Question! What’s the last film you saw? In all likelihood it wasn’t a film – mainly directors are shooting digital video now. Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg are renowned filmmakers who still opt to shoot on film. Bay says: “I’m old school because I like to shoot on film.” Thoughs they are the exception as digital video cameras today are impressive enough you can’t see the difference between film vs video.
It was George Lucas who originally utilized a Panavision-modified Sony HDW-900 camera to shoot his second “Star Wars” prequel. Now most other huge filmmakers are following suit. Sony’s CineAlta F23 and HDC-F950 cameras were brought into play by Michael Mann when he shot “Public Enemies”. The movie “2012” was shot with the use of Panavision’s Genesis high-definition camera by Roland Emmerich with which he told DGA Quarterly: “I don’t think I will ever go back.” But you will must pay much. The Genesis isn’t for sale; it is for lease at a rate of $3,500 a day to $45,000 weekly. Nevertheless, Emmerich goes for it: “Compositing is so much better in digital – there’s much more information to work with.”
Director Adam Shankman was nervious about moving to digital when he attempted it on “Bedtime Stories”: “I was worried about the depth of field, and for the first two weeks, I really had my eye on it because I was concerned after I saw the testing of daytime exteriors.” But he states it all resulted being fine.
The Red One is another cost-effective but similarly popular digital camera. Most film lenses are compatible with this camera, hence, you can make use of the older lenses you have been using in the past. David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh have used it on their recent films. For the television series, “Leverage”, Producer Dean Devlin is making use of this camera: “For me, those easy-to-change hard drives are a big deal when it comes to choose film vs video. They store a whole lot of content, and we can simply take them and directly put them into our system and get right to work. That transcends everything – skipping the transfer of dailies is a game-changer.”
Not all cameramen are convinced. Michael Hofstein, a cinematographer, has written: “Film images have a depth that hardly any other medium can match at this time… Isolating an image with a long telephoto lens is sort of tricky and relatively non-existent when utilizing a digital camera due to physics of the current professional 2/3-inch digital chip versus a 35mm film frame. 35mm film encompasses a larger latitude.”
But Emmerich, Fincher and Devlin all think the technology has advanced enough now that digital is the approach to take.However, Emmerich, Fincher and Devlin are in agreement that technology has advanced adequately to go with digital. And there are actually some things that appear better in digital. A product manager for the Phantom HD line by the name of Moe Shore states, “A simple, mundane thing like pouring water into a glass takes on an extraordinary beauty if you slow it down to 1,000 frames a second. To do this with film would require a huge camera and value.” So it looks like it’s bye-bye film stock and hello hard drives for film vs videomovie-making in the new era.