Tired of Hearing "Film is Dead"? Well, So Are We.

What I meant by downsizing, was to move the whole production into smaller factories with fewer people, apparently they don't need the behemoth monster factories any more.

Wages and cost of material are usually the most expensive stuff. Heck, even efke and foma manages to push out films to the marked, so shipping and packaging can't be the most costly thing in the production.

Didn't they demolish lots of their buildings, remove company presence in lots of countries, and sack loads of staff? In my opinion that's downsizing.

Nice to see any new product out there. I like the line "....digital age and well beyond." like they are seeing a post digital future.

How does any MF photographer not worth his/her salt inconvenienced with 5 roll boxes??/
My local store will sell partial boxes anyway... have been for years.

Thanx!

Last year TwinLensLife had a review of Vision3 500T vs Portra 400 (link). Unfortunately, Vision3 is movie film and it requires different processing.

JBrunner said:

Plenty of demand for MP film. Even when just little old me shoots a total POS, I'll still go through over 100,000 feet of the stuff.

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100,000 feet! So how much does a major motion picture go through?

90 feet per minute at 24fps...

Christopher Colley said:

90 feet per minute at 24fps...

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So for 120 minutes of finished film that's a little over 10,000 feet. The other 90,000 feet would end up on the cutting room floor in JBrunner's example. That's for what he described as a "total POS" film.

So my question still stands. If his ratio is 90% waste, what's the film usage for a major motion picture?

langedp said:

That's for what he described as a "total POS" film.

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If I know JB like I virtually think I do...
I don't think he was ragging on the film but on HIS film making.
A bit of self deprecating humor.

HIE - I have 6.5 rolls in the freezer - Made some of my funnest pix with it

langedp said:

So for 120 minutes of finished film that's a little over 10,000 feet. The other 90,000 feet would end up on the cutting room floor in JBrunner's example. That's for what he described as a "total POS" film.

So my question still stands. If his ratio is 90% waste, what's the film usage for a major motion picture?

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The bulk of the film usage for the motion picture industry is in making prints for distribution. A major motion picture will do in excess of 10,000 prints to go to worldwide distribution, so for for a 120 minute film, 10,000 ft for one copy, 100,000,000 ft for all 10,000 copies. This is how the motion picture industry is keeping the film business alive.

This is short lived however, for a variety of reasons, movie theaters are moving to digital projection, which means that they won't need the film to distribute......

One interesting anecdote - after a film is completed, and they generate their master copies, most motion picture companies make a colour separated print - on black and white film. They are not sure how archival the various types of digital media are, but they have lots of experience with archiving film, and know that it is stable. By doing the colour separation, and keeping the archive as B&W, they will be able to generate new colour prints, on whatever media is in vogue hundreds of years from now.

Mark_S said:

The bulk of the film usage for the motion picture industry is in making prints for distribution. A major motion picture will do in excess of 10,000 prints to go to worldwide distribution, so for for a 120 minute film, 10,000 ft for one copy, 100,000,000 ft for all 10,000 copies. This is how the motion picture industry is keeping the film business alive.

This is short lived however, for a variety of reasons, movie theaters are moving to digital projection, which means that they won't need the film to distribute......

One interesting anecdote - after a film is completed, and they generate their master copies, most motion picture companies make a colour separated print - on black and white film. They are not sure how archival the various types of digital media are, but they have lots of experience with archiving film, and know that it is stable. By doing the colour separation, and keeping the archive as B&W, they will be able to generate new colour prints, on whatever media is in vogue hundreds of years from now.

Click to expand...

As far as I know, Ilford produces no motion picture film.

Mark_S said:

The bulk of the film usage for the motion picture industry is in making prints for distribution. A major motion picture will do in excess of 10,000 prints to go to worldwide distribution, so for for a 120 minute film, 10,000 ft for one copy, 100,000,000 ft for all 10,000 copies. This is how the motion picture industry is keeping the film business alive.

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Thanks Mark. I pretty much knew about the prints for distribution although I didn't know how many copies were typically made. That's a lot of film. My question was more about the filming of the movie and how much film was used to capture the original scenes. I genuinely don't know. Is 100,000 feet typical? I know a lot never makes it into the finished movie, but 90% or more waste?

langedp said:

I know a lot never makes it into the finished movie, but 90% or more waste?

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Waste is not really the right term. A director will do multiple takes, film extra and different angles for editing coverage. There is no way to cut most (99.99999999%) of films without coverage. As far as feet of film, many films have gone through over 1,000,000 feet, "Apocalypse now","The New Wold","the thin red line", the first Superman - to name just a few out of many.

This is called the shooting ratio and although 1,000,000 feet equals 100:1 in ratio to film shot vs used, it is hardly unheard of. Wish I had that kind of budget...

below is a quick explanation
http://www.cinematography.net/edited-pages/ShootingRatio.htm

jbwpro said:

Waste is not really the right term. A director will do multiple takes, film extra and different angles for editing coverage. There is no way to cut most (99.99999999%) of films without coverage. As far as feet of film, many films have gone through over 1,000,000 feet, "Apocalypse now","The New Wold","the thin red line", the first Superman - to name just a few out of many.

This is called the shooting ratio and although 1,000,000 feet equals 100:1 in ratio to film shot vs used, it is hardly unheard of. Wish I had that kind of budget...

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The main costs of a film are in actors and crew salaries, sets, locations and all the other expenses, so a director is going to make far more takes, angles, etc., to be exactly sure that he has everything he could conceivably need....this applies whether he is shooting film or digital (it would be a bit embarassing if he had to get the sets and actors of. say, Harry Potter back a month or two later because one shot was faulty ).