bullet3 wrote:I mostly agree with Gzarra's take on it. The doc seemed very biased towards digital and didn't make a strong case against it. They only had like 2-3 vocal anti-digital people in the doc, and they got maybe a combined 5 minutes. That bugs me, because there are legitimate arguments there about the look of one vs the other.
You look at the 2 biggest film and digital movies just this year, Dark Knight Rises and Avengers, and Dark Knight completely blows away Avengers visually, like it's not even close. Yes digital can look great (Skyfall, any Fincher movie post 2000), but there's an aesthetic look that I'm not certain can be reproduced.
That's the biggest issue with it to me, at a certain point, it won't be about "quality", because yes, we'll have 8k, and 12k, and 16k. The issue is the specific look you get in a Lawrence of Arabia or an Apocalypse Now or a Dirty Harry. Nothing coming out these days looks like that anymore, and it really bugs me. Everything is just super, super clean and flat.
What I'd really like is to learn about what can be done in terms of faking that look. Obviously you can do stuff with filters, but I'm not convinced you can get it close enough to look right. The argument that one vs the other is now going to be just an "aesthetic" choice is all well and good, but I think Nolan is completely right to question whether that choice will even be available to film-makers in 10-20 years. When the entire production pipeline for film breaks down, guess what, you won't be able to shoot/develop/process film whether you want to or not, and that will be a real shame.
Personally I think the big difference in "look" between digital and film currently is mainly due to the relative novelty of good digital movie cameras, and filmmakers exploring what they can do visually.
For me my preference goes in waves. When the Red One and Arri Alexa are used, since primarily shadow detail is so much better than film, many films have gone for a flat, smooth transition between shadows, midtones and highlights. Basically a low-contrast look. Initially I really loved that look and also applied it alot to my photography. Currently however I am in a phase where I prefer my dark levels to quickly drop off to black/no exposure.
Also as someone who has spent alot of time with digital photography, the main look of film is not at all unattainable. To me the devil is in the details.
As an example, one complaint people generally level against digital is that is looks too smooth or sterile. 90% of that can be fixed by adding a good film grain structure to the images. You'd be amazed the difference in an image when it comes out of the camera extremely clean, and after you add a filmgrain astructure to it. Before you have alot of elements in the picture that just sort of hang around on their own, they are not really "bound" to anything. It looks as though the image is suspended in nothing. With film grain added, suddenly it looks as though the image is drawn on a finely-textured canvas. It looks like a physical structure permeates the frame. It almost is like watching the film through a mildly frosted window.
Example from Gladiator, watch the out-of-focus areas to see the frosted glass effect:
[image]http://images6.alphacoders.com/338/338964.jpg[/image]
Additional artifacts of film include flickering of frame brightness in some areas, from frame to frame, and possibly some very slight horizontal and vertical instability between frames. This can give a slightly more lively appearance, the image is moving and breathing.
These things really to me are easily fixed, byt filmmakers currently are reveling in the clean digital images, and don't necessarily want to contaminate it with adding additional grain to create a certain look. If you want, play a digitally sourced file in VLC media player, and in the video effects of that player, there is a film grain filter. Find a fairly quiet moment, pretty well lit, with lots of out of focus elements, and try turning the effect on and off (use high variance for a higher grain effect). The difference is palpable and quite dramatic, despite it not doing anything to the original images, only adding a fitler on top of it.
Also the other aspect of the film look is dark areas underexposing alot quicker. Also the Dark Knight films have really dropped the black levels even further in post it seems. They are extremely contrasty, particularly TDK. The stark shadow levels on faces sometime look like someone shot a digital camera on the landscape profile where the camers assumes the images are from areas very far away, and thus need alot of added contrast and dropped black levels.
This effect is also easily mimicable in digital. Using curves or just setting the black point, you can drop shadow information into black. Again, currently filmmakers seem to very much want this information there, which leads to the shadows being slightly brighter, which also leads to a flatter appearance of the overall image (even if highlights and midtones are the same).
As for the dynamic range, digital is quickly catching up. Even current gen cameras usually have lots of highlights detail and quite smooth rolloff even in outdoor sunlit scenes. Many filmmakers so far with digital simply have chosen not to intentionally mimic the film look. To reach 80% there, they would need to simply set blacklevels appropriately, and use film grain to create the feeling of structure across the frame.
EDIT: Because I had it handy, I uploaded two images from The Avengers, one of the original frame, and one adjusted only in the VLC player to more approximate a conventional Super35 film look.
Original: http://postimage.org/image/blsopctj7/
Adjusted: http://postimage.org/image/vzoeyhpj7/
Put them in two tabs and switch between to see the differences better.
Last edited by TechNoir (2013-03-09 13:06:13)
