3/18/24
Newsletter #573
The Crack of Dawn
Being old, I spent three-quarters of my life shooting actual film: first Super-8, then 16mm, then 35mm. During the course of those years video developed, then slowly worked its way into the professional filmmaking world.
The first video any of us ever saw was in the early 1970s, it was black and white, it ran on reels – there was no kind of cassette or cartridge – and the reels on the machine moved up and down (as had wire recorders before them). The rich kid in the neighborhood, Jim Rose, got one and we shot a little movie one day. When we were done shooting and looked at our footage it struck me – we have no way to edit this. Editing video, we would come to learn later, isn’t all that easy.
The first professional video of any kind that I ever saw was one night with Bruce Campbell at Producer’s Color Service – one of three film labs in Detroit at that time (like 1980) – and we were working as production assistants on a commercial. We were bringing exposed film to the lab to be processed. One of the lab guys took us in back and let us see a big, hulking two-inch video machine (which were only in use for a short time) that was the size of a refrigerator. He showed us sections of what would later become Elephant Parts, a compilation of the earliest music videos ever. It was produced by Mike Nesmith from the Monkees, and directed by William Dear, who is from Detroit and Bruce and I both worked with him on commercials a number of times. I thought it looked really good.
Two-inch video was quickly replaced by one-inch video as the professional standard. Then they came out with three-quarter-inch video, which was thankfully housed in a big cassette, the size of a 300-page hardcover book, and officially known as “U-Matic,” though people rarely used the term. Then for far too long, if you shot something like a local, low-budget commercial on three-quarter-inch video, you’d then edit it “offline” on three-quarter-inch video (which was a funky system), then recut it “online” on one-inch-video to get it to look good enough to meet “broadcast standards.”
Three-quarter-inch video gave way to half-inch video, which was known as VHS and Betamax. Though barely a dim memory now, this era of half-inch video lasted for 20 years.
This finally leads to digital. First there were laser disks, which were too big and clunky and didn’t catch on, then came DVDs. A standardized digital format that people accepted, could afford, and eagerly bought. As all of our own movies came out on DVD, one after another, Bruce and I both thought, and said aloud to one another, “Finally our movies are in a safe, digital form where we don’t have to worry about disintegrating magnetic tape or film stock.” Although we didn’t say it, what we meant was that the movies were “archived.”
OK, here’s my point. Unlike what Bruce and I and many others thought, it turns out that digital technology is not a particularly “archivable” format, whereas film, stored properly, is far superior (magnetic tape is crap). The reason is obvious.
Digital formats keep changing – High Definition, 2K, 4K, 8K – and you can’t upgrade digital. If you went and paid a lot of money for a top-notch 2K transfer of your movie, it will not upgrade to 4K. And 4K won’t go to 8K, etc. A 2K transfer from film to digital picks up X amount of digital pixels and lines, and you can’t increase that number, because it’s a number, it’s not a picture.
The photographic film image that you start with – if you shot on film – has an infinite number of grain particles. A 2K transfer will pick up this many of the particles; a 4K transfer will capture twice as many, on and on, but the digital image will never pick up everything.
Personally, I think 4K looks great. I thought 2K looked great. The picture looks as good as it needs to look as far as I’m concerned, watching on a 75-inch TV.
But thankfully, every time digital standards go up – and they don’t need to for a while – they can always return to the 70mm film of Lawrence of Arabia and transfer it again. Film, it turns out, is a better archivable format than digital.
And there you have it.