Re: [Leica] Re: squabbling over digitial vs. film

[Feli di Giorgio <feli2@earthlink.net>]

On Tuesday, Aug 5, 2003, at 21:56 US/Pacific, Mitch Alland wrote:
>
> Absolutely. Think of the situation of the motion picture industry 
> where currently film and digital work together: from a friend who 
> works in post-production I learned recently that movies are 
> photographed on film and then the film is scanned on very expensive 
> high-speed scanners and the post-production people use high-powered, 
> specialized, Photoshop-like software to do thinks like color balance 
> (and other types of "magic"), and then the digital version of the 
> movie is "burned" onto film again and the film is printed in many 
> copies for distribution.

>  This is because, with current technology, capturing on film and 
> projecting film apparently gives the best visual image and the 
> intermediate digital processing enhances that quality.

This is called a "digital intermediate" and it's really done for the 
greater level of control you have digitally as opposed to the lab. But 
if it is done poorly you end up with a lousy looking movie.
At the moment there are massive, borderline religious arguments raging 
regarding what the best method/technology (kind of like here ;-)) is to 
do this. Traditionally you would be at the lab for a timing session and 
would sit with the color timer and use a device called a Hazeltine, 
which gives you a pretty good idea of what your print is going to look 
like. Think of it as a giant version of a still color head. Then you 
would strike prints, screen them, tweak etc. till you get it right, but 
of course you still don't have anywhere near the control that you have 
digitally. The traditional method is slow, expensive and not always 
very accurate, because you are dealing with all of the wild cards we 
are familiar with, like the current state of the soup (developer) etc. 
As an example Monday's prints are usually off (too magenta/green etc), 
because the soup settles over the weekend and it takes a day and a few 
cigarette butts from the lab techs for it to really get mixed up again. 
Isn't that great fun? ;-)


> On the other hand the best movie that I've seen for a long time is 
> Eric Rohmer's  "L'anglaise et le duc" (The Enghlishwoman and the Duke) 
> which was shot with a digital video  camera (and transferred to film 
> for distrbution). This movie takes place during the French revolution 
> and was shot digitally because Rohmer used water-color paintings as 
> the "backdrops" for Parisian outdoor scenes. In other words, the 
> actors were filmed digitally and then, for all the outdoor scenes, 
> were digitally placed against the backdrop of the water-color 
> paintings that are painted in the style of paintings of the period. 
> This is absolutely brilliant because our knowledge of how Paris looked 
> like comes from paintings of the period -- so that this artifice looks 
> very genuine in terms of giving the feeling of the period. The 
> alternative of course would have been either to build old-style 
> streets on a sound stage or to go to old sections of Paris and clear 
> the streets of anything modern. Although this movie doesn't have the 
> resolution and clarity of movies made the other way (as described in 
> the previous paragraph, this doesn't matter because not only is 
> Rohmer's digital solution brilliand but it's like magic: the film is 
> beautiful because of the water-color painting backdrops which create 
> their own reality, and it is a reality which is very appropriate for 
> this movie. The resolution and clarity, as Doug Herr states, are  
> "good enough" .

First off I agree with you. The medium doesn't determine if a film is 
going to be good or bad. Last year I saw "Royal Arc" and "The Deep 
End". Both were shot on HD and transfered to film. It didn't make a 
difference, because they were good films. In the case of Royal Arc, you 
couldn't have done it on film regardless, because the nearly two hour 
long movie was one continuous take, without cuts. You can't fit more 
than circa 11 minutes worth of film into a standard 35mm magazine. I 
haven't seen "L'anglaise et le duc", but on a technical note I would 
like to point out that shooting process screens (blue/green/red screen) 
on anything but film, or the new Viper digital cine camera, can turn 
out to be a technical nightmare, because HD, mini DV etc is compressed, 
much like a JPEG is. This can make it extremely difficult or impossible 
to produce high quality effects work, because of edge artifacts and the 
compressed color space. That was one of the major problems on Episode 
One....

>
> --Mitch/Bangkok



Cheers,

feli



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Richard III was framed.	 *     feli2@earthlink.net


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