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Good News for Kodak Film

Good news indeed!
 
Those statements do not hint at the future development of the cine print-film market that is decreasing.
 
Probably, for once, a balanced report by Kodak. We all know what's happening with the movie industry's change to digital....nothing we say will change that, but at least Kodak is securing the remianing business, which can only be good news.
 
We should not forget that for colour release films only two manufacturers remain: Agfa and Kodak
There still may be stocks of Fuji film around though.
 
It might be still a great investment to send the all film cameras , lenses and lighting to garbage.
 
Promising news...yes! However, I take some of this news with a grain of salt.
There were earlier articles of Kodak's new 'asset protection' or archival film.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/27/kodak-asset-protection-film/

It would be interesting to know just how many feet of film, (of the billions of feet mentioned),
will be film for 'initial capture' or the new 'archival film.' As mentioned in (post #7 above), though,
production of any type of film at Kodak will help in keeping more of the coating machines running.


Marc
 
I think archival, in the end, will win. It's much easier to store a reel of film than some sort of digital copy over the longhaul.
 
Klainmeister said:
I think archival, in the end, will win. It's much easier to store a reel of film than some sort of digital copy over the longhaul.
Click to expand...

I was talking with a technologist at Disney, where they are archiving by digitally generating a colour separation, then printing to B&W film - but this is not enough film to keep the industry afloat. When films were distributed as film rather than bits, tens of thousands of copies of the film would be made, now for archival purposes it will be a handful.
 
3 colour seperation copies per movie cannot compensate for hundreds of release copies.
 
Most (perhaps all-- not 100 certain) major studios still make prints of all theatrical releases (including those entirely shot digitally) for archival purposes. That's really what these deals are about. However, release prints are drying up fast-- I work in film distribution, and a lot of art theaters around the country are being denied requests for classic titles because such-and-such studio doesn't ship prints anymore. They tell them to screen a blu-ray instead.

Regardless, film (color and black and white) will be around for a long time, even if Kodak does totally collapse. However, prices will continue to go up...
 
There will always be enough demand for film to keep some coating plant of some size operating at a profit. Kodak's size is the problem, not their product. Prices will perhaps go up although I don't know enough to know if that is unlimited. I think film prices will stabilize at the point where X's customers move to digital. So there they sit; making a certain amount of profit and employing a certain number of people: A nice little business to be in. A boutique business, like Leica perhaps. The scale is critical. It might just end up being a couple suppliers with neither of them being Kodak or Ilford.

Nobody here really knows how much film is being sold and nobody here (except for a few) knows how much film one needs to sell to keep a plant of size X running. Everyone is just talking through their hats.
 
Nice to hear something positive for a change.
 

thanks s-a

you said exactly what i was thinking !
not to mention, i sure hope kodak secured the movie studios,
they are ONE OF THE only ones making the film since fuji stopped ...

- john
 
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What about the digital cinema percentage in India and China plus south Asian countries and Turkistan ? How is the american cinema overthere ?
Or do they use cd player and tv ?
 
In some of those film has vanished.
 
Mustafa Umut Sarac said:
What about the digital cinema percentage in India and China plus south Asian countries and Turkistan ? How is the american cinema overthere ?
Or do they use cd player and tv ?
Click to expand...

I believe the spread of digital exhibition in Asia is largely the cause for Fuji to pull out of motion picture production. Fuji stock was never very popular in the U.S., but used widely East Asia. Now, very little there is shot or exhibited on film, as I understand it.

Also, significantly, major film festivals are almost exclusively digital now. With low commercial demand for prints, for many smaller titles they are never even struck, whereas before at least a quantity would be needed for the festival circuit. Once peoples hard drives start crashing, some films will begin to disappear. I've heard it theorized that the period we are in now could be like the silent era, with only 20-30% of produced pictures surviving past 50 years.
 
Perez must be one unhappy man at the moment: Kodak is still alive.
 
desertratt said:
Most silent films have disappeared. Flammable film stock did a lot of the in. Curiously the copyright office couldn't handle films in the old days so film companies sent them rolls of prints, one print for each frame. These can last 200 years.
Click to expand...

Quite a few of the Edison films we have have been reconstructed from just such paper prints.
 
I went to a paper at SMPTE several years ago about converting Star Wars to 5.1 sound.

It turns out no one thought to store the main master print of the movie in an-archival manner. It was on some shelf in a building with no humidity or temperature control. The studio was annoyed they had to spend $10,000 to clean the print before they made 1 billion dollars on distributions for the DVD and re-releasing for theater.

Don't under estimate the stupidity of the movie industry.

They could have built a single vault just for that movie. Anyone who saw the original run of the movie would have realized this is a big deal, preserve it. But not the Star wars gang .
 
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