pawel86ck said:
ZkinandBonez- my opinion about movies shot on digital was negative (for example star wars looked flat as you say), but right now digtal cameras are much better, and I started to love films shot on digital because picture quality is most of the time very consistent, and looks realistic and sharp at the same time. Of course movies shot on film also can look good, but very few film studios care to scan their movies with good results. Few days ago I saw Edward scissorhands, and that movie received 4K remaster, and picture quality was superb. But again, very few movies (shot on film) looks like that, most of the time we get fuzzy and overprocessed picture with lots od DNR in order to mask film grain.
4K BD format will come out soon, and so I hope that we will see some quality remasters in regards to movies shot on film, maybe we will even see official high budged star wars remaster for 4K BD.
Sure, there's nothing inherently wring with digital, and it has gotten extremely good lately. But I mostly have two big problems with it (or rather it's use);
1. Digital bias - This idea that it's the new upgrade to celluloid really has to stop. It's an ingenious re-approach to getting roughly the same end result, but it's not a replacement. I have no problems with movies being shot digitally, I just wish people would stop referring to the use of film as a "hipster" thing, or calling it "out of date." Digital is an awesome new invention, but it has been over-hyped beyond belief. And film is currently evolving just as much as digital is; it just so happens to have been around for a fair bit longer.
2. Hyper-reality - I really can't stand when a movie is shot at 8k, or 48 frames per second. It's so redundant. I remember reading somewhere that the human eye sees roughly the equivalent of 4k (in digital terms), and that 35 mm film cover roughly the same amount. So why go beyond 4k when making a movie? There's just something so ugly about these 8k movies. I remember seeing The Hobbit and thinking "holy crap, what's wrong with Ian Holm's face!" in the opening scene. There's nothing wrong with it, but in 8k I can see every wrinkle and pore on his face. Heck I wouldn't have been able to see this if I was standing inches from his face in real life.
The whole 48 fps thing bugs me as well. I know people keep saying that the eye sees faster than 24 fps, but I feel like these films kind of proves otherwise. Wave your hand in front of your face and it'll look blurred. Look at any movement in the Hobbit trilogy and everything looks like a high frame rate video-game.
Digital is fine and all, but I really see no purpose to film anything beyond 4k and 24 fps. The result is a bunch of hyper-realistic, video-game looking mess. It's just a gimmick. It sounds cool, it mirrors current iPhone and flat screen TV ads. "It used to be 4k, but now it's 8k!" It sounds cool, but it's completely redundant. It's just cheap marketing.
All in all though, I just wish it would even out a lot more so that the two mediums could co-exist with much more ease. Film has such a unique, and currently unsuccessfully emulated aesthetic, it would be such a loss to movie culture to lose it. Film also has a lot of financial benefits which no one is talking about either, which really bothers me and kind of confirms that there's a bit of a digital bias going on in the current film industry.
I'm currently in the process of applying to a film school, and I'm hoping to one day get to direct movies of my own, and I'd be really disappointed if I'd loose the possibility to shoot on film. It has such a natural and organic look to it, and has so many currently unsung benefits. And although I have no problem with other people shooting digitally, I have no interest in using it myself.
(End of rant.)