.

If a project has already been lit well, than I keep my adjustments to an absolute bare minimum, sometimes I'll just let the signal through exactly as is, via what I call "pre-set". Pre-set is the number one factor in setting up a studio. Can one send a signal over to another device without altering it from it's original form? Can I montor the signal via "check" points such as LED read outs or waveforms and vectorscopes that let me know that I have evenly matched the signal at each and every exchange point? I recently read that Adobe After Effects uses RGB processing, but that actual digital video signal uses R-Y, B-Y, Y component processing. These are not 100% compatible, it's the big lie that nobody talks about and it's probably caused people to go nuts trying to rematch a shots color that had to be imported into afteraffects.

Even though my color correction work is done on video, it's not done in a computer and I can correct at a faster rate because of that.

The color correction and accuracy is not taught very well in the digital world, it's just assumed the signal is OK and instead the time that should be spent optimizing the actual shot is used to create all kinds of cool editing gimmicks, sort of like putting one's handprint on someone else's initital vision. Sometimes, the handprint is welcomed, other times, it's merely a tool used to keep people watching so they don't channel surf.

What ends up happening is the person at home trys to emulate the cool editing tricks, but they become oblivious to how little they actually know about the original video signal, and what they could have done to gently massage it for most impact.

 

[Alessandro Machi]

I see. First the problem is my language: I meant, "analog" as a traditional photo-processing method, and not the nobs and dials for the video transfer. Analog photo process means, you shoot film, develop it, print with an enlarger or have a slide ready for the final presentatation, etc. That is the typical analog process of the traditional photography. Cut the video tranfer and show us how you can do it in a traditional way if you can, which would probably be a good start to run a forum for this area of film photography and cinematography.

Secondly I understand your adjustment process with the presets, and I don't have any problem with it except when you said the saturation-boost is done by the the lab, but not you, etc. Right here, you're exactly talking about the video product that's not done iin the traditional process any more, but you're not indicating how you can come up with the similar result in the traditional way. What do you want to do with it ultimately? So, this is what I think is not appropriate to discuss on this forum because this is for the traditional photography.

Third, it was my fault to call your "3 super8 cameras and me" photo as a DJ booth shot. It just looked like that to me. You are so in the picture, so in the atmosphere, which I think is kind of cool. But again it's hard to see what it is unless you're 100 percent certain and confident about the way the image is shown is what you wanted to do in the first place...

The lab does the boost during the transfer to video stage, not during the processing stage. While one can call that "hybriding", It's really the most logical way to handle Super-8 and for me it still feels like I'm working with the film because the image on the screen really looks like the film.

 

[Alessandro Machi]

Interesting views...

Alesssandro, I'm interested in this aspect of your post, the idea of the "wait and see" aspect of photography. I was just musing on this last week in my blog, and thought that perhaps one of the 'addictive' aspects of photography, for me at least, it the idea that one can work in a creative medium that does not provide immediate feedback; there's the element of surprise and anticipation, like what one experiences when mail-ordering merchandise and waiting for it to arrive. The buildup of anticipation, for me, provides tension that is all the more pleasurable when released by the fortune of good results.

And so I'm interested in this question of "methods" of working that don't provide a sense of immediacy. Which is intimately tied in with the specifics of technological formats and systems and their artifacts, as you've provided allusion to in your post. Specific to 8mm film, just this week I spent some time engaged in 'format swapping' a old, anonymous reel of 8mm film, from a business trip in 1973 to the Konica factory in Japan. I transfered the projected film to MPEG-4 video via my point-n-shoot digital camera, then assembled this in Windows Movie Maker into a 'production' of sorts. I then downloaded the completed MPG file back to the memory stick in my camera, and am able to play back the video to TV - or record to DVD or analog tape, if desired. Yet, the original sense of the 8mm film's quality and unique artifacts are still present in the final playback, despite all the various other format artifacts that may be present.

Reference in another post was also made to the lack of appreciation of VHS video, as compared to small-gauge film. I've also been interested in the 'despised formats' of low-grade consumer analog video, like VHS and Fisher-Price Pixelvision, or just plain old B/W surveillance video. Each have their own, unique qualities that are often found mimicked in high-dollar hollywood productions using costly special effects systems. What is evident from this discussion is that there are other ways of production, and other visual qualities to moving images than the 'standard' hollywood or television (i.e. 'mainstream media') methods. The works that I enjoy the most are off-beat, non-mainstream, alternative, underground or experimental video and film.

This probably won't be appreciated, if at all, until after NTSC is turned off in the States, and there arises an underground video economy, similar to what happened with Fisher-Price pixelvision after its demise. Video artists and experimentalists will find these old formats refreshing and interesting after all. I certainly do.

This will probably sound political, but I think it relates. Wall Street is both empowering this country, and ruining it at the same time. When 3M manufacturing announced several years ago that they were laying off 5000 workers , 5000 manufacturing jobs in the United States, 3M's stock went up. The videotape division was profitable, but it just was not making enough money! Even today, several years later, do you all realize that there is no true realistic rearchiving format for the average consumer that will outlive their film and video originals! Yet these formats are being taken away prematurely, because they don't make enough money. Thank you Wall Street.

Wall Street bean counter-itis will eventually be the end of the U.S. as we know it. There no longer exists any paradigm scenario in which U.S. workers doing real work will garner favor with Wall Street over subbing the work out overseas. If you live in the United States, think about that, think about that real hard. Any new economic venture that does not involve farming out work to other countries will cause Wall Street to frown upon that specific business venture. I find that sick.