Changing Lanes, Murder by Numbers and yes, Star Wars: Episode II are all recent examples of movies that just looked grainy. Is this the latest style in filming? Soft focus? Different film-stock in production or exhibition? Or are more and more people using digital to film more parts their films lately?
I hope Super 35 die....(at least in major productions)
Un saludo
Many S35 films actually DO look pretty good, I think the lab work and the shooting stocks play an important role in the final product's quality.
-Aaron
I canīt imagine why the academy awarded LOTR in best cinematography or any other title filmed with Super 35.
Changing Lanes was also intentionally grainy. I would assume that they used graininess to try to further attempt to give the film an edgy, cinema verite aesthetic. In my opinion, Changing Lanes failed in this respect. See my post in the reviews section for my entire rant.
I haven't seen EPII yet, but in that case, it sounds like it may have been a lab problem or some issue that arose with the digital to film transfer. Blackhawk Down, Seven and Panic Room were also most likely intentially grainy. I say intentionally as I can't speak for these filmmakers, nor have I read anything that would validate my statements.
But let's remember that we are talking about professionals that are working with enormous budgets here. Yes, Super 35 will tend to yield a more grainy anamorphic image, but these people have and know the ways to avoid the grainy look of the final print: slower, finer stocks, more light, etc. If they didn't want their films to look like they do, more often than not, they wouldn't. I am exaggerating a bit to make my point, as I am sure that even in the super high budget world of Hollywood, things don't always come out the way they intend, but more often than not, these filmmakers and cinematographers have access to the money and tools they need to achieve whatever look the want to.
Also evidently they now use mulitple internegatives that make the final release prints more generations away from the camera negative than was done in the past -- a great contributor to the degraded look of today's films, according to Haines.
We just ran two "show prints" of MOULIN ROUGE and SW Ep 1 (I believe these are struck directly from the camera negative or at least from an internegative closer to the camera negative than the mass produced regular release prints. They were gorgeous. You could almost believe you were watching technicolor or 70mm, the sharpness is that dramatic over conventional release prints. And once you see a show print next to a regular print, you will immediately see how impressive 35mm technology really is.
Using digital elements is not helping matters either. I just saw LORD OF THE RINGS (yah, I know, I am not enamored of seeing films when they are first released -- I wait until they are just about played out so I am guaranteed a good seat -- almost like a private screening!) and the insertion of digital effects was about as obvious as day and night-- now we are in focus, now we are not. It's great that CGI can do anything the imagination can congure up; now all they need to do is to figure out how to get it in focus.
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This one time, at Projection Camp, I stuck a xenon bulb....
A 'show print' is a print which has been assigned for special screenings and is usually technically superior to the general print run of a given title.
The higher quality can be achieved, for example, by printing directly from the camera negative, and/or by very careful lab work.
Of course, general print runs can also be of excellent quality (minimal loss in steadiness and sharpness) when all the printing steps are done accurately. Sadly, this is not always the case.
High-speed printing is often cited as the reason for poor quality general release prints, but this isn't so. Very high quality high-speed contact prints can be made once the internegative elements have been produced correctly.
quote:
I agree that most Super35 originated prints look grainy, but there are some good ones too, Oceans Eleven i beleive was shot in S35, and that looked great
Ocean's Eleven? That was one of the grainiest films I've ever seen (other than mid-1930s black and white). Granted, I've read on this forum that the graininess was intentional, and the film is otherwise well photographed, so I'd agree that it looked fine. But if you're looking for a Super 35 film that doesn't exhibit graininess, Ocean's Eleven is not the best example.
The only way how I see Super35 being done right is to either show it in 1.85:1 or blow it up to 70mm if the optical enlargement process has to be used. In going through the extra optical printing steps to get to 'scope 35mm a generation in image quality is lost.
Anamorphic 'scope is superior to Super35 for being able to use the full 4-perf frame and have all that extra emulsion used to capture image detail. Super35 imagery is getting blown up across both horizontal and vertical axis, just like a non-anamorphic widescreen DVD. Ugh!
The one single advantage that Super35 has is depth of field over use of spherical lenses. But that is more a matter of convenience (and price) than over quality. If depth of field is what the DP and director wants, they can get razor sharp focus across the entire frame if they choose their lenses and T-stop setting correctly. I have seen plenty of anamorphic movies where this has been done.
Shooting anamorphic 35mm forces the film crew to actually compose for the format rather than doing the proverbial "having their cake and eating it too" with Super35. Most Super35 films have a lifeless quality when it comes to the composition. The top and bottom of the frame has simply been lopped off and the composition really just looks like it. Super35 compositions (and quality) often look no better at all than the trailers for 1.85:1 films that have been blown up to 'scope.
When done right, anamorphic 35mm looks really great. Care must be taken with actor placement, set decoration, lighting and everything else to correctly accomodate the format. If all that extra work is not done, anamorphic can look disasterous. You'll get into the low depth of field headaches and such. But even with that, the film stocks are so fast that there is more flexibility with the kind of lenses and exposure settings that can be used. This is so much so that I am angry that film productions are not trying to give 70mm any kind of a legitimate chance. With the kind of cameras, lenses and film stocks that are available now, it would be so much easier to shoot a movie in 70mm than it would have been 20 years ago.
The claims about Super35's superiority in terms of depth of field are a bit dubious. Sure, I could improve the depth of field of anamorphic photography by 200% if I loppped away half of the frame and used only 2 perfs of it for composition.
Depth of field and capability of detail should be seen as two different things. 5-perf 70mm has a very very low level of depth of field when compared to 4-perf 35mm. But if you can get the lighting and exposure settings just right, 70mm just absolutely blows away 35mm in terms of extreme high resolution razor sharp detail. Seeing a 70mm film like "Lawrence of Arabia" versus a 'scope 35mm print is like the difference between having 20/20 vision and needing glasses to correct blurry eyesight.
I see some of the same kinds of things going between Super35 and anamorphic 35mm. Sure, in some tight close up shot the background is going to be very blurry and vertically distorted using anamorphic. Rack focus moves on such shots are going to be awkward. But Super35 has its own tradeoffs on image quality. You often get an image with more noticeable grain and a lot less in terms of rich color. I think about it in terms of blowing up a colored balloon. When it is deflated, the color is very solid. When overinflated, that balloon's color gets very weak. I feel Super35 just stretches the emulsion out past what it is worth. It always falls short of 35mm anamorphic quality, especially when anamorphic is using the same high grain/high speed films.
I would only make a movie in Super35 for two reasons. One, I want a movie that can transfer to home video 1.33:1 TV release with minimal panning and scanning. That is the primary purpose above all others for Super35. It is "home video safe" widescreen. The second reason is that some filmmakers hate the anamorphic look, even though the anamorphic look is very fashionable these days judging by all the music videos out there being shot in 'scope.
Two recent movies that really took maximum advantage of the 35mm anamorphic production format are "Moulin Rouge" and "The Thin Red Line" --- very sharp images with almost no graininess.
"Super-35" can be "Done Right" too: e.g., "Titanic", "True Lies". But underexposure or using inappropriately fast film stocks can result in grainy images.
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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: +1 585 477 5325 Cell: +1 585 781 4036 Fax: +1 585 722 7243
e-mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion
Camera negative image area that ends up on the screen:
1.912 x 0.870 inches: 65mm 5-perf 2.20:1
1.912 x 0.800 inches: 65mm 5-perf 2.39:1
0.825 x 0.690 inches: 35mm anamorphic 2.39:1
0.945 x 0.394 inches: Super-35 2.39:1
0.825 x 0.345 inches: Techniscope 2.39:1
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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: +1 585 477 5325 Cell: +1 585 781 4036 Fax: +1 585 722 7243
e-mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion
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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: +1 585 477 5325 Cell: +1 585 781 4036 Fax: +1 585 722 7243
e-mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion
No, I thought overall that 65mm was as waste on Far And Away. It was just was not very good looking film inspite of the 65mm cinematography....way too much diffusion was used to be able to tell what format it was shot in. There are alot of older films that looked far better than Far And Away! Sure the 70mm prints would provide brighter, steadier images with less visible dust and scratches but it is what was put on the negative that I didn't care much for.
Gord,
You won't find too many rear anamorphs being used on large productions except for crash cams. Most 1st assistants go to what ever camera house the equipment is comming from and hand select the lenses for best color match, etc...these are ususally integrated units from Panavision, Arriflex, etc., that have already been optimized by the manufacturer. About the only advantage I can think of to using rear anamorphs is that there is usually less weight to the lens and they are a bit smaller...also keep in mind that using these attachments usually takes a given Superspeed lens OUT of the Superspeed catagory as the anamorph uses up a bit of light when at the rear of a lens. These days those super high speed integrated lenses, be they anamorphic, or spherical, are very important...although I don't necessarily agree with the way they are used alot of the time.
Mark
It is true that the balance of exposure, lighting and focus gets ever more critical with the larger the film negative, but a larger negative is going to have better contrast, better color quality and an overall sharper image. A smaller negative is easier to shoot. It takes more skill to correctly photograph a larger one. People using Hasselblad view cameras really have to know their stuff.
"Far and Away" had its own problems here and there, but there were plenty of points in that film where is was noticeably much sharper and richer in color than any 35mm 'scope film. Out of 1990's 70mm films, I tend to point out "Baraka" as a good example of 70mm work. I think the motion control shots of stars rotating around the earth's axis with Monument Valley and Bryce Canyon mountains as a backdrop ranks as some of the best imagery I've ever seen on 70mm.
I see the same general differences in color quality, contrast quality and sharp image with anamorphic 35mm shows. If done well, anamorphic 35mm looks better than just about any Super35 show. With the grain getting stretched out too much, its like putting only two tea bags in a gallon of sun tea when you really need at least eight. It gets weak.
One thing that also has to be mentioned with Super35 is how a growing number of those shows are using digital intermediate techniques to work in CGI, but also attempt to hide the flaws (grain, poor color rendition) that come about in Super35 origination. "Lord of the Rings" is a good example of that.
In cinemas where I showed the same film several times with different prints, I noticed enormous differences between each copy in the contrast, saturation and graininess of the picture. I think I must have handled about 10 prints of Titanic in total and they ranged from crisp and dense to grainy and washed-out.
Ironically, new 35mm prints of archival rerelease titles generally look far sharper than routine release prints of new films nowadays (though admittedly, the larger frame area of Academy or full-gate silent relative to S35 and widescreen flat 35 makes this a bit of an unfair comparison).
If Ocean's Eleven was not shot using anamorphic lenses, then the lights in the background should remain round. I see that it's still showing here at our 15-cinema complex, so I must check that out.
Unrelated, but you mentioned Ali using this process: A premiére of Ali was held at our complex, and Will Smith, Michael Mann (director), Nelson Mandela and other celibrities were here. If only I'd known about the question of Super-35. I would've asked Michael Mann about it.
By the way, it seems to me that a scope film will definitely have more light output and more contrast when viewed on a top-masking screen, and possibly even with side masking. I mean, with a flat film, you mask half of the aperture out. With scope you let the whole frame through. So, being confident that scope will give you more brightness AND more contrast on a top-masking screen, has anyone done the math for side-masking? I mean, there'll be more light, but the screen is also bigger in that instance.
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"One man can make a difference."
The "math" is in my article about the advantages of "scope" formats, including current 2X Scope 2.39:1 and a proposed 1.5X Scope format that would produce a 1.79:1 aspect ratio with the current "scope" aperture and give 1.5 times MORE screen luminance for the cost of a lens:
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/newsletters/reel/february97/pytlak.shtml
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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: +1 585 477 5325 Cell: +1 585 781 4036 Fax: +1 585 722 7243
e-mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion
The scope film on a screen that has side-masking will have more light on the screen than a flat film, at a ratio of 13:16!
The other facts were interesting, too. Forgive my ignorance, but I always thought that scope was 2.35:1, not 2.39:1. What gives?
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"One man can make a difference."
With motion picture film, you're taking about taking a much smaller size negative and blowing it on a screen much larger than any print you would make with a view camera. Those two items greatly amplify the roughly 40% size difference in negative between a cropped 2.35:1 Super35 frame and full 4-perf anamorphic 35mm frame. Anamorphic 'scope originated 35mm film images are already pushing the limits of what is acceptable for 35mm use. 5-perf 70mm was developed partly in response to the obvious compromise in quality that anamorphic represented. Super35 origination is taking the blow-up to widescreen method a step farther.
quote:
The other facts were interesting, too. Forgive my ignorance, but I always thought that scope was 2.35:1, not 2.39:1. What gives?
The standards changed. See: http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/apertures.htm where Film-Tech (and Kodak's) very own Human Search Engine traces the history of the 'scope aperture.
IMDB, by the way, continues to list all anamorphic as 2.35:1. They do, however, list Academy ratio correctly as 1.37:1 (many projectionists get this wrong). Just another example of how unsuited the IMDB is right now for technical data.
quote:
I haven't yet noticed this 'Super 35mm' anamorphic, of which you speak.
Super 35 vs. anamorphic (grain, telltale signs, etc.) has been discussed several times before on this forum. You should do a search -- there's quite a bit of info to be found.
quote:
a 2.39:1 A/R movie released nowadays is much more likely to be shot in Super 35 than in anamorphic. Looking at the Oscar nominees for cinematography, while hardly representative, certainly shows the trend. Super 35 outnumbered anamorphic 3:1 in the 2001 nominees, 4:1 in 2000, 2:1 in 1999, and 3:1 in 1997.
I don't think that Oscar-nominated titles from only a few years is a large enough sample from which to create a realistic statistic. Because I'm curious (and I assume at least a few of you may be curious too), I've dug through a massive research project I've been logging over the years on scope releases, and this is what I've come up with for the past five years:
2002
# of scope releases I'm aware of (the number will, of course, increase as the year progresses): 42
anamorphic: 20
super 35: 17
other (HD 24p, digital, etc.): 4
2001
# of scope releases I'm aware of: 116
anamorphic: 37
super 35: 55
other (HD 24p, digital, etc.): 4
I don't have origination format confirmation on 20 or so titles.
2000
# of scope releases I'm aware of: 128
anamorphic: 40
super 35: 54
other (HD 24p, digital, etc.): 4
I don't have origination format confirmation on 30 or so titles.
1999
# of scope releases I'm aware of: 158
anamorphic: 55
super 35: 65
other (HD 24p, digital, etc.): 4
I don't have origination format confirmation on 30 or so titles.
1998
# of scope releases I'm aware of: 141
anamorphic: 70
super 35: 53
other (HD 24p, digital, etc.): 2
I don't have origination format confirmation on 15 or so titles.
1997
# of scope releases I'm aware of: 154
anamorphic: 82
super 35: 58
other (HD 24p, digital, etc.): 2
I don't have origination format confirmation on 10 or so titles.
Keep in mind that I haven't supplied any figures for FLAT releases. My guess is that they account for around 75-80 percent of all releases. Others may have different figures, though. The latest American Cinematographer Manual, for instance, states that SCOPE releases account for 45 percent (which I feel is an inflated figure). The tricky part of gathering these types of numbers is that it's just plain difficult to account for everything. And then there's the definition of "everything." Do you include independent releases or just studio films? What about films shown at a film festival that never get picked up by a distributor? Straight-to-video releases? What about releases from other countries that never get released here in North America, or that we never hear about? Titles from India?
My figures generally account for North American releases and as many international releases as I can possibly track. So, please keep that in mind. The figures I provided can only be considered a guide for the curious and for those who wish to continue a discussion on the topic rather than the final word on the subject.
I only found out about this Super-35mm format in this thread - I wonder if I've seen a film done this way, in a theatre, and not noticed that?
I hope not. 'Cos then my trained eye's not what I thought it was.
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"One man can make a difference."