Steven Spielberg on digital or not digital

[Luis Otero]

Directly from Cannes official website:

Steven Spielberg on digital or not digital:
"The film is being released digitally on a lot of screens, about 300. Making a film digitally and releasing a film in the same digital process gives a beautiful image. It creates an extraordinarily clean, sharp image, but making a film on celluloid - as I’d like to do with all of my pictures –then transferring, releasing it, and projecting it digitally is a very inferior image. So the decision to go out to a vast number of motion picture theatres was a simple decision for me to make. But digital cinema is inevitable, it’s right around the corner and even someday I will have to convert, but right now I love film.”:ohmy:

So, he has spoken...

[Joel Kaye]

but making a film on celluloid - as I’d like to do with all of my pictures –then transferring, releasing it, and projecting it digitally is a very inferior image.

Friggin' send that to those guys on those other websites that think film will never die.

[conrad gaunt]

:biggrin:
Friggin' send that to those guys on those other websites that think film will never die.


Hold your horses, I`m too stoned to decide the fate of film right now, and not qualified, but..
I hope film never dies personally, I`ve never used it for motion capture, but it has served/serves us well it seems. Microfeche is still a far more reliable storage medium than any digital media, and film is, er, more like microfeche (which is itself a close second to stone carvings in my book, and along side aboriginal cave paintings in terms of reliable storage), and when the terrorists, er, I mean the neo-cons, discover how panicked people get when a small Electro Magnetic Pulse is released in their local city and everything stops working, lets just say, erasing art and culture while they herd all the crazy cowboys up would be a nice bonus to them.. of course Speilberg uses microfeche, er , I mean film, so his take on history/legacy is safe for a hundred years+, with care. :)

To me, some of the oldest films are the most interesting. Often film gets discovered after being lost for an age. Good luck recovering that hard disk in seventy years, I can imagine the news reader:

"A Film, shot digitally in the early 21 century, over fifty years ago, by famous director <insert your name here>?, and believed to have been lost after his/her? death, was yesterday discovered in a loft when workmen discovered an old fashioned Maxtor disk system whilst removing a wasps nest. The disk was said to have a clearly marked label on it, with the film details written in permanent marker pen. Later recovery experts were able to confirm that the disk was in fact f**ked, and early hopes of the data being intact had been `unrealistic`"

.. I`ve still got 27 year old computer games on audio cassettes (stored in a loft for decades, very bad) that still load, not sure if I have a 17year old 5 1/4inch floppy disk that does though (I still have a drive for them and disks!).
Digital is perfect for the eon of disposability.
At least the Nazis had to physically set fire to the books last time around, not just erase them, mind you, in the digital age I expect they`ll still set fire to our hard drives too, just for good measure, so think about your sixteen word message before you post next time! :wacko::bleh:

[gbalaji]

Friggin' send that to those guys on those other websites that think film will never die.

Joel,

I don't agree with you that film will die. Everyone of us in the digital domain loves the film quality and will try to match with film. Even RED talks about comparing their camera with S35mm quality and everyone thrives to get film quality one day.

Till that date we need to respect film and at the same time thrive to equal film quality with our digital tools.

RED Rocks and Rules, even Panavision scares.

[Christoffer Glans]

How lond did it take for 8mm to die? How long have 16mm lived when it's already surpassed by most high end cameras?
Even if Epic or whatever camera that's around the corner will kill film there will still take A LONG time before we can say that 35mm is dead. We are also a long way from a workable workflow of digital 70mm quality.

Some say that 2013 will be the year when film dies, but it doesn't matter if that is on paper or not because I believe film is going to be used for at least 20 years more before there is no reason to use it.

The major thing is that the reason why some have shot on 8mm and 16mm today is because of the looks. It has it's special look that would take alot of expensive postprocessing to accomplish with digital footage.

The ONLY thing I see that would kill the reason for using film is if you can shoot in high resolution and create an image that has the exact same looks and features as 35mm film.

With todays choices DP's and directors don't choose 35mm because of money, they choose it because of it's looks. You can achieve almost the same quality with Red but even if you one day surpass the quality of film, it's downsides will be it's features you want for the character of the image.

[James T Mather]

Friggin' send that to those guys on those other websites that think film will never die.

God, grow up a little

[Radoslav Karapetkov]

Film won't die, it'll just lose the monopoly...

[RedRay]

I've been a film purist for quite a long time. I made a lot of super8mm films in the early 80s, moved on to 16mm, shot a lot of 35mm in the 90s to present, and have recently been dabbling in HDV, HD, and now ultra-HD on the Red. As much as I love film, I would dare say it would eventually die. The question is not if it will, but WHEN. Right now we are seeing image acquisition and post-production moving over to digital. Theatrical exhibition is still primarily film, but one day they will come up with digital projectors that simulate film resolution. The last breath of celluloid will be film archiving, storage, and preservation, as film still proves to be the most lasting medium at present. But unless the world blows itself up with all this new technology, they probably will develop indestructible data storage. Someday. Until then, film is still superior :)

[Bang WOW Bang]

I am humble to say that Digital files 2K 4:4:4 ( Dual Link ) is better than Film because a lot of Film projectors + prjection lenese were made in CHINA ( MIC )

Who know better than I and I am CHINESE to believe in REDolution.

Will see how Films can last any longer in CHINA. ( One of the biggest market in D-Cinemas in the world )

Best regards,

Stewart

[Noah Kadner]

It's kind of inevitable if you think about it. How many still photographers are still shooting film? In the news gathering world just about zero. The news moves way too fast to wait for developing film. In the art world of course you have a lot of photographers still shooting with their Hasselblads and Mamiyas, but less every year and Hasselblad already offers high end digital backs for their medium format cameras.

In the audio world: many young people today have never even seen an analog tape recorder or a record player- those are just gone. You might see a record player in an audiophile's basement but in every home, forget about it. And imagine just 20 years ago, every music store carried CD's, tapes and records. Now music stores themselves are going out of business in droves because everyone gets their music digitally from the internet- legally or otherwise.

In motion pictures things move slowly because a lot of money and established players are on the line, but eventually this too will come to pass. That's not to say it's Film Vs. Red so much as it's Film vs. Digital.

Film is a fixed photochemical process that has incrementally improved over nearly a century of development. Digital is limitless in its potential. We're already at 2K DI's and 5K cameras now which even the most die hard film purist would have to agree on a purely technical level are approaching or equivalent to the resolving capabilities of film. And nearly every "film" you see in a theater now has been DI'ed digitally and then printed back to film for exhibition. Once the theaters all switch over to digital there will be no film prints made, regardless of the shooting format.

But that's just the beginning, just as Digital SLR's add a megapixel or two each year so will it be with motion picture cameras. There's nothing unreasonable in peering into the future four or five years and saying, "now that we have 10K cameras which greatly exceed the resolving powers of even 65MM IMAX, there's no reason to shoot in 35mm film as it's a lower resolution and quality." It will be for purely aesthetic, sentimental reasons- which is fine. That's the choice we have as artists. Digital is no longer "The Future," it's right now...

-Noah

[Radoslav Karapetkov]

Digital is no longer "The Future," it's right now...

-Noah


I like the sound of that. :)

(I read it out loud)