Film fights back- on cost.

It is interesting to read about push back from studios and even producers where cost is concerned- and film is reconsidered instead of digital. 

Some of the thoughts are true, you need a digital imaging technician to do it right, you need a media wrangler, but weren’t those positions already there on film crews (DP, loader, respectively)? Using less film reduces cost, but it also reduces quality- at a time when digital is improving quality with every codec revision. 

Film may still record more latitude, but HDR still cameras are already here so HDR video can’t be far behind. Those few advantages film has are slowly being whittled away, while the advantages digital offers keep increasing. The only one Film may keep, in the end, is as an archival medium, having already demonstrated, in some cases, 100-year stability.

They took my Kodachrome away.

On June 22, Eastman Kodak Company announced that it will retire Kodachrome color film this year, concluding its 74-year run.

This is quite a long time for any single product to be offered by any manufacturer. Kodak says that Kodachrome represents just a fraction of one percent of Kodak’s total sales of still-picture films. That’s pretty darn small and the fact that they’ve held on to it for this long really is a testament to Kodak’s endurance.

Where to get 8mm & Super8 film transferred?

I have a client who needs thousands of feet of 8mm and Super8 film transferred to DV tape so they can edit their family memories. This is not a service I perform so I thought I’d ask the hundreds of TechThoughts visitors every day where is a good place to do this…

Super Hi-Vision makes HDTV look like…

For reasons that really are difficult to fathom, Japanese Broadcaster NHK has announced breakthroughs in what used to be called Ultra High Definition Video. Now Super Hi-Vision is expected to be the “broadcast” standard in Japan by 2015.

Never mind that the human eye actually has a hard time seeing the difference between 1080p and 720p at the normal home viewing distances from today’s screens. Never mind that 4k from camera to screen isn’t yet a reality, even in theatres.  Somehow, they see the need to replace our 2 megapixel images with 33 megapixel images.

Our Cinema Treasures. Do you?

Films influenced me greatly while growing up.

I still remember seeing Rocky from the back of a long, long theatre- a single screen house that had been split into two and the screen was so far away that it was like watching TV. I remember seeing Apollo 13 the week it opened. I got to the theatre late and I had to sit in the third row. The screen was so large that I had to turn my head to see left and right and take the whole image in. Point is, the rooms in which these films played were sometimes as memorable as the films themselves.

In my time, I have seen numerous theatres go dark. The Mayfair. The Devon. Sams Place, the SamEric. GCC Northeast 4. The Orleans 8. The Boyd. etc.

There is a place on the web where we can treasure these cinema houses. Those that passed, those that still exist, and those that are being reborn. This last aspect is something to cherish in this age of rampant (& crappy) development, and in an age of disposable mass media- where little is worth the electrons that carry it…