Movie Studios Forcing Hollywood to Abandon 35mm Film - Vast & Troubling Consequences

[Hardrock69]

http://www.laweekly.com/2012-04-12/film-tv/35-mm-film-digital-Hollywood/

Not posting the text, because there is 6 pages of it. Basically the studios can spend several million dollars distributing 35mm prints of films to movie theaters nationwide, or they can do it digitally and spend $150.

So the studios are trying to move to all digital....no more shooting FILM.

Read the details for yourself. Much like in the music world, it is harder and more expensive to get analog tape for recording these days.

[Nitro Express]

Gil Amelio was unlike any Apple CEO since the days of Mike Scott, a former Fairchild executive. He was from National Semiconductor, an outside company where he made a name for himself as a turnaround artist.

As CEO of National Semiconductor, Amelio transformed the company from an unreliable third tier chip producer into a respected front runner in the industry. Before he entered management, he was a successful researcher with a PhD. Along with a coworker, he invented the CCD, the basis of all scanners, camcorders, and digital cameras.

My brother used to work for Dr. Amelio when he ran National Semiconductor. I was visiting my brother in the bay area and Amelio wanted to know if we wanted to spend the weekend up at his place in Lake Tahoe. Sure. I got to see how the other half lived. We flew to Tahoe in Amelio's private plane which he flew himself and stayed at his wonderful house right on the lake. He had lot's of toys up there. We had a good time.

He's a nice guy and I talk to him every once and a while and he was one of the guys who helped develop some of the technology that makes digital photography and video possible. He said he was working on a venture with Steve Wozniak to produce high definition photo cells that would be used in digital motion picture cameras. Dr. Amelio always had an interest in motion pictures and is real familiar actually with the panavision cameras and lighting concerns. I took film production classes in college so I know a little about lighting and cameras and we had a pretty good discussion on it.

Digital has pretty much replaced film in the consumer market. If it can match the resolution and quality of 35mm film in the movie industry it's going to take over that as well. The cost savings would be substantial.

[twonabomber]

ten years ago at Star Wars Celebration II, producer Rick McCallum asked attendees to lobby theater owners to go digital. not because of the cost savings in distribution, but because the picture was so much better. Lucasfilm brought a teaser clip of Attack Of The Clones, and a digital projector to show it on. this projector was pretty big. my mom and grandmother had both managed movie theaters, i had been up in the projection rooms many times and those projectors weren't as big as this one. even the modern "platter" machines were smaller. i also remember the digital projector throwing off a lot of heat, we were sitting near it and it got noticeably warmer in the room when they ran the clip.

we'd show up Friday at the theater and pass cans of film ready to go back to the local studio offices. the movie's run would end Thursday and the reels would go back in the cans, ready for pickup. i can't remember if they went out UPS or a local rep came to get them, i'll have to see if mom remembers.

you know there will be the holdouts who don't want to shoot in digital. they could always shoot on film and convert to digital for the distribution.

[Angel]

We shot "Crime Stories" using all digital.

[ashstralia]

progress, dudes. there are so many ways in which 001001000111000 has improved our lives.

astrophotography springs to mind; an amateur on a $10k budget can now produce science which even 20 years ago would have been only the domain of large pro set-ups (google 'anthony wesley', if you're interested)...

i really can't see how film could be better than HD digital. (pun intended )

[BITEYOASS]

Frankly I'm glad that film is gone! You ever seen the process of editing film? Man that is a TOTAL pain in the ass! Not to mention all the volatile chemicals you have to use in order to develop photographs back in the day.

So good riddance and I'm moving the fuck on!

[Nitro Express]

Frankly I'm glad that film is gone! You ever seen the process of editing film? Man that is a TOTAL pain in the ass! Not to mention all the volatile chemicals you have to use in order to develop photographs back in the day.

So good riddance and I'm moving the fuck on!

You got that right. I did all my projects in college with film. Had to buy it and had to edit and splice it. Nothing like reserving the equipment to do a shoot and only having it available that day and hoping to hell the weather is going to be good. Your grade could be screwed by bad weather but that was the way it was.

My wife is friends with the wife of the brother of the guy who played Napoleon Dynamite. We had them over for dinner last year and he was saying they shot that low budget movie on film and they just about ran out of film doing the movie. His biggest fear was running out of film and not being able to finish it. The low cost of digital will be a godsend to independent film producers on very tight budgets.

[Nitro Express]

Not to mention all the volatile chemicals you have to use in order to develop photographs back in the day.

I kind of miss the old darkrooms. Our high school had a nice big one and even had a revolving door so you could go in and out without letting any light in. I was on yearbook staff and was one of the photographers. We bought our film in bulk and then loaded the 35mm canisters ourselves. I was real good at developing film and pictures since we had a dark room at home and my dad was an excellent photographer and worked as a dark room tech in his younger years. Anyways I was working late after school with a girl on the staff developing pictures and one thing led to another and we ended up fucking in the darkroom, with the red light on. The smell of the chemicals didn't stop us. LOL! I later found out one of my friends took a girl back in there and banged her. I think that darkroom must have seen a lot of action. It was tucked back behind the librarian desk in the library and I don't think most students even knew it was there.

[Hardrock69]

My dad had his own darkroom in the 60s, and that was where I learned to develop film, enlarge photos, etc.

Thanks to him, I still have a rather large stack of 8 X 10s of images he took of our entire family when I was a kid.

TAKE PHOTOS PEOPLE. They are not just images. They are MEMORIES.

I am almost done editing this U2 concert DVD I have been working on. Only 3 songs to go. I could never have done this if it were not for the digital technology available these days.

I bet overall I have at least 50-70 camera angles over the course of the concert. You could not even get that with a pro camera crew.

Due to the cell phone revolution though.....I have several hundred video clips from the show, and it has been enough to give me blanket coverage.

Eventually the quality will be good enough to replace film. It is not so much quality, as the look of it. Film has a sort of natural color saturation that you can't quite get with video unless you spend way more than film.

It is gonna suck when Technicolor and Panavision go out of business.

Hell, these days if you try to take film to the drugstore to get it developed...they send it out. To A SINGLE PROCESSING LAB IN LAWRENCE, KS!!!!!

That is it! ONE LAB handling the comsumer film processing for the entire country now.

Crazy.

What is amazing is that as the technology gets better, the rate of improvement of the technology increases drastically. I mean, in the 90s you started seeing digital point and shoot cameras.

Now the camera manufacturers are beginning to stop production of them already, as smart phones can take HD images AND video that are easily as good as the consumer point and click models.

Where the fuck are we going to be in 2020 in terms of video, etc.?

[ashstralia]

Where the fuck are we going to be in 2020 in terms of video, etc.?

clearer, bigger, and cheaper if history is anything to go by.

[BITEYOASS]

Due to the cell phone revolution though.....I have several hundred video clips from the show, and it has been enough to give me blanket coverage.

Eventually the quality will be good enough to replace film. It is not so much quality, as the look of it. Film has a sort of natural color saturation that you can't quite get with video unless you spend way more than film.

It is gonna suck when Technicolor and Panavision go out of business.

Hell, these days if you try to take film to the drugstore to get it developed...they send it out. To A SINGLE PROCESSING LAB IN LAWRENCE, KS!!!!!

That is it! ONE LAB handling the comsumer film processing for the entire country now.

Crazy.

What is amazing is that as the technology gets better, the rate of improvement of the technology increases drastically. I mean, in the 90s you started seeing digital point and shoot cameras.

Now the camera manufacturers are beginning to stop production of them already, as smart phones can take HD images AND video that are easily as good as the consumer point and click models.

Where the fuck are we going to be in 2020 in terms of video, etc.?

I doubt that cameras are going away. Especially since you can't optically zoom at all on a cell phone. In addition, you can't attach a zoom lens to a cell phone either.

[Angel]

Our GUNDERSON series never could have happened if we'd had to use film.

I LOVE digital, it's created so many more opportunities!!

[BITEYOASS]

I'd like to see someone film a nature documentary with a cell phone. They would be dead in a minute.

[Hardrock69]

I never said cameras are going away. I said point and pray cameras are going away.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/17/iphone-4-camera/?utm_source=pulsenews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

There will always be prosumer and pro-grade DSLRs. And even 35mm film cameras still have users. I know because I am selling off some of my Dad's camera gear, and there ARE buyers.

But the smartphones are now taking more digital photos than point and shoot cameras.

Only a matter of time.

[Hardrock69]

Smartphones killing point and shoots:

http://gigaom.com/2011/12/22/smartphones-killing-point-and-shoots-now-take-almost-13-of-photos/