|
|
This topic comprises 10 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10
|
|
Author
|
Topic: The digital revolution
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
|
posted 02-16-2011 02:54 AM
Many thanks for the compliment, Brad.
When I changed jobs a few years ago, I started working for a new employer who has pretty strict policies about posting viewpoints and opinions etc. on publicly accessible websites under your real name. This was basically a kneejerk reaction to a political nutjob on the staff, who had been doing plenty of that and had made it into the national press as a result. That caginess has since largely died down, but there is still a bit of paranoia about. Because of rule #11, I just tried to wind down my posting here unobtrusively rather than post a 'goodbye' message.
Agreed with pretty much everyone here: it's a simple business reality that the days of film as a mainstream presentation medium are numbered. In the same way that the last few years of vinyl LPs were characterised by poor quality and impure PVC, thin pressings and 40 minutes on a side, so many of today's 35mm prints are poorly timed, have a wobbly picture and are generally depressing to watch. I suspect the reason is simply that labs' margins are being squeezed as the focus of R & D is moving elsewhere.
On the archival front, it seems to me that there are two distinct issues. 1 - How to ensure the long-term preservation of material originated on film on film; and 2 - whether and how the film viewing experience can be preserved in at least some rep houses, museums, cinematheques and so on.
I've never been able to find out the exact figure, but would guess that during the peak of the 35mm film era (in both movie and still imaging), most of the stock manufactured was release print stock. The introduction of digital imaging for stills didn't affect this very much, because while tens of millions of feet were being made each year for theatre prints, the loss of a small fraction when still photography went digital didn't affect the economies of scale so much. However, now that, as Brad points out, the film era is nearly over and we're at the point where the big studios are on the verge of discontinuing 35mm printing, it won't be long before film is not going to be made in any significant quantities any more; and that will be the game changer for preservation.
At the moment, any ethical issues apart, film is still the most cost-effective way to preserve high-quality moving images. If store it cold and dry enough it'll last for centuries - even nitrate. The hardware needed to make digital copies from your film originals is never going to be that complex or expensive to make, and so no format migration for preservation is necessary - only for access.
Given the storage and migration issues involved in storing any digital data long-term, no-one in their right mind is going to migrate film originals for preservation to digital and then put the film in the dumpster. It won't be cost-effective to do so until you can buy a petabyte of storage over twenty years for a few bucks. I'm not saying that moment will never come: I vividly remember a chief projectionist I worked for in the early '90s tell me emphatically that computers will never be powerful enough to project film-quality moving images. His 'never' turned out to be a decade and a half.
If and when that moment does come, the issue will shift from an economic issue to an ethical one. On that score, I'm not too downhearted. In the last 10-20 years, commercial studio archives and taxpayer-funded ones have developed close and effective working links: the studios realise that their back catalogues represent a major asset, and they also realise that non-profit archives, curators, boutique DVD publishers such as Kino and Milestone, universities etc. help to create and sustain the market for that asset. Unethical so-called 'restoration' practices are likely to become a major issue (3D-izing 1940s classics and that sort of thing), but as long as the originals are preserved, they won't cause major damage.
Preserving the film viewing experience could well prove more tricky. Again, I turn to the analogy with vinyl LPs. There are still a small number of cottage industry manufacturers producing turntables and records for a die-hard market of enthusiasts. The economies of scale for this just about work, because mechanically and electrically, the technology is a relatively simple one. I'm hoping that the same will apply to 35mm projection: that the machine tooling needed to refurbish an intermittent (for example), and the chemistry needed to make and process at least black-and-white stock is straightforward enough that even if the market dwindles to a couple of hundred theatres worldwide, it'll still just about be possible to support them. We're not going to find this out in the next few years, because the stocks of machines and spares in circulation will still be in use.
But we're certainly in the final stages of saying goodbye to film in mainstream theatres; and like everyone else, the archive and film heritage worlds are just going to have to deal with it.
Sorry about the long post!
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
|
posted 02-16-2011 05:57 PM
In retrospect, I should have sent you a personal message explaining why I dropped off the F-T map - sorry.
Reading through this thread a bit more thoroughly...
quote: Manny Knowles
The "digital revolution" can't be blamed if original elements are in poor shape. If anything, digital technology will probably play some role in the restoration/preservation effort.
It already is, to the extent that like 35mm projection in theatres, analogue preservation methods (e.g. wet-gate printing to reduce scratches, physically assembling reels to be preservation duped from multiple sources etc.) are already the exception that proves the rule. There are some preservationists who stick to these methods on ethical grounds, e.g. Ross Lipman at UCLA or Mark Toscano at AMPAS, but the normal workflow now is to scan all the elements you can find, either as you find them or with the bare minimum of physical treatment needed to get them through a scanner > carry out reconstruction and/or image correction digitally > laser out a preservation negative to go in the vault. Modern toothless, sprocket-free scanners such as the ones made by MWA-Nova or Kinetta don't mind torn perforations, shrunken and brittle stock, very dry cement joins and all those problems that previously could have added up to hundreds of hours of bench repair before you even get near a printer. In most cases it's now cheaper to scan whatever you've got, warts and all, and do a software cleanup than it is to repair and/or clean elements before scanning.
quote: Manny Knowles
I also question whether good quality prints would be junked as long as they're still earning revenue. My hunch is the studios will keep shipping them out "till the wheels fall off."
That's certainly what's happening on this side of the pond. Even though digitisation has fallen off a cliff in price, there's still an up-front cost and it's still not worth it for an esoteric title where you print only gets two or three bookings a year.
quote: Martin McCaffrey
That says, as I've mentioned elsewhere, the studios have discovered the best way and cheapest way to preserve their films is with B&W separations on film. How many films they decide need to be preserved is a whole other question.
From what I've been hearing, the seps route has turned out to be not such a good idea. The problem is that the three elements don't shrink at the same rate, with the result that achieving accurate registration gets more and more difficult the older your seps are. At AMIA either last year or the year before (can't quite remember), there was a presentation from someone who'd just prepared new DCPs and HD masters of Chinatown. He said that he started with seps made during the original post-production, but that the differential shrinkage was so bad that it was impossible to combine them without fringing, either by three-pass printing to a new interpositive or digitally. In the end, scanning a dye-faded fine grain and doing digital colour correction yielded much better results, because at least the three emulsions were in the right place relative to each other.
Making YCMs was considered the way to go during the '80s and '90s, when dye fading was known about but acetate stock shrinking was not very well understood (base shrinkage was thought to only affect nitrate). Martin Scorsese was a particular fan of the process, and it is rumoured that he insisted in a clause in his contracts with studios that they would make and preserve a set of YCMs of every film he directed. There were a lot of re-releases of material preserved on YCMs during that time that actually look almost unwatchable now, so bad is the colour fringing. We're now in a situation whereby dye fading can be corrected digitally very easily - by using different coloured light in the scanner, you can read the three emulsion records separately and then have the computer restore the timing to account for the differential fades of the three colour records - but the misalignment resulting from the differential shrinkage of YCMs has proven a much tougher nut to crack.
And of course once you've done all this, you've then got the extra problem of preserving the dataset...
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
All times are Central (GMT -6:00)
|
This topic comprises 10 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10
|
Powered by Infopop Corporation
UBB.classicTM
6.3.1.2
The Film-Tech Forums are designed for various members related to the cinema industry to express their opinions, viewpoints and testimonials on various products, services and events based upon speculation, personal knowledge and factual information through use, therefore all views represented here allow no liability upon the publishers of this web site and the owners of said views assume no liability for any ill will resulting from these postings. The posts made here are for educational as well as entertainment purposes and as such anyone viewing this portion of the website must accept these views as statements of the author of that opinion
and agrees to release the authors from any and all liability.
|
Home
![[thumbsup]](graemlins/thumbsup.gif)
![[beer]](graemlins/beer.gif)
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic