Raw film doesn't look that good
 

Some people say to get the film look you should shoot on film. But from what I've seen, film doesn't look all that great. To me, it doesn't look much better than video. Film does look great though when it's gone through lots of color correction/grading/enhancement. Commercials and music videos are often color graded on a Da Vinci system (which doesn't seem to be the best system now, although I believe it's very popular).

I've seen student films shot on film, and stock footage from the Sony Pictures library. That footage doesn't look all that great.

I think you can download some stock footage from the Sony library at
http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.co...437&SerialNum=
http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.co...p2.asp?DID=583
Not sure if you need to own Vegas. You may need to register.

Certainly, lighting and set decoration plays a part in things (which would explain ). But if you look at exterioir/landscape shots (where this stuff doesn't matter), the Sony library stuff doesn't look all that great (it was shot on 35mm). Although if you shot those scenes with video, you may have problems with exposure latitude.

Anyways I guess my question is, have anyone here shot film and have it look so-so?

(Talking about film telecined to video here.)

That's a pretty broad statement.


Different filmstocks have different looks. And those looks can also be altered in the developing process, before you even get to the color timing.

When you say "Raw film"... I'm not sure what you are reffering to. The raw negative you get when you shoot with your 35mm still camera, doesn't look like much. I worked in a professional still lab, and believe me the manipulation that goes into getting a good print, especially for magazine level reproductions, is extraordinary.

All negative stock is manipulated to get the positive image. It's the nature of the negative image, that stores so much MORE information than video data, that is what's so great about film. You can take the same negative, and get more 'looks' out of it, than you can from raw video data.

I've shot reversal film, which looked FANTASTIC in both super 8 and 16mm. The film comes out of the developer... as is. That's what you project. The colors and the lattitude, even for reversal stock (which is not as broad as negative) looks much better than video. (And that's not taking into account the increased DOF of even 16mm film...)

(I'm assuming you are not addressing the presence of grain, 24fps, or greater depth of field in this discussion... all of which add to the 'film look')

So when you shoot negative stock, and go directly to telecine, there are different levels of exposure you can ask for. One light, best light, full process...

So, if by film look, you are simply referring to lattitude in color and exposure... there's no comparison to video.


Not sure if I'm answering your question.

Obviously it's a matter of opinion. But I think that if one were to take a 35mm film camera with a fine-grain stock and place it next to any video camera, do a best-light transfer of the film footage and then watch the two images on side by side monitors, I'd be hard pressed to pick the video image as the winner under any circumstances.

I'm not sure. If we compare it to these uncompressed 4:4:4 cameras the output of both is relatively the same. The pre-processed footage from LOTR for instance looks merely ok. It's the grading that really gives the movie it's other wordly feel. Film is currently better in latitude but I don't think it has much if anything on digital in color rendition (not talking DV25 here). While the film stock is certainly a part, the color grading used on most modern movies is much more extensive than any look you could achieve via selecting a specific stock.

O Brother, Where Art Thou (released in 2000), is the first Hollywood movie that was digitally graded all the way through. To my eye we have the better part of a century's worth of film before that which looks better than video.

Aaron,
Can you please explain what "color grading" is for us nonfilm-industry folks?

This Wikipedia article sort of explains it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_grading

Someone should add to it!

Well I think that film looks like film and video looks like video. There are strengths for both but the industry is saying that film is the look that you want so that is what most think is ‘better’ because it is the standard. In my opinion (as a 16 year old outsider) in 10 years it will be mostly digital and then we shall see what the differences are then.

To clarify a little, by raw film I mean film telecined to video. I'm sure film looks great when projected, but I want to talk about film telecined to video. By "raw" I mean film that hasn't undergone extensive color grading. If video got the same treatment it would probably look great too (i.e. Star Wars).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that shooting film doesn't automatically make your footage look really good. Examples would be:
student films from film schools
the stock footage from the Sony Pictures library
old Hollywood films, without digital re-mastering

In my opinion, "raw" film just doesn't look that great as film that has undergone lots of color correction (i.e. Lord of the Rings, commercials, music videos) or video-originated material that has undergone lots of color correction (i.e. Star Wars, the BBC TV Show Top Gear). If you look at the footage people here are shooting, there are some really good-looking "low" budget video-originated flicks... the ones in my opinion that look good are:

Silencer (glidecam, Canon Gl2, Magic Bullet)
Sundowning (which used very minimal lighting, Magic Bullet for color grading, shot on Canon GL2)

Unfortunately it's hard to do a comparison to film because very few people on dvinfo are shooting film (or posting their work in the DV for the masses forum).

I guess the things I see are:
A- Color grading/enhancement makes such a huge difference to how good something looks. (I'm biased here because that's where my interests lie right now.)
B- Color graded video looks a lot better than "raw" film. This is definitely subjective. (And subject to bias too, because I am a fan of color enhancement.)
C- "raw" film versus "raw" video: I'd agree that raw film (on average) looks better. Although people shooting on film usually have more money and experience. As well, the DVX100 allows some in-camera color grading with the gamma curves and other settings, which can make its footage look very nice. But I don't think the DVX100 represents the average.
D- Color-graded film versus color-graded video: It's hard to say because there's not that much color-graded video being produced. Or maybe I can't tell what's video and what's film (I thought 24 was video). It'll be interesting to see how this turns out.
Right now I would say film has an edge. But films like Sin City and Star Wars look really good. I think we are close to the point where color grading has seriously closed the gap between the two mediums and that artistic usage of the medium (i.e. the coloring in Sin City) makes a much bigger difference than film versus video.

Film or video, there should be a great deal of attention paid to color correction (and other corrections) in post to make it look great. Film has a different response to color, and that difference itself differs from stock to stock. You can use Curves to emulate or correct to that difference if you want to match a certain stock. In fact, a lot of stock has published response curves and other technical info available use to match. Of course, you'd have to know the same info for how your camera responds to make an accurate match. You can't assume that your camera is a neutral capture device. So, I'd say color is a wash, except that most video formats don't store full color information.

24p, we can do that on video,too.

Where you can't beat film is in exposure latitude, and it's a long way ahead of most video cameras. Surprisingly, most cameras (especially comsumer-level cameras) default picture processing settings increase exposure and contrast a great deal, reducing the latitude even moreso. If you have manual controls you can get some of this range back, and you should do so.

Depth of field, the range you have to work within is relative, mostly to the size of the imaging plane. Even a 1/3" chip camera like the XL2 or DVX100A is only equivilant to 8mm film. 2/3" chips nearly the same as 16mm. I'm not sure if a 1 1/3" chip camera exists to match 35mm.

All in all, it's true film can look bad... but at least you'll see a better range of bad details. :)

Josh

Yeah there is, panavision (i think) has one. It's a beast, not to mention prolly worth more than my life.

I think it's silly to say that raw film looks worse than color corrected video...
Nobody is going to use raw film in a movie anyway, so what's the point?

You have to compare raw with raw, and graded with graded. And film wins every time. When you color-correct your video you'll be trying to emulate the film look anyway. When you color grade film, you certainly won't be trying to make it look like video.

Film has much better latitude, DoF, handles HDR better. I still think those Vegas examples you posted look pretty good. The colors are so soft and rich.

Also, stating that video will replace film in the future is stupid. Video was invented because it was cheaper and more pratical. Can you imagine a reporter in Iraq walking around with a 35mm for point and shoot?

Automatic Transmission is more pratical for city driving, but racing pros always use Manual...

Student and low-budget films might often be using un-color graded footage.

EDIT: It probably doesn't make sense to compare un-color graded film to graded video, because if you can grade video there's no reason why you couldn't grade the film material (presumably telecined to video).

Thanks :)

I think in time, the quality you get from video would be very comparable to film. However, video would still maintain the advantages of speed and cost. This would free up time and money that could be better spent elsewhere.

If you look at still photography, digital has really taken over. However, speed is a big deal for news photography (no development, don't have to change film as much) whereas video doesn't benefit that much from speed.

Glenn, you bring up an interesting viewpoint, because what you say is true. I have shot 16mm before, and just like video, you do need to color correct it in post. In fact, whenever you watch deleted scenes from DVDs you can often see how the uncorrected footage looks very shoddy...but these very well could be 1-light dailies...so the comparison wouldn't be all that fair. However, the amount of correction you can do with film is probably far greater then DV.

Adding on the topic another diff (film/video):
Film is factory balanced to Day or Tungsten (preset white balance)
If the light sources used on a shooting are matching this preset, the neg only "needs" a very minimum of timing to get to the "ideal" print, in fact, leaving a lot more options for DP to "tweak" it to his vision.
Video needs to have WB done under existing lights (most times a combination of various color temps) Now..... where, on what and how one does the WB is what generates the FT employment for post!!! (lol) aside from the creative part of editing.
A "bad" WB will further reduce the CCD's general sensitivity to light. If the material leaks blue, there is no way to bring it back to what it should have been, without having the other two color suffering (I am talking extremes here no minor adjustments and.... only for compressed signal)

to my knowledge, star wars wasnt shot on film, but rather hd 24p, ,he actually invented the format so to speak.
the most important thing about getting good results with film, is the lense (zeiss), lense speed, and how it is lit. pus also the rating, of the film.
grading of film can be somwhat be compared to "onlining" on a symphony, or adrenaline system where you can colour correct, and adjust the gammas.
but to compare both of them "raw film" and "video" too many variables to take into consideration.

I thought Attack of the Clones was shot with a Cinealta?

Anyway, I still don't think it looks as good as film. It looks great, nearly there but you can still see it's clean and crisp.

Also, I remember playing the DVD in 2x on my player (which is the XBox, and when you double the speed it doesn't judger at all) and it felt like video... due to 'becoming' 48fps. It felt a lot like PAL output in terms of motion...

Film can fall apart rather quickly when you begin to look at film prints that went from the original negative to an internegative then to a final print.

That's two extra steps before the film was transferred to video. Nowadays that is for the most part frowned upon. The idea being a digital intermediate gets thrown into the equation, or for stock footage, the video is transferred directly from the original negative to video, and looks quite spectacular.
Sometimes when you look at stock footage you are seeing a third generation print transferred several years ago, and the result won't stand up to what one can do now from the original negative.

Certain television shows that were shot on film have been retransferred in recent years to get even more quality out of the original filmed footage.

One form of education that Non-linear does not teach very well is linear color correction. By that I mean actual knobs and dials where you instantaneously can control several video levels. When Linear color correction is combined with properly set up white clip and black clip, color correction takes on a whole new meaning.

I still use betacam sp for editing and mastering because I color correct EVERY SHOT, and when I combine it with the black and white clip, I can usually make any lower budgeted video shot look better, and I can do it within a few seconds.

ONe thing counts. Most of us are poor, or extremely poor (barely covering monthly Internet costs and montly Micky Mouse magazine). We all want to use video cause that is what we can buy. So that is why everybody feels so damned GOOD when video is portraited as being equal or closely equal to film. Video enhancing makes the difference all right, but you will never get shallow DOF and deep shadows. Although the latest xl2 has some nice-ass shallow DOFS.

Another thing, audio makes the difference. I only need to hear 5 seconds of conversation of the film to judge it as ' cheap' , ' bad acting' or 'film-like'.

I'm confused. Always always confused. We strive for the "film look", grain, "softness", color, fps... but we all love HD TV, which is the oposite of film. It's so crips, it's SOO digital, and we all love it! We love all the intense detail, and super clean lines and edges. So why is it that we think we need to emulate, dare I say it? An outdated look.

It reminds me of the camparison of CDs/MP3s to Records. Records are so rich, so full of sound. The Analog wave forms hold so much more that a Digital attempt at a wave can only dream of. Records Scratch and pop, CD's don't. The process we use is the same as adding in Scratches and Pops to the latest music to make it sound "real".

Why is it that we are introducing defects into our movies but not our music? Why is it that we think we need scratches and grain in our movies and not our favorite HD TV show? I understand the color and exposure range arguments, totally. Video has a lot to catch up on in that respect, but the softness and grain ... maybe I'm missing something, but I thought a cleaner image was always better. Next time I wont clean my lens, add some more grit to my footage. =P (that last one was a joke)

I think your "vision" about film might need a bit of.... "adjustments"
Film is not "soft". Film is as crisp as a high acquisition medium can get.
But due to frame size and lens used, has the ability to separate the "important" from "less important" thus, creating the 3D illusion on a 2D screen. The shallow DOF that is so hard to get in video (as the CCD size gets smaller)
Nobody (that I can remember) was looking forward to the natural defects from projections/transfers (scratches, hair in the gate and so on)...

I understand the DoF issue. People complain about Star Wars:EPII because it is so crisp and clean (as a previous poster said), but it still uses DoF like other films, I don't think of 'soft' as refering to DoF. Maybe by soft they are refering to the lower fps and how it interacts with motion on screen?

I suppose the thing that confuses me the most is why people introduce grain and scratches.

its the common misconception that grain will have significant effect in the film look, which isn't really true IMO. If you watch IMAX films, there is hardly any grain what so ever, yet it still looks like film (because it is), and is still absolutely beautiful.

Yeah adding grain/scratches to video for "film look" is ridiculous. Adding diffusion (softness) seems to help blur the line between the two maybe, but definitely doesn't make any video more or less like film.

I just wanted to toss this in here tho....I'm all for film. I still really love 35mm and larger format photography. It looks incredible, but as far as 35mm motion pictures are concerned, there's not too much there for video to overcome. a 35mm negative resolves to about 3k pixels i think, and there are medium format digital camera backs with CMOS sensors that capture 22 megapixels, EASILY matching the quality of 35mm. There's also a 48 MP large format back out. Anyway I'm just saying that the technology is basically already there. We just lack the ability to store the massive amounts of information fast enough (>24 fps), so film still ultimately wins... for now. I'd say that 35mm color photography is pretty much dead now though. And hopefully interlacing will die soon too... I really hate it. lol.

Well after I saw Revenge of the Sith...

Film will and should be dead. :)

Lee,

I'm not sure. A lot of people came out of that movie thinking the opposite, that this digital stuff just doesn't look right.

Josh