I always hear people/actors/directors say, this tape or film is x meters long, it is this size, etc. do they really still use physical film? If so why aren’t they using terabytes of storage in a way more compact form?
so when they talk about length, they’re talking about the physical length of the film. 35mm film refers to the width. depending on the format being used- super35 for example- the length of a single frame or still on that film is about 18 mm.
as for why film- because digital recordings are actually pretty heavily compressed and once you lose that data, it can’t be recovered. the information stored on the film is actually much, much more densely encoded even if it’s analog. additionally, there’s some effects that simply can’t be perfectly replicated using digital, simply because it’s a fundamentally different medium.
You’ll have adherents to both camps, but ultimately it comes down to what produces a better film, and for box office productions, that’s still analog film.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Movies are absolutely still made and distributed on film, the physical dimensions of the film determine how much detail can be fit on it, a larger frame size means you use a bigger photosensitive area to capture the same picture, which effectively means you get better “resolution”, though on film the image is captured by photosensitive particles or “grains” on the film.
Film is also still used in some movie theaters as the format of choice for their projectors. Often movies are distributed in any format imaginable, both digital and film, regardless how the movie was recorded, though the amount of film projectors around is definitely falling. More often than not new installations are digital.
But film still has it’s place, it has some image quality benefits that digital system cannot yet beat. This has lead to fun stuff like movies distributed on film having digital audio tracks, encoded as complex microscopic qr-code style patterns right there on the film.
Film is still able to produce “higher resolution” and it of course reacts to light differently compared to a digital camera sensor. Because of that you get different results with digital vs film, not simply “better” or “worse”.