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Modern digital cinema capture has nearly film-like dynamic range. It's gotten pretty good. Film is the gold standard but it's not always worth the trade-off in

Modern digital cinema capture has nearly film-like dynamic range. It's gotten pretty good. Film is the gold standard but it's not always worth the trade-off in cost and complexity. And ultimately a lot of it comes down to good grading, not the DR of the original shot.

dylan604 5y ago
>Modern digital cinema capture has nearly film-like dynamic range. NEARLY is not EQUALs. The dynamic range that you are touting being nearly the same is the specific feature of film that I was refering to on how it handles highlights. It's taken 25 years to get to where we are nearly there, but I understand why some purists still prefer the acquisition on film. However, the nearly is good enough for most but the purists.
- greedo 5y ago
  You do realize that all this range and depth that purists talk about is just like what audiophiles do when they talk about the "warmth" of a vinyl recording? So film has a huge resolution advantage especially when you use 70MM. Theoretically capable of 16K. Yet by the time you've developed the negs, created interpositives, edited, created masters, created internets, and finally created prints for the theaters, that resolution, that dynamic range, those "highlights" (could you be more vague) get lower and lower. Then you send it to a theater with a crappy projector that's out of calibration, or has a bulb out of spec. Then you get crap. Same with when you have this pristine film scanned for DVD/BluRay/4k whatever.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    I'm talking about the ability to expose what would appear to be overexposed details in clouds while allowing shadows to be exposed to avoid details lost in the blacks. When color corrected, the highlights have the ability to be recovered to see the details back in the clouds. Just an example of a shot. If the exposure was too much for the clouds to be recovered, then the roll off in film looks much cleaner than just the clipping that occurs in digital. Your reply comes off as if I don't know what I'm talking about which just isn't the case. I've already stipulated in a previous comment that modern digital is good enough for most everyone one but purists. So your audiophile comment implies to me you missed some salient details.
    - greedo 5y ago
      Modern digital cameras like the Arri Alexa have 14+ stops of dynamic range. That is less than what Kodak says about most film stock.
      - dylan604 5y ago
        Man, you're just missing the point. It's about the look of what happens when it reaches the end of that range. It's not how much range it has. For example, I've seen footage shot on a Red (don't remember specific body/chip) of table top food products with fun issues. Specifically, it was a chocolate shake with whipped cream on top. The sensor had issues with the white so that when the exposure was pushed, the white became magenta. The green data was not hitting at the same levels as the red and blue. To get white, the green channel needed to be pushed independantly, but it was already clipped digitally even though the R/B channels were not. Scanning that same image from film would not have exhibited this behavior.
        unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        > Scanning that same image from film would not have exhibited this behavior. Wellll, you might have got a magenta cast from Fuji colour transparency stock... ;-)
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    > You do realize that all this range and depth that purists talk about is just like what audiophiles do when they talk about the "warmth" of a vinyl recording? Yes, and no. GP is referring to a specific fundamental difference between digital capture and film negative capture that is not vague or woo or wine tasting. Highlights record differently on film negatives, because they do not clip; they roll off progressively as the negative image gets denser and denser. This is why wedding photographers kept shooting black and white film alongside digital colour for a long time, for instance. You retain that benefit when you then scan the negative back into a digital form (because the scanner's dynamic range significantly outdoes the range of the developed negative). You can significantly "redevelop" that negative digitally. I don't know if that specific fundamental difference was what the Dune production was aiming at -- I am guessing that if it was, they exposed their digital files very carefully to maximise the chance of being able to use it the way they wanted to.
    - greedo 5y ago
      According to Kodak[1], most film has 13 stops of dynamic range; today's digital cameras average 14 stops. An Arri Alexa has 14+ stops of range[2]. Discussing what wedding photographers used to do for a long time has no relevance to today's technology. 1. https://petapixel.com/2015/05/26/film-vs-digital-a-comparison-of-the-advantages-and-disadvantages/ https://petapixel.com/2015/05/26/film-vs-digital-a-compariso... 2. https://www.panavision.com/products/arri-alexa https://www.panavision.com/products/arri-alexa This is just like LP lovers talking about the warmth of vinyl...
      - dylan604 5y ago
        You're like a record yourself. Round, round, right round you go with that methaphor.
      - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        I haven't been making the case that analogue is superlative in any sense, though, so I am not sure you're particularly on target with the "warmth of vinyl" snark. I'm very far from a purist. I do shoot film occasionally (stills, not motion film), but 99.5% digital, and I'm absolutely not coming at this from the LP-lover's perspective. Not least because the "warmth" thing is purely subjective, when there are fundamental characteristic differences between film and digital regarding the way that highlights are captured by the sensitive medium, and those differences have actual creative impacts that can be exploited. That was the point about wedding photographers. (Incidentally it's not just that the technological gap has mostly closed where black and white is concerned; it's also that the cost and supply models have changed. People don't shoot film for jobs like that now, because the professional infrastructure does not exist anymore.) Where the cinema-oriented, digital-printing-to-colour-negative-motion-stock situation is concerned, I am not convinced that the digital source yet has enough extra headroom to really take advantage qualitatively without very careful capture exposing for the highlights; it's certainly not going to be an automatic, magical conversion.

dylan604 5y ago

>Modern digital cinema capture has nearly film-like dynamic range. NEARLY is not EQUALs. The dynamic range that you are touting being nearly the same is the specific feature of film that I was refering to on how it handles highlights. It's taken 25 years to get to where we are nearly there, but I understand why some purists still prefer the acquisition on film. However, the nearly is good enough for most but the purists.

greedo 5y ago
You do realize that all this range and depth that purists talk about is just like what audiophiles do when they talk about the "warmth" of a vinyl recording? So film has a huge resolution advantage especially when you use 70MM. Theoretically capable of 16K. Yet by the time you've developed the negs, created interpositives, edited, created masters, created internets, and finally created prints for the theaters, that resolution, that dynamic range, those "highlights" (could you be more vague) get lower and lower. Then you send it to a theater with a crappy projector that's out of calibration, or has a bulb out of spec. Then you get crap. Same with when you have this pristine film scanned for DVD/BluRay/4k whatever.
- dylan604 5y ago
  I'm talking about the ability to expose what would appear to be overexposed details in clouds while allowing shadows to be exposed to avoid details lost in the blacks. When color corrected, the highlights have the ability to be recovered to see the details back in the clouds. Just an example of a shot. If the exposure was too much for the clouds to be recovered, then the roll off in film looks much cleaner than just the clipping that occurs in digital. Your reply comes off as if I don't know what I'm talking about which just isn't the case. I've already stipulated in a previous comment that modern digital is good enough for most everyone one but purists. So your audiophile comment implies to me you missed some salient details.
  - greedo 5y ago
    Modern digital cameras like the Arri Alexa have 14+ stops of dynamic range. That is less than what Kodak says about most film stock.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      Man, you're just missing the point. It's about the look of what happens when it reaches the end of that range. It's not how much range it has. For example, I've seen footage shot on a Red (don't remember specific body/chip) of table top food products with fun issues. Specifically, it was a chocolate shake with whipped cream on top. The sensor had issues with the white so that when the exposure was pushed, the white became magenta. The green data was not hitting at the same levels as the red and blue. To get white, the green channel needed to be pushed independantly, but it was already clipped digitally even though the R/B channels were not. Scanning that same image from film would not have exhibited this behavior.
      - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        > Scanning that same image from film would not have exhibited this behavior. Wellll, you might have got a magenta cast from Fuji colour transparency stock... ;-)
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  > You do realize that all this range and depth that purists talk about is just like what audiophiles do when they talk about the "warmth" of a vinyl recording? Yes, and no. GP is referring to a specific fundamental difference between digital capture and film negative capture that is not vague or woo or wine tasting. Highlights record differently on film negatives, because they do not clip; they roll off progressively as the negative image gets denser and denser. This is why wedding photographers kept shooting black and white film alongside digital colour for a long time, for instance. You retain that benefit when you then scan the negative back into a digital form (because the scanner's dynamic range significantly outdoes the range of the developed negative). You can significantly "redevelop" that negative digitally. I don't know if that specific fundamental difference was what the Dune production was aiming at -- I am guessing that if it was, they exposed their digital files very carefully to maximise the chance of being able to use it the way they wanted to.
  - greedo 5y ago
    According to Kodak[1], most film has 13 stops of dynamic range; today's digital cameras average 14 stops. An Arri Alexa has 14+ stops of range[2]. Discussing what wedding photographers used to do for a long time has no relevance to today's technology. 1. https://petapixel.com/2015/05/26/film-vs-digital-a-comparison-of-the-advantages-and-disadvantages/ https://petapixel.com/2015/05/26/film-vs-digital-a-compariso... 2. https://www.panavision.com/products/arri-alexa https://www.panavision.com/products/arri-alexa This is just like LP lovers talking about the warmth of vinyl...
    - dylan604 5y ago
      You're like a record yourself. Round, round, right round you go with that methaphor.
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      I haven't been making the case that analogue is superlative in any sense, though, so I am not sure you're particularly on target with the "warmth of vinyl" snark. I'm very far from a purist. I do shoot film occasionally (stills, not motion film), but 99.5% digital, and I'm absolutely not coming at this from the LP-lover's perspective. Not least because the "warmth" thing is purely subjective, when there are fundamental characteristic differences between film and digital regarding the way that highlights are captured by the sensitive medium, and those differences have actual creative impacts that can be exploited. That was the point about wedding photographers. (Incidentally it's not just that the technological gap has mostly closed where black and white is concerned; it's also that the cost and supply models have changed. People don't shoot film for jobs like that now, because the professional infrastructure does not exist anymore.) Where the cinema-oriented, digital-printing-to-colour-negative-motion-stock situation is concerned, I am not convinced that the digital source yet has enough extra headroom to really take advantage qualitatively without very careful capture exposing for the highlights; it's certainly not going to be an automatic, magical conversion.