35 mm film/slides consumer garbage?? wha?

[..........]

Most medium-high end photographers consider 35 mm print and slide

film to be consumer garbage. I am moving up to medium format myself,

but the question STILL remains, how do you explain major movies

still being filmed with 35mm video film? All the movies I see at the

theater are still what I consider to be of amazing quality,

especially for that giant size blow up. Thoughts? I am speaking

apples and oranges, what am I missing? Thanks all, Dennis

[steve_dawson1]

It's a question of the appropriate technology for the application. You watch a movie from a distance, and it's 'moving' - you don't get to sit and concentrate on the quality of any one individual frame. In addition I understand they use lenses that cost a fortune. Mind you, one time when I was travelling in a remote place in northern Canada I came across a big wire crate, a metre high, stashed full of expensive movie equipment - lenses, telescopic hoods, tripods and stands, electronic gizmos, all just heaped in the crate and left by the side of the road. Its custodians were nowhere in sight so presumably they weren't on a 'you lose it, you pay for it' kind of a deal!

[ed_hurst]

As said above, part of the reason is that "noise", graininess or error (of certain kinds) on any individual frame tend to average out between frames i.e. they do not occur in consistent places on different frames, because they are random. Meanwhile, the actual scene being recorded has lots of consistency (and changes in mainly predictable ways) across frames. Thus as there are several frames per second, the errors are not very noticeable, whilst the scene being recorded is.

 

Movement also distracts the eye/brain away from other artefacts and errors.

 

Of course lack of resolving power does set a limit on things.

[bob_osullivan]

Dennis:

 

Steve is right. It's all about the viewing distance. Also, the movie film is oriented vertically, off 90%, making the image that much smaller. The reason they still use film is that, dispite the availability of very high end digital video equipment (which news crews currently use), they want to be able to archive the film and perhaps rescan it at a future date when digital technology improves. Also it's still a lot cheeper than digital.

 

Who cares what most high end photographers think anyway? There is still a place for your old 35's. Don't ebay them yet. I still have several old Minolta SRT's. I use them in the more hostile environments where I wouldn't dare take my DSLR, and where I need long lenses that are affordable. You can spend $15K on one long lens for a DSLR. My whole outfit including the dark room isnt' worth that much.

[James G. Dainis]

Freeze a frame of a movie on your DVD or VCR by hitting the pause button and see what it looks like. It always amazes me how a baseball can look like a perfect sphere in flight but it is actually a rather long streak on the frame.

[ross_wilson1]

It has to do with viewing distance, but also the actual film shot is transfered onto a special film for release, it's a very, very slow film, about 5 ASA, so has much finer grain.

[ross_wilson1]

Also if you pause a frame of your TV and it's an interlaced tv not progressive scan, what you'll be seeing is one of two 'fields' of video that are used to create the one frame. You need to put these two fields together (in photoshop etc) etc to see the real frame.

[ilkka_nissila]

That's just a snob attitude. 35 mm film is excellent for some applications, when correctly used. When someone's photography fails to have interesting content, it's all about technology.

[g._armour_van_horn]

All the resons why the 16x24mm frame of a 35mm movie look so good have been covered, but I have to challenge your opening. There are plenty of top shooters who consider 35mm inappropriate for their core work, but precious few who would consider 35mm SLRs "consumer garbage". In fact, I've known very serious medium-format shooters who kept Olympus P&Ss in their pockets, because they're good tools for some things.

 

I tend to think that anyone who would dismiss another's toolset as "garbage" is very insecure, probably based on his knowledge that his own skills are marginal.

 

Van

[trw]

Perhaps you have it backwards... Consumer 35mm print film is garbage.. shipped and stored in uncontrolled temperatures, for who knows how long, made to wider tolerances, etc.<br /><br />

To make matters worse, auto-everything volume-lab printing is crap. Well, not crap, just <i>set up to make passable snapshots from crap exposures on crap film</i>, not great prints from great images on great film. They're also often set up to save costs by <i>always</i> scanning at 6MPixel, regardless of the intended print size.<br /><br >

 

Films like Provia, Portra, and even Sensia and Kodak HD (if you get them fresh) are really good. Processing is really good anywhere that the machine is kept clean and running properly and the chemicals are kept fresh.<br /><br />

Scanning the film yourself is the ticket, even with a cheap scanner like the Konica-Minolta Scan Dual IV (which I use). Once you have the exposure calibrated (use the strip at the beginning of the roll that goes from fogged to unexposed), set the whitebalance (just like with digital, have a photo of someone holding a white card in the same light), lock the settings and scan away. You've just made images far better than the minilab would make, assuming your exposures, composition, and subject matter is good.<br /><br />

From that point on, the images are just the same as images from a dSLR, except with more flattering contrast if shooting pictures of people with print film, and higher resolution for a given capital expense. When you interpolate to different sizes for printing, the grain seems to disappear from 400iso. Just like digital, you can print on your own inkjet, send them to a printing service (mpix or whatever) or take them to a minilab to get prints done. If you take them to the minilab though... tell them to do <b>no corrections</b> or they'll leave the machine on auto-everything and you'll get crap again (but this applies to any image shot with the camera on any mode but the most basic, film or digital).<br /><br />

Sounds like the rantings of a film zealot? No, if I were running a portrait studio (other than high-end), shooting sports, or photojournalism, I'd probably be using a dSLR for their lower cost per picture and faster results. Most of the techniques I use apply to either film or digital equally well.

[ted_marcus1]

<i>It has to do with viewing distance, but also the actual film shot is transfered onto a special film for release, it's a very, very slow film, about 5 ASA, so has much finer grain.</i>

 

<p><a href="http://www.dalelabs.com">Dale Labs</a> can print color negative film on this "special film" (Kodak <i>Vision</i>) to make very nice mounted slides. I got very good results with Kodak 400UC (and before that, Supra 400, Fuji Super G 400, and Ektar 125) before I switched to digital.

[steve_levine]

Horses for courses, as they say. Every format has it uses , and limits. A frame of 35mm motion picture print stock, and a 35mm slide have little in common. The movie film would appear grainy if you were to view a single frame. The fact that the grains are in different spots on each frame, and "persistance of vision" make this invisible.

[..........]

hrmmm..it's still confusing...I don't totally understand...I guess the constant motion keeps it looking good? I mean, I can see people's pores in movies, lots of details. It amazes me still to this day. 35mm film blown up onto a huge screen, and it still looks detailed. I wonder what one of my 35mm slides would look like that big. I have a slide projector and they look decent at around 6 feet wide, hehehe. I dunno how it works, but it does. Movies look extremely high resolution to me in the theaters. I still use my Canon EOS 2000 35mm SLR, but people tell me for portraits, 35mm is a no-no. Most of the photos in magazines are large and medium format, correct? I guess I just will never understand the difference between 35mm video film and 35mm camera film.

[oceanphysics]

<i>Also it's still a lot cheeper than digital.</i>

<p>

Shooting digitally is on the order of 1% of the cost of shooting on film. Videotape is to a first approximation free. Digital projectors are expensive, but that has nothing to do with what the picture is shot on.

<p>

<i>...I guess the constant motion keeps it looking good? I mean, I can see people's pores in movies, lots of details. It amazes me still to this day. 35mm film blown up onto a huge screen, and it still looks detailed.</i>

<p>

All I can say is you must be seeing different films than I am. Pores in closeups aren't impressive. If they're there on the film then they're going to be there in the blowup -- they're just going to be a foot across.

<p>

<i>

Movies look extremely high resolution to me in the theaters.

</i>

<p>

OK, now I'm really starting to think you need glasses. If you want to see high resolution, watch an IMAX. The difference is day and night. 35mm films are very fuzzy everywhere, all the time.

[oceanphysics]

It's not "video film" by the way. It's motion picture film. Video is the horrid-looking stuff on tape.

[philippartridge]

35mm photography has its clear place for film photographers; a combination of optimised lenses, depth of field, camera size, roll length, cost, product choice, and specialised lenses make it so, for a wide range of shooting styles.

 

I hope most art house and 'serious' movie productions stay with film, it just looks so rich and deep compared with digital output, which mostly looks as realistic as a typical photo.net landscape to my eyes. ;-) Lord of the Rings battle scenes, anyone?

[discpad]

Playboy Magazine has used large format since day one: That's why you can count the hairs!

[..........]

Which hairs? Bacon strip? :P The last two movies that I saw in theater were FlightPlan and Brokeback Mountain. The quality and clarity of all of the images in both films to me was astounding! and I don't need glasses! I don't go to the theater often, I'm a home DVD watcher usually, so maybe thats why I'm amazed at the quality of simple 35mm film. It has to be the equipment, the lenses, motion picture cameras, etc. Also it doesn't make sense to me why they wouldn't upgrade the motion picture film to medium format nowadays, especially by now. But I guess since people like me are still amazed at the picture and quality and impact, there is no need. Maybe someday I'll get a large format, to add to my Canon 35mm and old Yashica MF. They look very complicated though. Thanks for all the replies, Dennis

[ross_wilson1]

Like I said, a movie with the lights they use in a studio can be shot on stock around 50 asa then transfered with no optical step to super fine grain slow film. The grain by this point is very very small, even when it the picture is very big. Ad that to the fact a lot of your Hollywood blockbusters are going through a DI 'digital intermediate' and can be clean up there if needed.

 

Want more odd facts? The state of the art HD cinema camera Sony's Cine Alta is about the equivilent of a 2 mega pixel camera. The difference is the quality of the CCD's and the other worldly lenses not to mention processing software etc etc. It's all very very expensive, but motion picture tolerances make still photography tolerances look as loose as a dutch hooker. Things like the circle of confusion tolerances and lens tolerances all help in creating the finest pictures.

 

By the way, IMAX is simply 4 x 35mm motion mags, it's not some special film. It's effectively a special built camera that's basically like four cameras in a line that take standard panavision 1000ft 35mm mags. So you're looking at 35mm picture film when you look at any one quater of the image.

 

At the end of the day it's simply far, far more affordable and easier to go bigger with the film size than to refine tolerances to the nth degree of 35mm still photography. Just take a look at the size of a standard panavision PL mount lens, it makes the biggest medium format lenses look small, and it's resolving on an area that's a fair bit smaller than your still photography 35mm frame.

 

Even 70mm has been almost abandoned because of what modern design and tech has done with 35mm.

 

35mm film at the movies is the best the format can be, it's just so out of this world expensive to do that getting an MF camera makes a lot more sense.

[edgar_njari]

"Freeze a frame of a movie on your DVD or VCR by hitting the pause button and see what it looks like. It always amazes me how a baseball can look like a perfect sphere in flight but it is actually a rather long streak on the frame."

 

A DVD image is so small in resolution that it is useless for evaluating any kind of film image, exept perhapse 16mm or 8mm film.

Also it is full of compression and noise.

An uncompressed 1080 HD image might be a better indication of how original film elements look like.

Of course, not to mention that VHS image is even worse, specially of an older tape full of holes and noise in the picture.

 

But VHS image in motion is a good analogy of how a really crappy image can look great in motion.

 

It is true that movie images appear fine on screen because of motion, but original negatives look good enough even as still slides, depending on the film stock that is in question.

 

For example, a 35mm half-frame (24x18 mm) of 5245 or a similar slower emulsion (like the new 5201) can appear grainless (literally) and pixel to pixel sharp at 2K, which is close to 2200 dpi

That is pretty much up to the standards of still photography film.

 

The problem with movies is that the print you see in cinema is a print of a duplicate negative. That's 3 printing stages, the last one being done at high speed.

Now imagine how would your favorite 35mm slide look like if you duped it 3 times.

What you see in cinema is no indication of how cinema negative film looks like.

[edgar_njari]

"By the way, IMAX is simply 4 x 35mm motion mags, it's not some special film. It's effectively a special built camera that's basically like four cameras in a line that take standard panavision 1000ft 35mm mags. So you're looking at 35mm picture film when you look at any one quater of the image."

 

Excuse me but IMAX is 15-perf 65mm film

[ross_wilson1]

Well obviously there's more than one camera then and one format, the Nascar Imax movie was shot on the camera I described as per a lengthly American Cinemaphotographer article I read. Excuse me.

[edgar_njari]

I don't doubt that, if you read it then they did it like that. What I'm saying is that doesn't mean IMAX doesn't exist as a separate format. The prints are 70mm 15-perf, even with 35mm blowups, and the standard camera is 15-perf 65mm. They look like Vistavision butterfly cameras, only larger and noisier.

 

Here is how an IMAX print looks like:

http://us1.webpublications.com.au/static/images/articles/i303/30317_19mg.jpg

 

And here is a Fries 15-perf 65mm camera compatible with IMAX:

 

http://www.frieseng.com/3x65.htm

[jeff bishop]

> "Most medium-high end photographers consider 35 mm print and slide film to be consumer garbage."

 

I find this hard to believe. I shoot medium and large format both and don't embrace that logic. First off, Tri-x or Velvia or Provia are all the same regardless of format. It's the same emulsions on the same film.

 

The only difference is the format. 35mm is much smaller, thus it's harder to enlarge it as much.

 

This would be the same as 35mm guys telling the medium and large format people that they have the best lenses. That small piece of film requires the image to be super sharp!

[photo5]

And lenses for 35mm cameras actually resolve more detail than lenses for medium format. They have to.

 

I remember when I shot my first roll of 120 through a Rolleicord with a 75mm Xenar lens. I was floored how silky smooth the images were. I fell in love and shot with various Rolleiflex cameras over the next few years. I also bought and sold a Bronica ETRS, SQ, and a wonderful Mamiya RB67 that I had with three lenses. Later I got a couple of Hasselblad 500CM cameras and sold them too.

 

I always came back to 35mm slide film. I just like the portability of the format too much. The others are fine if you're in the studio. Otherwise I needed a tripod most of the time even with my ETRS, which I was afraid to handhold for less than 1/125 second exposure.

 

Dave