This is just a quick note, something I’ve been thinking about after advising a few people this week on the best acquisition mediums. Here’s my argument for film (16mm and 35mm) as the top choice, and 4K Red as the best digital alternative… in my humble opinion.
We all know that here and now, HD is the high-end standard for broadcast and home entertainment, and at 6% more resolution, 2K or 2048 x 1556 pixels is the best we get in the majority of digital cinemas. Here in South Africa, we currently finish to 2K for film recording.
What happens 10 years from now when 4K becomes the standard in cinema and in the home? This will happen, and if you’ve originated in HD, you’re out of luck, you will never ever have more than 1080 lines of image information.
If you’ve shot 35mm, or even 16mm film, you will be able to go back to the neg and rescan at 4K, even 8K from your EDL and reconform.
In a DI (Digital Intermediate) environment, your grade is all metadata, so if you’ve saved the project, the process should be a simple re-conform. This is part of the beauty of a high-end digital finish and metadata based, non-destructive tools.
The same (up to a maximum resolution of 4K) is true of either the Red One or the DALSA Origin, and so for this reason, my favourite digital acquisition format at the moment is 4K Redcode RAW.
I’ve touched before on the superior archival properties of recording data back out to 35mm negative over any volatile (it’s called volatile for a reason… think about that for a second) data storage solutions.
A digital intermediate in the true sense, is exactly that, a intermediate, it sits between film based acquisition and film output. If you shoot video, and end up risking it all on magnetic data tapes or hard drives at the end, that’s not a D.I., it’s just a video online, even if it’s been accomplished in the same suite.
It’s important to see your work in terms of it’s ongoing long term marketability and 5, 10, even 15 year+ shelf life rather than lose out in a short-term cost saving exercise.
Having the 35mm for storage would allow you to have a Master – so to speak. Although digital storage is getting more robust all the time, so somewhere along the line digital storage will be safer.
Another thought is the expense – isn’t argued that starting digital and not 35mm the cheaper option and the reason why it is such an attractive option?
I wonder what sort of influence 35mm storage would have on the look of the film – if you ever have to re-capture from the reels? They always say that Film (ok, originally acquired by film) has richer and deeper colours.
Archival is one of Kodak’s main selling points with 35mm even when a film has been shot digitally. That’s an interesting question, and one I don’t know the answer to, it’s making a higher resolution or “oversampled” in digital terminology, optical, analog master of a digital image, and because silver halide crystals are dispersed in the emulsion randomly, there will be no exact “pixel for pixel” equation in the film print, unless the digital image resolution is quite low. I imagine the laser recording process, if at a sufficiently high resolution, like 4K or more, where the number of pixels begins to approach the density of individual silver halide crystals in the film emulsion, will not have recognizable square pixels at all on the film.
Has this made any sense?
What a great post Rich! I think as a lover of film this makes so much sense and you’ve laid it out in a great way. thanks for this – Im gonna be reposting it to my fellow read/write’ians!
I think the problem here is that you take it for a granted that the public in 10 years time will be looking for tv screens that have 4k of pixels. Will more pixels really make such a difference on tv screen, and lets face it, most modern homes will not really go bigger than a 42″ screen. I think in TV quality we have reached our zenith when it comes to pixelsize. The Tv manufacturers will now fight it out over LED. 3D, and all the other new tech shit. I understand your point, but I just dont know if we will ever go to the 4k television screen.