Comments on Profile Post by Merrick

Even 4-perf 70mm isn’t appreciably better than a good truly 4K presentation. And while IMAX 70mm film remains the best image quality I’ve ever seen, at some point digital will catch up.

A good digital presentation doesn’t make me any less involved or engaged with a movie, yet I generally find vinyl holds my attention more consistently than digital music. But why would that be?

The only thing I can think of is that because we are primarily visual animals, our brains are better at engaging with visual content than purely auditory content, so I can more easily engage with a movie than I can with music to begin with, and therefore digital vs film isn’t as big of an issue.

The other option is it’s total placebo and if I didn’t know the source of the music playback I wouldn’t care.

Or is it that I haven’t heard sufficiently excellent digital reproduction? Does one need Yggdrasil level DACs or above to truly enjoy digital, or again is it just placebo and even modest digital sources would hold my attention as well as vinyl if I didn’t know the source?

Also I greatly prefer physical books over e-readers, but I don’t think e-ink is at the same level of reproduction as digital video. However I prefer a well designed website over a magazine. And yet I prefer physical comics over digital presentations of comics.

Perhaps movies and TV get the benefit of combining visuals and sound and music and plot and dialogue and acting and editing to engage us on multiple levels so the presentation medium matters less.

This is probably different to what you're talking about, but I find the "soap opera effect" very distracting, whether it's The Hobbit or my MIL's TV that has interpolation enabled full time. I suppose film at high fps would have the same effect.

Interesting post. I have semi-scattered thoughts: 1) One of my best cinema experiences was seeing Roma at the IFC. Picture and sound mix were astonishingly good.

"Cuarón shot the film on the Alexa65 digital camera, mastering at 4K resolution. FotoKem, the only remaining 70mm print lab worldwide, handled the transfer from digital to film, as well as the production of 70mm film prints."

So, there's a good chance I saw the 70mm projected, though it certainly had the crispness I associate with digital. 2) For a while, the artificial film grain Amazon added to a lot of its 4k content drove me nuts. Don't notice it as much anymore.

At the few showings I've seen on film over the last several years, I've been struck by how natural the colors look.

While I agree with you on the film itself, I still find good "analog" special effects are way better than purely cg special effects if that counts...

Roger Deakins says (I listen to his podcast which is good!) that he often can't tell what's shot on film vs. digital these days. Not the case in the beginning, but digital has caught up now.

I don't feel anything in particular about film vs. digital, but boy howdy are the artifacts common to bad digital super annoying: Uneven frame rates, compression artifacts, motion smoothing -- I hate it all so much, which is why I try to watch as much as I can off of disc rather than streaming.

Very much looking forward to Nolan shooting 'Oppenheimer' in IMAX. I fully hope to see the highest quality reproduction of the Trinity test ever done. B&W sections shot on IMAX should also be a first.

@dmckean44 We can get digital to have as natural colors as film, most modern films are just color graded like shit.

I believe these days movies shot on film are converted to digital anyways and then even if it’s screened on film it’s converted back to film. So one reason you might not see a difference is that everything has been digitized.

I wonder what you would think if you saw a film that was edited by hand by cutting the film strips and never digitized then projected straight from the original film. I bet that would look better to you than either film converted to digital and back again or pure digital.

All movie editing has been done digitally for at least 20 years I think more maybe 30. You maybe have never seen a movie shot on film and never digitized and projected from the original film.

After getting used to DolbyVision HDR at 4K resolution from an 55” OLED at ~6ft distance, I’ll now take Alexa65 footage every day of the week. It has a spooky amount of true (not sharpened) resolution and enough captured dynamic range and color information to push and pull the color grade into beautiful directions. 70mm film is pretty damn good, too. It just doesn’t have that last few % of Arri’s medium format cam.

@rhythmdevils I used to be a film major at the North Carolina School of the Arts, which has one of the largest film archives in the country and full sized theaters for screening. I’ve seen a ton of films shot and edited before digital.

Before that I lived in LA and routinely went to film screenings at the American Cinematheque (I used to volunteer there), the Silent Movie Theater, anew Beverly Theater, etc. I also used to review DVDs/Blu-rays and then did QC on them so I know intimately what to look for in a digital transfer that gives the game away.

@Merrick awesome! I’m a photography major from the San Francisco Art Institute

Not regarding picture quality, one of the best theater experiences I had was in college on Halloween night. We screened a 16mm print of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and filled every seat in the house. The screams were frequent and wild.

@rhythmdevils Is that the school with the Diego Rivera work on one of the walls?

Just to brag, I saw a screening of Citizen Kane from a nitrate film print, and that actually is one of the most amazing presentations I’ve seen from a picture quality perspective. Unfortunately nitrate film is highly flammable and was discontinued in the 1940s-1950s.

@Merrick yes! Great school. Amazing photography program.

@rhythmdevils I applied there, and visited the school around 2001-2002. I did not get in. :)

My best film experiences were seeing restorations of 2001 and Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm at BAM theater in Brooklyn. Just incredible picture quality. But, not sure if these were entirely analog or scanned to digital and printed back to film.