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XTimmy: Nov 28, 2007; I am Jacks self hatred

OttoVonBismarck posted:

Nitrate film looks very good indeed, it is actually superior tech in many ways. The blacks are great and the contrasts are amazing.

On image quality on film in general, I would like to add that pristine 35mm prints look absolutely mindblowingly good. I sat through a lot of quality control screenings with the senior lab technicians and archivists, and I was truly amazed by the amount of detail and "resolution" of really old footage. Mind you, this was "0-day" prints made from our own preservation duplicating positives. To be honest the move to digital amazes me somewhat, as the current standard in cinemas over here is 2k. 2k looks fairly well on a television screen, but it has nothing on a 35mm print. 4k looks comparable though.

There's a reason bigger productions are still shot on 35mm/16mm and it's both because it's really really hard to replicate the tonality, flexibility and detail of film, even if the end result is a digital file.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2014 21:50

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 02:44

XTimmy: Nov 28, 2007; I am Jacks self hatred

snorch posted:

We have three of these bad boys at work, sitting there untouched for about ten years:

Not identical to the model pictured, but it's the only decent pic I could find on the net. They're cathode ray tube film recorders, which in our case were used to expose 32mm movie film from digital images at up to 4k resolution, (usually 2k) by mounting a 32mm film camera on the top pointing down into the device. There's no phosphor raster, the screen is black and white, and color is attained by exposing three times through red, green and blue filters. The whole process of exposing a single frame of film with the device took nearly a minute, and the machines were made obsolete when Arri came out with their Arrilaser system, which only took a couple of seconds to expose a frame with red, green and blue all at once. They were then made super-duper-extra-obsolete by the dawn of digital cinema, which eliminated the need for film completely.

Question: Do you mean 35mm when you say 32mm? Only because I'm not aware of a 32mm format and I had a client asking about it recently and it threw me right off. Figured it might be a nationality thing since the film industry loves flipping its terminology for different countries.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2014 11:44

XTimmy: Nov 28, 2007; I am Jacks self hatred

WebDog posted:

Oh and Microsoft BOB actually appears on the XP install CD, as garbage data in order to pad out the space.

Why the necessity to 'pad out space'?

# ¿ Mar 16, 2014 05:19

XTimmy: Nov 28, 2007; I am Jacks self hatred

Humphreys posted:

Just saw this amazing piece of tech hackery on hackaday from 1987:

http://hackaday.com/2014/06/25/retrotechtacular-kodak-built-worlds-first-dslr-using-a-nikon-camera-body/

http://eocamera.jemcgarvey.com/

To give you an idea of how quickly the digital imaging world progresses.
This is the RED "ONE", released 2007 and costing around $50k USD on release.

This is the camera your Pirates of the Caribbean and Transformers are generally shot on.
Fully kitted out with lenses, and basic accessories it weighs about 13kg, but easily bloats to anywhere of 20kg and upwards. It takes a full 90 seconds to boot up, crashed regularly and got so hot handheld operators would complain of facial burns. It was essentially a 2007 era computer trying to throw a 25MB/s (that's bytes not bits) video stream around and it was not happy about that at all. Camera Assistants like me used to carry icepacks and towels around for this camera.
Further more it recorded to HDDs so they had to be suspended in shockcases (like little rubberband saftey nets) on the camera, hope it dosen't get bumped while recording!

This is the EPIC. (picture is of the monochrome version but they all look the same) Released early 2011

She weighs about 1.5kg body only, I think the heaviest rig I've ever seen from one of these was something close to 10kg and that was us trying to be stupid. 5K video capture, with a max data rate of around 145MB/s, though no-one shoots at that compression level, you can make it do twice that if you like seeing SSDs catch on fire. But the point is, SOLID STATE MEDIA.

The NEW sensor for the Epic shoots 6K. Literally 19 megapixels, per frame at 24/25 frames per second.

So from facial burns and having to schedule "RED time" to 19 megapixels and built in night vision, kids these days don't know how lucky they are.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2014 02:30

XTimmy: Nov 28, 2007; I am Jacks self hatred

Today you could probably pick up a ONE for like $10k with a bunch of accessories. But they were both about the same at release. ~$50k. I'm in Australia so my pricing might be a bit off.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2014 03:27

XTimmy: Nov 28, 2007; I am Jacks self hatred

A friend of mine worked for a guy who made his wealth with the contemporary version of that: SMS pay-per-texts, those things that you'd text once and in doing so would subscribe you, charging you per text. My friend didn't work with or on that side at all, but the guy was filthy, millions of dollars, here let me spend four grand on a staff dinner for five people rich. This is in Perth, Australia too. He was apparently really pleasant, he just lacked that disconnect of all good businessmen where morality didn't go near his profits.

Apparently the name of the game was finding a way around regulations: New advertising rules say you need to state terms and conditions? Make the terms and conditions a two percent difference in colour from the background and put it in 2pt font. He had people dedicated to that one task.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2015 23:28

XTimmy: Nov 28, 2007; I am Jacks self hatred

Jerry Cotton posted:

However I only ever bought one Bluray movie because apparently they all look like poo poo due to film grain effect? (Black Swan looked like poo poo anyway. The DVD looked fine.)

Black Swan was shot primarily on Super16 film, which is much smaller than the conventional Super35, and therefore has larger grain. It was chosen for this reason. While it is true that there technically should be no difference in grain/noise between DVD and Blu-Ray or at least little should be introduced if the telecine is done well, the higher resolution of Blu-Ray may have made the grain more apparent, as a lower resolution would produce less detail.

To correct myself: There is no difference in grain size between S16 and S35 (with regards to the crystals in the emulsion) the grain in S16 appears larger as the frame size is smaller, so the grain crystals are larger relative to the frame.

XTimmy has a new favorite as of 07:29 on Feb 10, 2016

# ¿ Feb 10, 2016 07:04

XTimmy: Nov 28, 2007; I am Jacks self hatred

Humphreys posted:

They are also smaller so less chance of flexing causing platters to crash on heads.

It's my theory and I'm sticking to is (as someone whose very first steadicam was made using junk HDDs spun and full tilt at opposing angles)

Wait do you have pictures or footage of that? Sounds incredible!

# ¿ Feb 14, 2023 13:08

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 02:44

XTimmy: Nov 28, 2007; I am Jacks self hatred

Humphreys posted:

About 15 years ago I got a Steadicam Merlin and it was a fucken huge piece of poo poo. I used up building my own gyro stabilizsation system using big old heavy Hard Drives spun at full speed mounted in different axis'.
Similar to a Kenyon Gyro:

https://motion-impossible.com/product/6x6-kenyon-gyro/

Do you have any documentation on that build or similar? It'd be ace as both an ex camera op and current school teacher to use for science.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2023 08:59

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