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This topic comprises 6 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6
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Topic: The end of film.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 07-11-2015 12:11 PM
This topic is covered extensively on this thread.
The current state of play appears to be that a small quantity of 35mm prints of new, mainstream releases are still being struck for the remaining theaters that are still doing enough business to justify making prints for them, but for whatever reason have not converted to digital. In addition to this, small quantities of prints are still being made by archives and for one-off "film forever" type projects, e.g. Nolan's and Tarantino's.
To create release prints on film, you need five things.
1. The stock.
2. Printing and processing equipment.
3. Processing chemicals.
4. The manufacturers and service providers that produce 1 through 3 to remain in those businesses.
5. The knowledge and skills to produce 1 through 4.
If you really want to answer the "When will film be done?" question, the information needed to answer it includes what Kodak's plans are, what labs still exist and what their plans are, who makes the processing chemistry and what their plans are, and how reliable the supply of workers is who can do all this stuff (keep in mind that many of those who previously did it will have either retired or moved into other lines of work and not be interested in coming back).
To my knowledge, FotoKem is now the only remaining commercial lab in the US that is actively offering a full service for making 35mm and 70mm color release prints. There are one or two others that are processing camera negative rolls for subsequent scanning and digital post, one or two boutique labs (e.g. Cinema Arts and Colorlab) that may or may not still be offering release printing services, and some of the larger nonprofit archives (e.g. UCLA, NARA and the LoC) that have printing (color and b/w) and b/w only processing capability in house.
As Buck notes, it would appear that film is having a "long tail" of small print runs for the remaining mainstream theater holdouts. I'd guess that the next major change will happen when a critical mass of these theaters has either converted or gone out of business. The studios won't want to continue making prints forever (and therefore won't have undertaken to keep supplying them forever), and so the question is when the tipping point comes. When it does, the next question is if the remaining boutique business is enough to sustain FotoKem's release printing operation and Kodak's 2383 production line. If the answer is no in either case, then the end of color release printing will happen very quickly at that point.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 07-12-2015 10:16 AM
There is another market for film prints, "analog" film-out back-ups for movies that are otherwise 100% digital (shot with digital video cameras, post produced digitally and released only on DCP).
There is currently no type of digital media that is reliable enough to store digital data anywhere near as long as a good 35mm safety print.
If it hasn't happened already we will soon have cases of all-digital movies that have been lost, where the only surviving elements are consumer DVD and Blu-ray discs. A laser-recorded 35mm dupe might be a pretty good back-up.
I wonder just how much data a movie studio keeps in regard to a movie release. Any movie heavy with CGI effects and digital intermediate work will have numerous terabytes worth of data to store. Do they keep any of that after the movie is released or do they just dump it? Even if they do hold on to a lot of those work assets those assets may become "dead" after 10 or 20 years due to changes in computing platforms, operating systems, software applications that come and go and differences in how a new version of a software application opens files from projects made in previous versions years ago.
I watched Jurassic World a few days ago. One thing that bothered me was the T-Rex in the movie's climax. It looked noticeably different from the T-Rex from 22 years ago. And not in a good way either. The new T-Rex kind of looked more goofy than scary; it's eyes were more beady looking. It just wasn't modeled very well. Why couldn't they pull up the T-Rex models, texture maps, etc. from 1993 and use that? That was more awesome looking. The obvious answer is they probably didn't have any of that data anymore. And even if they did, it was based on dead/old software that ran on a dead UNIX operating system.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 07-12-2015 12:50 PM
quote: Bobby Henderson
There is another market for film prints, "analog" film-out back-ups for movies that are otherwise 100% digital (shot with digital video cameras, post produced digitally and released only on DCP).
That's a market for fine grain originating or intermediate stock, not release print stock. The emulsion on release print stock is a lot thicker than that on pre-print stock, plus there's no color mask, both of which cause image information loss in scanning. Sure, a release print can be scanned or photochemically duplicated, and if a release print is all that an archivist has, it'll be used as the source material for a restoration. But it's not what you'd archive from the start, given something better.
It's a been a while since I've really had my finger on the pulse of the archive world, but the last I did, most of the studios and big nonprofit archives were trying to preserve digital original and intermediate files, but were not putting much faith in their ability to do so long term. For a high profile feature film restoration with a decent budget, a filmout master negative or IP, and possibly even seps, would be made as well as the DCDM for long-term preservation.
The emulsion formulation and the processing chemistry are significantly different for release print stock to the ones used in original and intermediate stock, and so even if the studios and archives can continue to provide enough of a viable market to keep the latter in production, that doesn't necessary mean that release printing will remain viable, especially color release printing. I'd hazard a guess that the chemistry involved in b/w is so cheap and simple that even if Kodak pulls out of that market, as long as they can continue to sell the uncoated raw stock to a third-party manufacturer that puts the emulsion on it and sells the processing chemistry, it would be viable to carry this on as a boutique operation.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 07-14-2015 10:30 AM
And again, that's probably more an issue for color than b/w. Really, the gnarliest chemical used in b/w processing is bleach, and given that I can buy that to my heart's content at Stater Bros. and it's poured down drains in huge quantities, intentionally as a disinfectant, I'd like to see the EPA start to meow and hiss about it.
Color processing, however, really does use 1,1,1,trichloro-ethyl-dichloro-methyl-badshit (and, IIRC, mercury in at least one of the couplers) - in the consumer market, Kodak even discontinued the E-4 process and replaced it with E-6 because the processing chemistry was so darn poisonous.
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Monte L Fullmer
Film God
Posts: 8367
From: Nampa, Idaho, USA
Registered: Nov 2004
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posted 07-14-2015 04:46 PM
quote:
As I pretty much run the theater myself, the automation of the movie presentation and all other facets of the show (lights, curtains, sound ) have saved me untold journeys up and down the stairs. I no longer wonder if my projector will make it through a show.
I have to shake my head on this comment since I know that if a booth was correctly and properly maintained with religious maintenance that this comment would have never have been mentioned.
I can easily testify, that if a film booth was taken care of, it can run plenty of circles around digital operation, in which this owner here, it seems, hasn't experienced the horrors of what digital equipment can do when it goes bad, along with the cost involved, which film was pennies compared to what he has to face with digital.
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