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Hi Roger and All,
To my eye, the look of movies shot on film has changed a lot in recent years, which I think is owing to the phasing out of film prints due to digital projection.
Up until the early 2010’s movies were predominantly projected from film prints, which I believe defined the “look of film” up until that point. As this is all you would really see when you went to the cinema and to my knowledge, any television, VHS, or DVD (and now Blu-Ray) copy would be taken from the prints (please correct me if I’m wrong on this). But once digital projection became the primary projection medium, the “look of film” has been associated with scans directly from the negative which are then graded in the DI and released digitally.
To me, it feels like modern movies shot on film have a different quality, colour, and look to them than those released before widespread digital projection. I suppose this could be partly due to the advent of the Vision3 Kodak stocks compared to earlier iterations but it seems to me that the one biggest change to the look was the phasing out of film prints.
Would anyone have any thoughts on this? I could be completely wrong…
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Telecine transfers of movies were primarily from a color-timed low-contrast interpositive struck as also a protection master after answer-printing. Projection prints are a bit too high in contrast to make a good element for transfer though they will be used if nothing better exists. Sometimes a cheaper option than an interpositive was to make a low-con print, a stock that Kodak discontinued eventually. I believe that interpositives were made on a step contact printer which was more stable than the high speed continuous contact printer used for release prints.
Sometimes, at some risk, the original negative was transferred for the final video master… but since it is not a color-corrected element, and sometimes has A and B rolls, plus has splices at every cut, it was not the first option though the quality was the highest.
I was curious about this as well, and although it’s been around, the opposite process of doing a film-out from a digital negative seems to have become an aesthetic choice on more and more films recently (that can afford it).
The only one that comes to mind that actually struck a print, scanned it back, and used that as the final grade was The Batman but I’d love to hear if anyone knows of more recent (or older) films that have done the same.
It would be interesting to see how popular the process might become and if that will result in an inverse trend to your original question – film acquisition and digital finish (so-to-speak) vs. digital acquisition and print finish (a misnomer since the D.I. is still very much in the equation but I don’t know how else to put it), and seeing whether or not the latter inherently looks closer to film pre-digital intermediate/projection.
The recent “Dune” movies did this as well, scanned an interpositive or dupe negative laser recorded from the digital file, then scanned the film element. It’s a rather expensive technique, a feature-length 35mm intermediate costs about $10,000 for the stock alone, then there’s the laser recording and the scanning costs. Most people would opt for film grain simulation software (as “The Holdovers” did, using Live Grain and adding some subtle gate weave).
Personally I think the “Dune” pipeline was a bit of a gimmick. I’d guess general audience hardly got anything from it (if at all) that couldn’t have been achieved much simpler and cheaper.
I’m always interested in the effort/benefit ratio and for me personally this didn’t pass it. Then again, that was a very big production, with top notch people, and they get to levels of quality where I’d imagine such details matter more.
As David mentioned, and I can only confirm with the first Dune film, they only used a 1 ASA internegative stock which could’ve only added a very subtle look/feel to the image, and I can understand why that would make one wonder if it was worth it.
That’s why I mentioned The Batman, because it seemed Greig Fraser leaned in more heavily to the process by actually creating a print from the negative generated, and if I’m not mistaken did a bleach-bypass on the print, which I can imagine is much more worthwhile for the cost.
I’m sure you can get pretty close with print emulation LUTS and Live Grain, but where I’m intrigued by the film-out process is the renewed relevance of pushing/pulling and film development/printing techniques that are logarithmic in nature, which require a lot more hoops to jump through to try and replicate in software that is often-times linear in nature – I’m definitely generalizing at this point since grading software has become pretty nifty but I think in broad terms that is usually the discrepancy between the “look” of film vs. digital workflows that Ryan might be getting at.
If not, sorry for hijacking this thread!
*intermediate negative stock, not internegative stock. It won’t let me edit my response for some reason.
Thanks for your insight David, as always they are second to none and I stand corrected!
I was under the impression that a modern film photographed on film would simply have the negatives scanned directly on something like an Arriscan and then be inverted and graded in the DI.
@BHGoddard, all good hijak away mate!I’m more getting at the differences at least to my eye between two movies, shot on 35mm and released say, one in the 1990’s compared with one released in 2024. I know that the final look will depend on a whole lot more factors than just the capture technology but I figured it would be at least partly down to the different treatment of the footage in post production. A predominately chemical process vs predominately digital. I’m only 23 and never got to experience the practice of cinematography before the digital era so this is the reason for my interest and lack of knowledge in the subject.
You were asking about the look of movies on home video pre-D.I. when color-timed interpositives printed from cut negative were used in telecines, not post-D.I. when uncut negative camera rolls were scanned for the D.I.
But the 90s were also the era of EXR Kodak stocks before Vision became the norm.
Yes, in my head this wasn’t my intention but was certainly what I wrote…
Thanks for your explanations, it’s clearly not as clean-cut as I previously thought!
Most people would opt for film grain simulation software (as “The Holdovers” did, using Live Grain and adding some subtle gate weave).
What do you think about the simulation? I understand that it gives a vintage feeling to the images, but I’m curious to know the opinion of experts like you about something that, basically, in a certain way “ruins” scenes that have been carefully studied and prepared to fake the look of past movies. I feel it like adding fake scratch noises on a cd to fake the effect of a vynil. Different times, different techniques, different results. What about you?
I thought “The Holdovers” looked great and was appropriate for the story.
Thanks David! In general, for what kind of stories would you suggest to add the grain effect?
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