Re: Halide emulsion vs digital. Was RE: Warning of major NHS IT overspend

[Ian G Batten <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]

On Tue, 02 Nov 2004, Alex Tibbles wrote:

> > for some years.  Does
> > anyone still shoot movies on 35mm stock?
> 
> AFAIK yes. You'd still struggle (ie more expensive
> than film) to find hard drives that can muster 24 *
> ~10MB frames per second, continually (mildly
> compressed images of comparable quality to 35mm), so

Accepting your claim of 240MBytes/sec --- and I don't, because you're
assuming a sequence of lightly JPEG'd frames, whereas reality says you'd
be generating a stream of differences with occasional index frames,
MPEG-stylee, unless you're shooting something where each frame is
substantially different to the adjacent frames --- then you need to ask
yourself ``what's the longest shot I need to make''?  The longest single
shots I can think of, Figgis's `Timecode' aside --- which was shot on
progressive scan DV --- would be the opening sequences of Welles' `Touch
of Evil', Altman's `The Player' and De Palma's `Snake Eye', all of them
at about ten minutes.  Commodity disk arrays can sink of the order of
60MBytes/sec, so you have a deficit of 180MBytes/sec over ten minutes.
A hundred gigabytes of RAM is hardly an insurmountable barrier.

> for high-quality footage (eg. feature films) it is
> still extensively used.

Sure.  But PS DV is now used without being foregrounded as ``looking
like video'', as it was in `Timecode'.  For example, `Lovely and
Amazing' doesn't look obviously like video (although it doesn't look
like 35mm, I'll grant you, perhaps looking more like the Super16 Figgis
shot `Leaving Las Vegas' on).  I've just looked at a list of films shot
on HDTV video
(http://www.imdb.com/SearchTechnical?PCS:HDTV%09(1080p/24)) and I note
that Rodrigez's `Once Upon a Time in Mexico' is HDTV, and that certainly
doesn't look worse than 35mm.

And before anyone says ``ah, but on the big screen...'' I almost
exclusively watch films in cinemas.

> No comment on the quality of the film. ;)

I sat a couple of seats from Euan McGregor on a flight to LA during the
filming of Star Wars.  He's very short.

ian