Originally posted by: Karyudo
That is the sort of sentiment from the "film is great" folks that is just as offensive as the "HD is better than film" line from the "HD rulez" people.

Truth is, it is almost certainly possible to replicate the look of your Super8 with digital video of some sort. Maybe not straight outta the camera, but with post-processing it's not such a big trick to match the look and feel of film -- especially Super8. Just add in a bunch of grain, lots of dust, and the occasional hair, and you've pretty much got it!

Thinking of either film or HD as "the best" and the other not worth bothering with is sort of like arguing whether a convertible or a pickup is a better vehicle: it really depends on what you're wanting to do with it.

Thats the sort of misconception that fuels the anti-film propaganda. Film is not just "grain." There is an innate quality to the way that the image is rendered that digital, by its very nature, cannot yet faithfully replicate.

Softeness. But this is different than just diffusion lens filters--the quality of the edges in film are soft and organic, while digital is sharp and clear. This is dampened with diffusion but it nowhere near eliminates it.

Lattitude. This is another huge one. The amount you can under and especially overexpose film is completely different than with digital. Put someone against a window--with digital that window will blow out and engulf the subject, while with film there will still be detail visible outside. This is an extreme example but it is even more important in more subtler instances--highlights and reflection burn out very easily with digital, producing an often ugly looking image and requiring great care and skill to bring the exposure levels together. Film reproduces the exposure lattitude of the human eye, which can see detail in both shadow and brightness.

Depth of Field. This is an issue for all but the most recent and state of the art HD cams like the Genesis. Film reproduces human vision by only rendering certain areas in focus. The depth of field of film is much, much shallower compared to video. Video will give you depth from here to the end of the earth, making everything seem crisp and in-focus, a very ugly and undesirably trait. This is often one of the more subtle things that most people don't realise about why film looks the way it does. In fact with low-end cameras with 1/3 and even 2/3" CCD chips, it is impossible to achieve and DOF without opening the iris all the way and using very long lenses, but this produces a different effect than simply having a natural depth of field.

Resolution. HD is roughly 1000 lines of resolution. 16mm is slightly more than this, 35mm is about 6000, and 65mm and IMAX formats are higher still. Even digitally scanning a piece of film only yields 4K (4000 lines) resolution. A photochemical duplicate of 35mm film is still many, many, many times higher quality than anything video can produce--there isnt even a contest here.

There are tons of more issues, like grain, light sensitivity, noise, gamma and color issues as well as the limitations of the hardware itself and the cost of digital production. The notion that HD somehow is cheaper is also inaccurate--you need more lights, better lighting and longer set-ups, more technicians and much, much more hardware and software--at the end of the day its not much cheaper than film, unless we are talking about low-budget (i.e. under $1 million) productions, which most people who argue in favor of HD dont watch anyway.

But to say you can re-create film in a computer is completely ignorant and is obviously made by someone who has no experiene with shooting motion picture film. One day, yes, it will likely be possible to achieve a look that is virtually indistinguishable from film--the rate things are going it will probably be twenty or thirty years or so, but even then people will still be shooting on film for various reasons