Originally posted by: zombie84Why do you think a movie shot on 35mm looks much better on your television than an episode of Days of Our Lives?
...
In terms of Star Wars I don't know why you seem to think it would be different than another 35mm film like T2--because its older maybe? Star Wars is likely
more detailed since it was shot in anamorphic widescreen while T2 was shot spherical Super-35. 1. Days of our lives wasn't shot in DIGITAL.
Digital SD and analog SD use the same resolution, but it boils down to what the lens and image sensor can render--digital is not a all inherantly better because it is digital. My $200 Sony Handicam is a digital camera but compared to a $50,000 analog camera such as the Sony BVW-590...well, theres a reason they are priced like that.
2. It's debatable as to whether an anamorphic film image (which holds more resolution vertically then it does horizontally) really does yield a better result then non-anamorphic filming. T2 was shot in Super-35, which uses more horizontal resolution because the picture goes all the way to edge of the film - something that doesn't happen with other formats.
The argument has a bit of merit but at the end of the day anamorphic exposes the entire negative frame, while Super35 goes through an optical blowup and gets cropped. The difference between the two is not night and day but anamorphic does indeed yeild a better image simply because it uses 100% of the picture area while Super35 will use about 85% of the same area and then be optically enlarged.
The T2 film would today be 15 years old. The SW film next year will be 30 years old. I'm not aware of the T2 film being in such bad condition that parts of the original negatives on the master reel had to be replaced, like with Star Wars.
So are we talking about film specs here or Star Wars? The current state of the original negatives has no bearing on their original quality, or even their current quality. Star Wars, at the time it was shot, was equal or higher quality than T2, at the time that film was shot. And as far as the current state of their negatives i would say that any difference between them, if any exists, would be so slight that it would be inperceptable to the human eye, and besides that has no relevance to what we are talking about.
16MM is about DVD resolution, not 35MM. If you don't believe me, by an old movie shot on 16MM on DVD, and buy it on HD when released and compare the difference. Try Last House on the Left, for example - it's from the right time period, and has had similar problems to SW with the state of it's negatives. The DVD resolution brings out all the detail in the film. Converting 16MM to HD resolution is just like blowing it up to 35MM.
You may be misunderstanding something here--a thirty year-old ultra-low-budget film cannot be compared to a big-budget state-of-the-art HD production today because the nature of the beasts are different. Want a better experiment than that? Grab an Arri SR3, a can of Kodak 7246 250D stock and shot a few feet of film, then grab a Sony F-950 and an HDCAM tape a shoot a few feet of tape. When you do that you will see the actual quality inherant in each format.
Last House on the Left was shot in the early 70's on a shoe-string budget--the lighting is poor (and almost non-existant) thus affecting the exposure and image quality (hello mr.grain!) and 16mm stocks at the time was very, very poor compared to today, plus the actual source print used for telecine has been degraded and scatched, and likely it is some kind of duplicate print so there is also generational loss. So if you aquired a 16mm print of Star Wars, yes, it would probably yield image resolution somewhere bewteen SD and HD--but that is simply because the print is so
damaged.Earlier this year i shot some footage on an SR3 with a great set of Arri lenses and using super-fine-grain 50D stock--the result was eye-popping! The image so clear and detailed that I almost thought it was 35mm. This is wringing every bit of detail out of the format--and DVD resolution it is not. And no, i was not screening it on a television--this was the original negative projected in a screening room. 16mm, when shot properly like this and with quality equipment, surpasses HD resolution easily.
Jim Cameron seemed to think that the digital filming is achieving a level of detail equal to 65MM film.
Jim Cameron is not a cameraman. Ask the DP of his film what he thinks--he won't be saying HD=65mm, i guarantee you that.
If you want to prove that film is better then HD then I suggest when SW is re-re-re-re-re-re-released on home video in HD that you show me captures of the highest detail with no special effects in them from each movie, and compare them to the captures of the highest detail in Ep2 and 3. Cause I reckon you'll find the detail in Ep2 and 3 is more.
