Why shoot analogue colour photos?

MattKing said:

One of the fascinating bits surrounding ""Oppenheimer" is that some editing was actually done the old way - by physically cutting and then re-attaching parts of the editing stock -

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In my younger days I spent literally tens of thousands of hours sitting in front of a 6 plate Steenbeck editing table, synchronising the sound and pictures of 35mm workprints/mag sound when the dailies arrived from the film lab for projection later that evening to the assembled cast/crew.

They of course were the dailies from the previous day's shooting.

Then they'd be chopped up again and put into hanger bins for first workprint assembly the next day.

gbroadbridge said:

In my younger days I spent literally tens of thousands of hours sitting in front of a 6 plate Steenbeck editing table, synchronising the sound and pictures of 35mm workprints/mag sound when the dailies arrived from the film lab for projection later that evening to the assembled cast/crew.

They of course were the dailies from the previous day's shooting.

Then they'd be chopped up again and put into hanger bins for first workprint assembly the next day.

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Not to mention the delicate task of cutting the negative once the final cut was done.

Pieter12 said:

Not to mention the delicate task of cutting the negative once the final cut was done.

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Never my job, those people were high priest cave dwellers referred to in hushed tones.

Viewing the answer print was a wonderful day though.

Alan Edward Klein said:

Theaters today are not like that. Most you can reserve your seat where you like to sit. Second, the seats recline and have a cupholder for your soda or popcorn. If the movie is bad, you can take a nap.

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My complaint was not about the seating arrangement, or the seat recline, or the cup holder. It was about other moviegoers. Sometimes people talk, or are otherwise noisy, or fiddle with their phone, etc. You might even get someone's phone ringing in the middle of the movie.

For those how understand dutch there is a long interview with Hoyte van Hoytema the Oppenheimer camera man in a potcast. Listen to what he has to say about 70mm film.

MattKing said:

One of the fascinating bits surrounding ""Oppenheimer" is that some editing was actually done the old way - by physically cutting and then re-attaching parts of the editing stock - at least for the IMAX prints. Most likely though that involved one of the intermediate film stock emulsions that are used to support the editing and distribution process.

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I've not looked into the details of this, but I think they're using the word 'editing' generously/quite specifically. Creative editing will have happened digitally, and then an imax reassembly matching that digital cut might well have been done manually, since printing back to film from scans at that point would unnecessarily degrade the image. Instead, like you say, far more likely that they physically reassembled ('edited') from an intermediate print and then duplicated and scanned that print for distribution.

Pieter12 said:

I imagine there were a number of special effects in Oppenheimer and those were most probably created digitally. So those scenes would have had to be recorded to film in order to cut them in traditionally. But as you say “some editing” those could have just stayed digital.

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Mostly correct, except nowdays the digital effects are called visual effects, and they are often rooted in real photographic elements created by the special effects department and recorded by camera dept. Once they've done their time in the digital world they do ultimately need to be recorded back to film for the intermediate.

MattKing said:

one of the other fascinating sections included details about those of the special effects that they did create and shoot direct to film - no digital creation involved!
Those included some of the images of explosions!

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This is one of those gross oversimplifications that have become part of the marketing strategy, and goes to the heart of the OP's original question - why do users favour analogue film products even in a digital workflow.

The special effects that are shot for the film do sometimes make it into the film largely unaltered, but rarely. They will always require some degree of compositing, which inevitably requires some purely digital media to be integrated into the plate. Often, they serve as the best possible reference for the digital technicians to try to recreate, and are replaced entirely, while their secondary lighting and atmospheric effects might be retained or enhanced, or suppressed, as necessary.

But marketing strategies aim to create an aura of authenticity by invoking the memory of techniques which most audience members know only through the very cinematic depictions of those techniques, and which thus are imbued with the romanticism of 'traditional' cinema, when in fact the authentic process has always taken maximum advantage of visual effects, and always invested in technology upgrades which do the work faster and cheaper while also opening up creative techniques that were previously impossible.

Oppenheimer, and every other high profile 'analogue'/'photochemical' movie of recent decades, is full of digital effects, some of which in the past were achieved optically and photochemically, others which couldn't even be imagined, let alone executed, in a purely analogue workflow.

'Film' fans I think both admire the romanticism of old school processes, and are also willing to take experts at their word when they say they did it this way because the final result is of higher quality, in their professional opinion.

Quality is a fickle concept.

David Lynch on film:

You have to be careful — you can bring out too much and ruin the mood. But if you’re careful, you can bring out things you never saw that make it that much more beautiful.

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If you have to wait while the camera reloads, it’s like the temperature of the room was a beautiful 99 degrees and you just slammed it down to almost freezing. Now you’ve got to start from zero and bring it back, and maybe you’ll never get it back. Maybe it gets even better, you just don’t know. But this way, shooting digital, you’ve got a chance of getting magic [...]

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It depends on what you're optimizing for, I suppose. Or temperament, approach, style.

Then again, maybe Lynch was just an incompetent hack who should have stuck to painting.

in art I agree that quality is a very personal concept, but in optics it's quantifiable and measurable.

thank god Lynch tried his hand at all sorts of things. I'm sure plenty among us know the feeling of missing a magical shot because we hadn't prepared for it, whatever our medium or process, but I'm also sure Lynch will have contemplated the difficulty of quantifying the magic missed in a moment that's now recorded only in your inherently personal memory of what might have been, maybe you never get it back, maybe it gets better, you just don't know.

st1 said:

in optics it's quantifiable and measurable

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Then I would have expected that this qualitative superiority would by now have been quantified in an objective and convincing manner. Yet, 25 years after the advent of digital cinematography, we're still having an interesting discussion that seems relatively free of such parameters.

If it ain't broke, why fix it?

koraks said:

Then I would have expected that this qualitative superiority would by now have been quantified in an objective and convincing manner. Yet, 25 years after the advent of digital cinematography, we're still having an interesting discussion that seems relatively free of such parameters.

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the first 25 years of any new technology are dynamic enough to sustain debate, even outside the revolutionary coincidental context of the internet as a discussion forum for arguably the most accessible and popular pay per view distribution medium yet devised.

also absent from any serious discussion of the topic are practical and economic constraints and opportunities. no commercial film is made in which image quality is the primary concern, rather image quality is an expense that can sometimes be viewed as an investment and leveraged for greater profit, even though in reality the image quality for the end consumer is wildly variable, in spite of the standards and controls that do exist for the sake of some minimum basic standard.

Arri's Alexa 65 has a sensor resolution of 6.5k, while one internet source suggests a frame of film (24x36? and therefore twice the size of a classic movie frame?) has between 24 and 84 billion silver halide crystals.

the reality is that digital cinematography offers all manner of economic and practical advantages in filmmaking, but it still carries a stigma, and so professional (=paid) opinions extolling its virtues are required to mitigate the possibility of diminished returns, while projects that can afford to use film maximise the potential return by publicising the 'craft'. in truth there is plenty of craft in both analogue and digital.

st1 said:

frame of film (24x36?

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A standard 35mm motion picture frame is 22x16mm.

Pieter12 said:

A standard 35mm motion picture frame is 22x16mm.

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it varied, 2/3/4 perf and beyond, according to your budget and studio/marketing choices

st1 said:

it varied, 2/3/4 perf and beyond, according to your budget and studio/marketing choices

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But never 24x36.

Why shoot colour film?
Maybe because of the sometimes weird colours (which, for whatever reason, people dont like when it comes to M240)

This fascinating thread was part of the journey of @Jarin Blaschke that eventually led to an Academy Award nomination for him for best Cinematography: https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/closest-filter-to-create-ortho-response-with-pan-film.156112/
So yes, there are people who choose motion picture film for reasons worthwhile to them.

Pieter12 said:

But never 24x36.

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the comparison being between the modern standard bearer of digital cinematography, easily defined for marketing purposes, and a well-informed best guess at the potential resolution limits of a latent image in a century old medium, in 135 format

MattKing said:

This fascinating thread was part of the journey of @Jarin Blaschke that eventually led to an Academy Award nomination for him for best Cinematography: https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/closest-filter-to-create-ortho-response-with-pan-film.156112/
So yes, there are people who choose motion picture film for reasons worthwhile to them.

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that's a great thread, and a great example of why somebody with an unusually large budget for their genre of movie might use film, even if they have to use the wrong film with a ton of workarounds, each one weighed on its impracticality, to create an analogue effect for digital exhibition

st1 said:

digital cinematography ... still carries a stigma

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Not for the people who buy tickets or dvds. They don't care.
If anything, most people seem to consider digital as being necessarily better than film.
They tend not to ever know whether the movie was shot digitally or on film - just like they don't know the brand name of the camera used. And it doesn't matter to them.

Don_ih said:

Not for the people who buy tickets or dvds. They don't care.
If anything, most people seem to consider digital as being necessarily better than film.
They tend not to ever know whether the movie was shot digitally or on film - just like they don't know the brand name of the camera used. And it doesn't matter to them.

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Yeah. Two years ago I honestly thought that photographic film didn't exist anymore. Never gave a moment's thought to what format a movie was recorded in. I was surprised to discover that not only it exists, but you can liberally buy film in Walmart.

dcy said:

Yeah. Two years ago I honestly thought that photographic film didn't exist anymore. Never gave a moment's thought to what format a movie was recorded in. I was surprised to discover that not only it exists, but you can liberally buy film in Walmart.

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Two years ago film was quite scarce and expensive here.

Is is now back into supermarkets, chemists, grocery stores, and gas stations.

Thanks Gen Z.

MattKing said:

This fascinating thread was part of the journey of @Jarin Blaschke that eventually led to an Academy Award nomination for him for best Cinematography: https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/closest-filter-to-create-ortho-response-with-pan-film.156112/
So yes, there are people who choose motion picture film for reasons worthwhile to them.

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(OT: this is one of the most hilarious pieces of the internet i've ever found, it should be presented as the epitomy of all the wasted bytes we send around all day)(these ones included, obv)

(lol, "you can try washi film")

David Lynch on Film and Digital...

Don_ih said:

Not for the people who buy tickets or dvds. They don't care.
If anything, most people seem to consider digital as being necessarily better than film.
They tend not to ever know whether the movie was shot digitally or on film - just like they don't know the brand name of the camera used. And it doesn't matter to them.

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most people don't care, they just want a few hours' diversion and the photography isn't a big concern. some people are so immersed they don't even realise they're seeing photographs.

as far back as 2003, audiences apparently already knew that digital was necessarily better than film. but that had everything to do with the digital push, visual effects, and poorly maintained projectors, and nothing to do with the image quality that each medium could offer at its best.

but there are still enough people who do care, that marketing bothers to take the time to allay their fears, whichever camp they sit in, by getting the filmmakers to talk at length about why their chosen medium was the correct choice for their film. because word of mouth is important, and if one cineaste deters their friends from seeing a movie, then that's money lost at the box office, and then again later on dvd.

the BFI have quite an interesting summary of the early days of digital cinema, including a little context on David Lynch's perspective.

st1 said:

digital cinematography offers all manner of economic and practical advantages in filmmaking, but it still carries a stigma

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Tell that to someone who has seen countless scratched, dirty prints with obvious splices projected at a secondary market theater.