Inconsistencies of film development

[gcconnelly]

Hi Roger!

Hope you are doing well. I recently listened to your podcast episode with Matthew Libatique and was very interested by your discussions about exposure and how inconsistent film developing is these days. Matthew told a story about visiting a developing lab and seeing that they were basing the film bath speed on the film before his film. You guys both used the term “running hot” and “hot develop.” I was wondering if you could elaborate on what this means.

 

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[Roger Deakins]

That is simply when a lab warms up the developer to a temperature that is above the optimum. This makes the process faster and labs would favor this if they had a large quantity of footage that needed development in a fixed time frame. When you ‘hot develop’ a negative, which I have often done with B&W stills film, there will be an increase in grain. There was a lab that would often change the temperature of their developer from day to day, which was quite noticeable on the dailies they produced.

[gcconnelly]

Would that result in an increase in exposure and contrast like a push process? Or is this something different entirely?

[Roger Deakins]

The process is run faster to allow for the warmer developer so the ‘exposure’, or more precisely the density, of the negative isn’t affected. What this faster processing does lead to is an slight increase in grain and, perhaps, contrast.

[Author]

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