Is 24p dying?

[Kevin Shaw]

Originally Posted by Ash Greyson

24P will be here until we move to 100% digital which is prolly 10-20 years away.

It was barely ten years ago that the first mainstream digital still cameras hit the market, and back then many said such cameras would never threaten film photography -- today film photography is on its way out for all but a few purists and specialty purposes. If it takes much more than another ten years to convert the movie industry to digital acquisition and delivery that will be surprising.

Last night I saw the latest Bond film in a theater and noticed motion artifacts in several scenes which looked like the results of too slow frame rates. I still can't see any logical reason to prefer 24 fps over smoother, more realistic motion at higher frame rates, but I guess that's partly a matter of personal taste. Good movie though: as usual content matters more than format.

[Simon Wyndham]

If it takes much more than another ten years to convert the movie industry to digital acquisition and delivery that will be surprising.

The movie industry will only switch over once digital offers both a quality incentive and a money incentive. At the moment, when it comes to cameras which can be used as an alternative to film such as the Dalsa etc, it offers neither. The cameras are too big and bulky, and the workflow for such new devices isn't standardised in the industry.

Remember, 35mm is an established workflow for Hollywood. It runs like clockwork. Digital currently doesn't currently offer them any real reasons to abandon film. Also remember that not all films go through a DI process either. So in the scheme of things shooting everything digital in Hollywood doesn't make sense. On top of this, it will take cinemas a long, long time to all convert to digital projection. Its a very expensive upgrade.

It will happen eventually. But it won't happen overnight, and film will be around for a very long time yet.

Stills photography cannot really be used as a comparison because the needs and workflow are totally different.

35mm film is very good for HD transfers, and is archivable for many years, and doesn't require banks of hard drive arrays to store. 35mm doesn't require constant backups, and the data can't be lost in a computer crash.

Digital makes grading easier. But thats about it. Quality wise, 35mm film still rules the roost.

[Kevin Shaw]

Originally Posted by Simon Wyndham

The movie industry will only switch over once digital offers both a quality incentive and a money incentive.

If the financial incentive is there the quality issues may become secondary, and the quality will get there sooner or later. Again, we had this same discussion ten years ago for film photography and that's pretty well settled now. A lot can happen in ten years.

Also remember that not all films go through a DI process either.

Are there really major motion pictures being made today by splicing film originals and replicating the result without use of digital intermediaries? Examples?

35mm film is...archivable for many years, and doesn't require banks of hard drive arrays to store. 35mm doesn't require constant backups, and the data can't be lost in a computer crash.

Film inherently deteriorates from the moment it's exposed and requires carefully controlled storage, can't be duplicated exactly and can easily be destroyed by fire or other disasters. There are some advantages to having a physical image as opposed to a bunch of bits on a disk, but that's manageable.

[Nate Weaver]

Originally Posted by Kevin Shaw

Are there really major motion pictures being made today by splicing film originals and replicating the result without use of digital intermediaries? Examples?

Any film with a negative cutter credit. I'm sure there's still plenty.

[edit: I just went to IMDB to find a recent movie with that credit. Casino Royale qualifies]

[Simon Wyndham]

Batman Begins too.

[David Mullen]

"Phantom of the Opera" didn't do a D.I. Neither did Nolan's "The Prestige". Plenty of smaller films don't do a D.I. either, like "Girl with a Pearl Earring" or "Capote". I just had a film out earlier this year that I shot called "Akeelah and the Bee" and it didn't go through a D.I.

But D.I.'s will become more and more commonplace, that's for sure. But the reason isn't a lack of faith in the long-term archivability of film, which if stored properly (and this includes archival masters) should last over a hundred years or more. In fact, many studios are looking into ways of outputting the data files for D.I.'s onto 35mm b&w film separations for long-term storage, which shows you which medium they have more faith in. With so many computer file and tape formats becoming obsolete, the studios would rather go with a more stable technology that will be easily machine readable decades from now, i.e. film.

[Brandon Rice]

In response to the first post in this thread... It's simple to change the shutter speed so that you capture less blur and more motion in the shots...

[David Tamés]

Originally Posted by Kevin Shaw

Film inherently deteriorates from the moment it's exposed and requires carefully controlled storage, can't be duplicated exactly and can easily be destroyed by fire or other disasters. There are some advantages to having a physical image as opposed to a bunch of bits on a disk, but that's manageable.

I'm puzzled, a hard drive is more fragile than 35mm film since it's an electro-mechanical device, it's something we can count on to fail (no one quotes MTBF [mean-time between failures] for film, however it's standard procedure to do it for hard drives) at some point in it's life. No medium is perfect, they each have their limitations.

[Glenn Chan]

With hard drives, couldn't you pay a lot of money to get the data recovered? (Much like... film.)

[David Tamés]

Originally Posted by Glenn Chan

With hard drives, couldn't you pay a lot of money to get the data recovered? (Much like... film.)

Call one of those hard drive recovery services and get a quote... and they can't always recover from catastrophic failures in which the head crashes and tears the *&^$% out of the media.

But we're getting off-topic so I'll stop myself, this was about 24P after all, not film.

[Victor Burdiladze]

Some interesting thoughts on this thread…
But one of the important reasons why 24p looks (or seems) to us as a “film-like” is that we have simply become accustomed to certain conventions over the years. For us film has always been 24 fps, and on top of whatever advantages 24 fps might have over other frame-rates, whether visual, economical, or any other, this is the frame-rate we’ve always watched movies in the movie theaters.
Just like in some countries it’s normal to watch a foreign film with only one translator narrating a whole film and overshadowing original actor’s (or actresses) voices. While in US, we’ve become familiar to reading subtitles and any other way of watching foreign film (such as dubbed, or other) seems unnatural and wrong to us.
Vic

[Rati Oneli]

Originally Posted by Charles Papert

Number one most popular debate on DVInfo.net in the past two years: which is most important factor in creating a film look: frame rate or depth of field?

My vote has always been frame rate--I started using a frame store to create a 30 fps look in the late 80's and Filmlook (the original 24p process that all current cameras license) a few years later, and I've never looked back. To me, 24p with all the depth of focus in the world is much more film-like than 60i with shallow focus (which I think looks odd, frankly).

I am however open to the notion that over the next generation, a new aesthetic will become acceptable and preferred.

How about the material? Film is called film because it is shot on film and video is shot ... well in many different ways, but not on film. Film gives texture, etc. This is in addition to and on top of frame rates, DOFs, etc

[David Jimerson]

Originally Posted by Brandon Rice

In response to the first post in this thread... It's simple to change the shutter speed so that you capture less blur and more motion in the shots...

Well, no; you have blur specifically because you're capturing more motion. A faster shutter speed gives you less blur because the exposure time is shorter and moving objects don't move as much during the exposure.

[Dave F. Nelson]

Originally Posted by Glenn Chan

I think the reason 'film' went with 24p is because it was the minimum needed to produce smooth motion. Film costs a lot of money so it makes sense to shoot as little as possible.

One reason you may not like 24p is that panning too fast leads to stuttery motion. The ASC manual recommends an object should take 7 seconds to cross the screen during a pan (or slower) to avoid that problem.

Anyways, it's all up to subjective taste. I personally don't care too much what frame rate something was shot on, although I'd probably prefer 30p (this is in the context of watching images on a CRT-based TV; other display technologies look different in terms of motion reproduction).

The Film Industry decided to convert from the earlier 10 to 19 fps variable speeds (there was no standard film speed until talkies came out) to 24 fps in the 1920s when engineers of the time were attempting to add an optical sound track to film. Audio couldn't be reproduced faithfully at lower speeds, so projector and camera manufacturers and operators decided on 24 fps (this was the birth of SMPTE, although television had not yet been invented).

Optical cutters were limited and could not make the cuts small enough to attain acceptable high frequency response for audio (especially music) at the slower film speeds of the time. They determined that 24 fps was the minimum speed the film could move across the optical pickup and faithfully reproduce high frequencies.

So we owe 24 fps to the Film Industry's conversion from silent films to talkies in the 1920s... and that's the truth.

[Jon Fairhurst]

According to Mark Schubin of The Schubin Report, 24fps was standardized due to the need for stable sound, but we owe the specific frame rate to a researcher from Western Electric who measured average hand crank speed at various theaters.

Here's the direct link to his podcast. The 24p story starts at 6:07 which is at about the 40% point.