The final product will be delivered digitally for 99.9% of consumers. Why fight it? Why spend so much money, time, and effort, to work with inferior media? I dunno. I worked on analog tape machines (I was even a hold out, for a while, having a 1" 16 track machine, as big as a mini fridge, in my house for several years after digital multitracks were the smart choice), but there really is no good argument for it today.
There was a brief window where the best digital equipment was inferior to the very best analog equipment, but it didn't last long. Maybe five years. We may still be in that window for film when comparing 70mm film to the best digital equipment...but, on the low end? Hell no. This janky little camera from Kodak will be a joke compared to digital equipment in the same price range. And, the film/processing costs will be outrageous comparatively speaking, limiting ones options when shooting to a significant degree.
In short: This is just hipster bullshit. Just like analog audio is hipster bullshit.
This, and not superstition is the reason we still have tube amps, 24 fps polyester film ("celluloid"), vinyl records and the rest. That's not to say superstition is not rampant in the professional fields, We've all seen it: gold plated wires that deliver no measurable improvements, creators that refuse to touch the same application in an (much cheaper and faster) Windows PC as opposed to the "pro" Mac version, "magic" equipment brands that "all the pros use" and so on.
It's essentially a cargo-cult: we try to emulate successful creators and get fixated on the appearances. If we get success, often time by sheer luck, we attributed to brand X or Y and spread magic thinking to others.
I suspect its the same thing in cinematography.
Double blind tests do real havoc to all kinds of fetishism from wine-tasting to high end audio.
Mixing desks are said to colour the sound in certain ways, and in doing so, introduce harmonics and other sorts of imprecision that would be anathema to digital components, for which THD and SNR are paramount and utter precision is the ultimate goal. Then, in the end, people listen to the source material with their own ears, which have totally different frequency responses anyway and the eardrum is basically an analogue device that will color the sound in the end anyway :D
But then you start getting into things like guitar sounds. It's not that digital guitars sound better or worse - all you can really say is that they sound different. The real issue is that there's no objective sound that it should have - the electronics, whether digital or analogue, are effectively part of the instrument. And in the same way that analogue amps and effects colour the signal in specific ways that a guitarist or engineer might prefer, film imparts its own aesthetic qualities that a director or cinematographer might prefer.
I say yes, but I'm a software guy. And I've had this argument with a serious pro audio engineer who has a Pro Tools workstation built around a Neve 8816— even though every track is digital, and dozens of digital filters are applied, the tracks each pass through their own DAC connected to this old-school analogue summing mixer, and then are re-recorded on the other side. It seems totally foreign to me, but there are definitely recording professionals still spending a lot of money to set up and maintain these workflows.
Humans aren't designed for a 'virtual' existence - the technologies may be very useful and empowering in many ways, but they shouldn't take over life and reality.
I sometimes shoot medium format film and the artistic results are often better, albeit with lower fidelity. The reasons as far as I can tell are due to both technical constraints that force you to be more mindful of what you are doing, the unique way light is interpreted by film, and mechanically superior vintage optics.
Could I achieve the same results in post processing? Yeah, if I calibrate exactly to colour rendering of my sensor, figure out the correct white balance, colour space, and the necessary adjustments. Although, given that even DxO Optics with their FilmPack addon doesn't give me the exact results I get from say Fujichrome Provia 100F film, I doubt that it's that easy.
Telling everyone you're vegan is hipster bullshit. This is just an artistic tool.
Not sure I'd film on Super 8 though, it ends up being pretty costly and hassly, and you can get a pretty good match to those colours (if that's what you want) using flat or RAW profiles and film stock LUTs on digital cinema cameras
I feel like there's a difference between working with limited means as a tool for creativity, and something like this.
But, I guess, more importantly: I hate the delusion, under which so many people operate, that analog provides higher quality than digital. If your argument is that this is a great idea because it kinda sucks and working with kinda sucky equipment makes you feel more creative, then I can't argue (again, I enjoy writing music on a Gameboy, which is truly sucky), but the moment you make the argument that it looks/sounds better than modern digital equipment is the moment I dismiss the opinion as hopeless superstition.
However, the end result may or may not be better/higher quality. Transportation is moving from mostly hydraulic/mechanical to electrical/computer controlled, Comms (analog to digital), Food (local whole foods to distant mega farms and processing), etc.
Old technology is far less efficient, but can be much more robust. For example, knowledge recorded in a book cannot become corrupt due to a failing hard disk controller, or lost due to electrical surge from a near by lightning strike. And, one can still send a message over radio waves using Morse Code to distant places even when cell phones fail due to network outages or cyber attacks.
So while we are smaller, faster, cheaper and much more accessible today (in almost every way... thanks to technology), our systems are much more fragile and dependent on other components. In many cases, this is why older technology is used.
Look, I own multiple all-tube amps for my guitars. I understand the appeal (though it's much more complicated than "tube is better"). I even understand the science for why tubes sound "good" and why solid state amps sound "less good". (To be clear: It is not merely the presence of tubes.)
There are so many confounding variables, however, that people end up believing that a shitty so-called "tube" preamp that costs $20 to manufacturer and runs on a 5V power supply is somehow superior to a high quality solid state preamp just because it has a tube. The most sought after old Neve consoles and channel strips that people love so much? Solid state; not a tube in sight. They're loved because they were extremely high quality, and have a subtle distinctive sound that is what our favorite records sound like (at least, our favorite records from a certain era of well-funded studio dilettantes).
And, while we're at it, the best way to capture that particular color is digital. The difference between Dark Side of the Moon and a digital recording today that doesn't sound as amazing as Dark Side of the Moon has less than nothing to do with DSOTM being recorded analog vs. digital and everything to do with the kind of budget, time, and skill Pink Floyd had in the studio.
I'm not arguing there isn't a difference in quality to be discerned between different pieces of equipment. There absolutely is. But, Super 8 is not and never was, a high quality way to get images onto a screen. It was a compromise based almost entirely on cost. It just so happened that for many years it was a compromise that was necessary for filmmakers on a tight budget...video took a long while to catch up, and it probably took the switch to extremely high definition digital video to really put the nail into film's coffin.
Slide film was always a challenge to expose just right, its dynamic range is pretty narrow compared to negative film. Its what you needed to use for movies though.
I can't see this new revival being more than a niche market. Sending film away and waiting a week might not cut it in todays market when phones shoot hd and can edit.
There are a bunch of these. The "imposible project" [1] bringing back polariod film being another. Polariod though has the advantage of being instant.
Kodak makes movie film only because the major studios, at the urging of some older directors, pay them to do so.[1] (Pro movie film sales were down 96%) The studios have to pay for a certain amount of film whether they take it or not. This leaves Kodak with a paid-for, underutilized film production plant and film development facilities. That's probably why Kodak is doing this.
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/kodak-to-continue-making-movie-f...
With a video assist, that light is simply captured by a sensor (yes, exactly like in a video camera) and presented to the user on a video display. Some use a beam-splitter to deliver the analog view to the cameraperson while still sending some photons to the video tap.
Note, in both cases, the light that hits the film itself is never visible to anyone until after development -- the camera crew gets to see the photons that are rejected, which can do weird things when you go to unusual shutter speeds (the image gets darker in the viewfinder as you increase the exposure)... though I believe there were some 16mm Bolexes that simply used a beamsplitter, so the viewer saw the same scene as the film stock -- but don't quote me on that.
I'd guess it's cheaper/easier than using glass especially to support swivel. Unclear if there's a prism in the light path though or if they're getting the image to the sensor in some other way. It would seem to take away from the whole retro vibe though.
(Plus it has SD, USB, etc... but there's no documentation as to what they do. Maybe you can store lo-fi digital versions for rushes and offline pre-editing.)
1. DSLR users are not.
2. The whole point of this exercise is to make a product for people who want a retro (and largely impractical) film movie camera. What people are used to is [EDIT: 100% digital cameras].
Currently, there are small digital cameras like the Blackmagic Pocket Camera (BMPCC) camera, under $1k, which have a capability to shoot images that are so similar to 16mm film that the average consumer couldn't tell.
The bottom-line today: if you want the 8mm vibe, you oversample your image when shooting (16mm or 35mm digital) and then degrade the image in post-production to 8mm.
I suppose one argument might be that the additional hurdles of the traditional workflow can be a constraint that boosts creativity.
Edited and color graded on digital intermediate
Other people are going digital, but Quentin Tarantino seems to be busy taking film to the next level instead :)
But I suppose it could also have been shot digitally and nobody would have spotted the difference. Maybe.
That said, you can't get the entire Super8 look with digital filters. There are optical properties (have to use the same lens and sensor size), and the way it handles highlights vs lowlights is different than digital sensors. (The 'rolloff' in the highlights, rather than clipping at saturation, is very desirable.)
And it's true that film isn't entirely dead in Hollywood. Quentin Tarantino shot his most recent film on 70mm stock. But that's nearly 100x the resolution of 8mm film, so they're not really comparable. OTOH, I recently saw Wes Anderson's "Moonrise Kingdom," which was shot on 16mm reversal (color, not negative) film stock for the look.
In each case, the choice of film stock definitely affected the look of the film. It also affected the act of shooting the film; even if you can mimic a filmic look digitally (through digital acquisition and post processing), shooting digitally is very different than shooting film. I happen to prefer digital, but courses for horses.
But yeah, for consumers, it's pretty much a hipster affectation. Good for Kodak, though! Also of note in the annals of hipster retro photography is 'The Impossible Project,' which revived Polaroid film:
https://www.the-impossible-project.com/
Also, 'lomography.'
The problem with 9.5mm is that when the projector jams, which happens rather frequently, it tears the film apart right through the middle or, in milder cases, enlarges each hole between frames. It's horrible and nerve-wracking.
8mm projectors don't jam as frequently, and when they do, each frame is usually somewhat salvageable because only the track of holes on the side gets damaged.
Anyway, as most comments already said, there is no point in shooting analog in 2015 if you're not Tarantino (and even if you are).
That's the advantage digital has - you don't mail the pictures anywhere. Nobody can lose them for you. (Yeah, you can still lose them yourself...)
This is how wedding photographers who shot on film avoided getting sued into oblivion by angry brides (and yes, there are many, many photographers who have been sued into oblivion by angry brides, contract or no contract).
:-<
Amateurs for home movies? Nope, digital will always be cheaper, and faster/more convenient to work with to boot.
Aspiring filmmakers? Nope, if you want to shoot on film professionally you'll want at least 16mm to avoid the magnification/graininess Super 8 brings with it.
People nostalgic for the blurriness of old home movies? Do any of these actually exist?
But how else will your viewers know that you were hip enough to shoot on film?
I mean. "There are some moments that digital just can't deliver, because it doesn't have the incomparable depth and beauty of film." Um, we're not talking 70mm Panavision here. We're talking Super 8. Has whoever wrote this ever seen a Super 8 movie?
Sure you could shoot a perfectly in-focus colour corrected image and filter it, but there's something fun about not knowing the result instantly. It's the reverse of when digital cameras came out, then instant was exciting.
Let me guess, you have never ever used a super 8 camera. I have, and FUN is the last word that will come to my mind about those machines.
Using a new cartridge and not being sure about light exposure in complex scenes, only knowing about it after having sent the cartridge away and returned. Idem with motion response, color and lots of little things that now we have feedback about in seconds, but at the time, took weeks.
I mean, after all the pain now you need to mount the projector, switch light off only to discover that your film is ruined, because you did not take the right decisions or just the developer lab did it wrong. Frustration, anger, disappointment, anything but fun.
This happened several times to my father. It was an expensive process to learn, only fun if you did not pay for it.
It was a pain in the ass.
The skateboard scenes in the movie were shot on Super 8, as inspired by the common style for home made skate films.
Here's a short clip: https://vimeo.com/7170912
Look at all the people buying vinyl records and ask yourself that again.
From the wikipedia entry, "From the $90 range in 1997, Kodak shares closed at 76 cents on January 3, 2012".
[1] Anecdote.
Part of the problem is that there simply isn't as much money to be made in digital as there was in analog. A digital camera doesn't need film, but film (and film processing) accounted for much of Kodak's profits for many years. So it's not just a simple matter of "make digital cameras instead of analog ones".
Also, remember that Kodak was very big into digital imaging, and was considered the leader in the field of high-end digital cameras. That is, until the Nikon D1 came along around 1999. Even then, Kodak sensors were common among the next few generations of DSLRs.
I grew up with Kodak products -- had a darkroom as a kid and every chemical, every paper, every film was made by Big Yellow. My camera was a Kodak Instamatic.
It is sad to see these organizations evaporate from disruption. Progress and all that, but still sad.
Isn't this the mindset that drove them into the ground in the first place?
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2050601.m5...
Why would people pay that kind of money for this?? Do they need it to play their old disks? Wouldn't it be cheaper to have them transferred to another media by a lab?
He even bought a multitrack minidisc desk. Apparently it was going cheap. I understand why - with 4 tracks of audio, it'll record 15 minutes. No good for long jams.
I do not understand the fascination with it at all. Even an old Tascam portastudio or the modern equivalents that record to SD card would be better.
I'm surprised it's still popular enough however, I'd have thought modern flash based platforms would have killed minidisc by now. It was different back in the early 2000s.
As an amateur photographer I tend to see film users a lot. I shoot digital but I'd like to shoot film too. The reality is that there are some artifacts that film gives you that you can't replace in digital yet. In art, if the effect or feeling that you want is given on a certain tool then that is the tool for the job. In photography, if this is film, then film is the right tool for the job. There's also the large factor of workflows. People get used to a workflow that influences their style and it's important to them to maintain that workflow. What is measurably better in technical terms is not important.
What I see happening is that market trends like this will push digital forces to perfectly re-creating classic films. The difficulty with re-creating film with filters or presets is it's notoriously hard to do and usually not perfect. Fujifilm is a perfect example of this with their film simulation modes on their X-Mount camera lineup. I suspect that the film trend is going to push photography giants into creating more accurate emulation of film baked into their workflows and devices rather than the current trend of generic hipster Instagram filters or playing in Lightroom for a few hours (and still not getting the effect you want).
Whether you're a professional or a 16y/o girl with a K1000 and mix-matched 80's leg warmers film still does have a place amongst people and this will in turn affect the development of digital processing.
Once upon a time the only way to get some text printed was to hire somebody to arrange lead type letter-by-letter and print your thing on a six-ton iron press. This required significant amounts of training to do well and still resulted in artifacts of the process, in this case slight debossing of the paper as the fibers were crushed between the press and the type.
Then came photolithography and xerox and laser printers, and nobody saw the point of all that labor and machinery.
Then came inkjet printers and Microsoft Word and email, and suddenly a textual message doesn't seem to have the gravitas or expertise that once did. At which point, having something letterpress printed is very noticeable and neat, even if you can't put your finger on what's different, and a person who does letterpress printing has necessarily invested enough time to correlate with passion and a keen typographic eye.
Once the old thing takes off, people really want those artifacts of the antique process, to the point where contemporary letterpress printers are goaded into ramping up the pressure on the press until the paper is crushed to oblivion and your print is ridiculously three-dimensional, more so than would have been acceptable back in old times.
Similarly, people who are shooting on Super 8 these days are really looking for grain and weird color temperature. And it also explains why, like photolithography, 16mm or analog video are neither distinctive nor expensive enough to be as interesting.
Digital music can't simulate having a physical album cover, an e-ink screen won't ever be similar to a printed page, no music encoding will physically prevent loudness-wars mastering the way a vinyl record will (the needle would just jump out of the track), no printer will ever be able to fool someone into thinking a document was written on a typewriter.
You can tell the difference if a piece of mail was signed by a human with a pen instead of a printer, and it means something.
The limitations of analog media are very often their strengths, especially in corner cases. The limitations of a medium are often a significant driver for the creative process and losing them or approximating them makes lots of things worse.
Normally people (morally) opposed to analog media spout just as much pseudoscience in defense of their position. (normally people arguing about such things on the Internet are idiots anyway)
One of the most characteristic features of Super 8, at least to me, is the complete lack of audio (at least, on most Super 8 works). So if you went to a theater to see something on Super 8 there might be a live band playing the soundtrack.
I wonder if Kodak is doing something like putting audio on the SD card and then storing digital synchronization marks on the film somehow.
Edit: To be clear, I know you can already put audio on Super 8. It's just that most Super 8 films I've seen in the theater have had no audio or live audio. And yes, I looked at the specs. The specs don't mention anything at all, but the product rendering appears to show jacks for audio and data, and I'm wondering how that's incorporated.
I suspect this would allow you to record digitally at the same time you were exposing film perhaps, or even use it as a digital video camera without film.
I'm excited, I want one.
At 24 fps, with each frame being 4.01mm tall, means 96.24mm (3.7 inches) per second of magnetic stripes (there are two, presumably for left + right channels). This is roughly twice the speed that cassette tapes used (1-7/8" per second). Their announcement doesn't say if there's any audio compression/encoding used, but I used to use a dbx compression/expansion box to lower the noise floor on cassettes with very good results.
One of the nice things about Super 8 was how easy it was to edit. You used a cutting station that had pegs to ensure your cuts were between frames, and glued them together after scraping off a little bit of emulsion. Adding audio complicates matters, as the audio track is offset from the matching frame by about 3 inches.
I know some 8mm cameras can take standard 16mm film that's been cut in half.
http://www.kodak.com/ek/US/en/consumer/Product/Product_Specs...
"FILM GAUGE: SUPER 8 ( EXTENDED MAX-8 GATE )
FILM LOAD: KODAK CARTRIDGES WITH 50 FT (15 M)
SPEED: VARIABLE SPEEDS (9, 12, 18, 24, 25 FPS) ALL WITH CRYSTAL SYNC
LENS MOUNT: C-MOUNT
FOCAL LENGTH: FIXED / 6 MM, 1:1.2 – RICOH LENS (OPTIONAL ZOOM 6-48 MM LENS )
FOCUS / APERTURE: MANUAL FOCUS & IRIS"
etc.
http://priceonomics.com/why-every-movie-looks-sort-of-orange...
it's teleported to some hipster cloud storage now.
[Edit: And actually I don't believe Kodak makes a reversal Super 8 film any longer, although others do.]
Personally though, I would rather have something similar to analog that doesn't require the cost and time/complexity. I wonder how many folks will buy these to go with them: http://nofilmschool.com/2013/12/nolab-digital-super-8-cartri...
Which I actually sort of appreciate (in my less cynical moments). Though, if it's just that they've never shot anything on film, I'm sure they have friends or co-workers with old still cameras gathering dust. Borrow one, shoot a roll of film, send it off to be processed, and the urge will probably have gone away by the time you get your prints back. You can get those prints scanned too if you like.
An old boss of mine used to say something similar: "That's a cure for no known disease".
If you like in hollywood tho, it's probably cheaper to rent a 4k camera for your next blockbuster.
Photographs belong to the person who pressed the shutter release. The actual format or medium of the photograph (digital, print, negative, whatever) is irrelevant to the copyright, which is created during the act of taking a photograph.
So remember: Next time you hand someone your camera to take a picture of you, that person effectively owns the copyright on that image. Including a monkey[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie#Copyright_issues
PS - Although I'm sure you have to give them a license to your copyrighted photo so that they can display it back to you on their website. It is standard industry practice. Doesn't mean they have redistribution rights or own the copyright however.
"Instagram does not claim ownership of any Content that you post on or through the Service. Instead, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service, subject to the Service's Privacy Policy..."
AWS: "We do not access or use customer content for any purpose other than as legally required and for maintaining the AWS services and providing them to our customers and their end users. We never use customer content or derive information from it for marketing or advertising."
SoftLayer: "As a Processor, SoftLayer will not access the Customer Content for any purpose beyond providing You with support as described above, and will not disclose it to any person or entity."
I can still tell the difference between film and digital. It could be I'm too used to film? It could be I'm partially color blind? Whatever the reason, I like the look of film.
Recent example. I watched Dumb and Dumber Too. Yes--it was bad on a lot of levels, but what really suprised me was the look of the movie. It just looked cheap. Say what you want about a Farelly brothers movie, they always looked great. I then looked into it, and one of the Farelly brothers was given the choice between film, or digital. The producers brought him to a digital lab, where the techs applied the film "look" program to make the digital look like film. Farley couldn't tell the difference. I sure could? They went with digital. If this is their last digital film--they will have settled to controversy--in my little world. I just have a feeling their next movie will be in film?
As to digital photography. When digital finally hit the practical point, I went digital. For myself, it was the Canon 20D, I bought the camera, and three very expensive lenses. Yes, it took great pictures. Great pictures to what? I wasen't a photographer before digital? I didn't know better. Actually, as a kid, I was a photographer. I used a Pentax K1000, and a Canon 350D. A few years ago I found a stash of negatives. I had them blown up, and asked a couple of family members to pick the best pictures. These were nature pictures. All picked my kid pictures. Maybe I was a better photographer as a kid? I don't know.
If I was going to "gear" up again, I think I would stay with film. Not because I think it's that much better, but because the used lenses, are so cheap right now. A used Canon F 2.8 300mm lens is under a grand used. The digital Canon 2.8 300mm lens is a minimum of $3500 used(usually beat up.).
To anyone who honestly wants to get into photography, but funds are tight, look into film. Hell, I wouldn't even bother with color. I would set up a bathroom darkroom, and set up shop.
I guess it's easy for me to throw around this advice. I'm not going back to chemicals in the sink. I have bought the digital equipment, and probally won't go back to film. Oh yea, whatever you do stick with prime lenses. That was my biggest mistake. Buy whatever camera bare. Buy the lenses(glass--if you want to sound like one of those guys--I never wanted to be in that club.) Buy your primes separately. Try to keep your digital camera not in [fully auto] all the time, but then again, I sometimes wonder why.
My ex-girlfriend is a professional photographer--takes studio pictures of old stuff. She loved to brag about it. "I'm a professional Photographer. Did you know, I take pictures for a living?" Yes--it was worse than going to the dentist, but maybe I was being too critical? She has never been in manual mode, TV, or even AV mode. She doesn't know about F stops, or exposure times. I think she got lucky though. I told her the pictures were Spectacular, but I really though they were too Photoshopped. As to her job--well it's a lot about who you know at big corporations.
Good luck--
I got one of those as a gift, probably so I'd stop borrowing his Spotmatic (the K1000 was basically an 80s version of the 60s Spotmatic, with an annoyingly different lens mount).
I think a large aspect of picture quality when we were kids, is rich grandpa can give you triple digits worth of camera at Christmas, but I paid my own way on consumables and I had to push a broom at the food store for something like ten minutes per pix once all the costs of analog were accounted for. Large sheets of photo paper for enlargements were not cheap, either.
Something often overlooked is the analog era was extremely expensive.
