For all the advances in digital photography, there remains a mystique for photographers and filmmakers about chemical film. Using it presents an artistic and technical challenge, and it lends an aesthetic to your work which is difficult to find in other ways. But particularly when it comes to moving pictures, how many of us have ever ventured beyond the Super 8 cartridge? If you’re not lucky enough to have a Spielberg budget, [Stand-Up Maths] is here with a video taking the viewer through the various movie film formats. He claims it’s the first video shot for YouTube in 35mm, and given that his first point is about the costs involved, we can see why.
In particular it serves as an introduction to the various film terms and aspect ratios. We all know what full frame and IMAX are, but do many of us know what they really mean in camera terms. A particularly neat demonstration comes when he has two cameras side by side with the same stock as a split screen, one 35mm and the other 16mm. The cheaper smaller framed format is good quality, but using a profession resolution chart you can see some of the differences clearly. The full film is below the break, and we’d suggest you watch it in the full 4K resolution if you are able to.
Meanwhile, some of us have been known to dabble in 8mm film, and even sometimes shoot footage with it.
Thanks [Jurjen] for the tip.
It’s tagged 3.5mm, but that should be 35mm.
Also in the video the guy says mil instead of mm. Which bugs me.
I’ve had different co-workers use ‘mil’ to refer to one thousandth of an inch, one thousandth of a meter, and one millionth of a meter. ‘Thou’ was also pretty common for thousandths of anything, and leaving off the last half is forgivable, considering that it has four consonant sounds in a row.
Mil as in a thousandth of an inch is a very common measurement unit in circuit board design. Using it to refer to other things always confused me. Similar with Thou, Permille, etc.
It doesn’t help I have my feet in several worlds where these words are used but refer to different things.
I’ve also never got the hang of these things spoken out loud. For example, in recent machining videos from Adam Savage he talked about 1 in 10000 (tenth of a thousandth, a tenthousandth) or 10 in 1000 (ten thousandths) in the same sentence. I appreciate anyone taking the time to write it out and translate between imperial and metric.
The worst I’ve heard is where someone used partial freedom units combined with thousands of freedom units: “1 5/8 3 thou”. Which I can see if you need a certain wiggleroom, but then just say 1,627. Or use metric :-p
If the US joins the rest of us over here on the metric system, that’ll solve your problem neatly.
We actually define our strange measurements by SI units. 1 yd is defined as exactly 0.9144 m.
What’s far worse is hearing medical people pronouncing mg as “megs”.
Or medical people’s affectation of pronouncing “centimeters” like “sontimeters”
I think they’re trying to sound French. You know, because Système international d’unités.
I can assure you that no-one in the film word says “thirty five em em”, or “thirty five muh muh”
We say “thirty five mil”
Then you are all wrong. Plain and simple.
It’s pronounced millimeter. Not mil. Which is 50 times smaller. It you don’t have the patience to say millimeter then you might just leave it out altogether: “35 film”
I enjoyed this a lot :-) Some directors, like Scorsese, prefers the magic of film, others, like Mann, embraced digital early.
I thought about a COVID documentary—how New York could have a landscape in 70 mm, pedestrians at 35 mm and the noble 24 fps before.
As the disease spread, 16 mm and Super-8 used…with a daguerreotype of streets empty…the old videotape type cameras of the early episodes of COPS made the night hideous.
As things got back to normal, only digital cameras of increasing sophistications with 4 and 8k used with the surreal soap-opera motion smoothing in its place—to show change.
@Jenny List said: “The full film is below the break, and we’d suggest you watch it in the full 4K resolution if you are able to.”
Actually I can still see the difference in the 35mm versus 16mm side-by-side split-screen comparison even if I do not use a full 4K resolution playback option. What I did was play the YouTube video in full screen mode from this URL:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/QYUE696k6GY
Then I set YouTube in my browser (Firefox) to play in 4K by clicking the Gear icon in the lower-right, selecting Quality, then selecting 2160p (in YouTube I think it’s actually a 4K UHD or 3840p x 2160p 24 FPS vp09.x 14616k or 7101k VBR encoded video stream [1][2]), then selecting Full-Screen playback mode so as to use as many monitor pixels possible. And yes I am pretty sure I have enough bandwidth for the YouTube 4K UHD VP9 compressed video + audio stream through my DOCSIS 3.1 cable modem and GbE wired router/switch (let me know if you think I’m wrong).
These are the two best YouTube video encoding options that appear in yt-dlp -F for the embedded video [3]:
625 mp4 3840×2160 24 │ ~ 2.29GiB 14619k m3u8 │ vp09.00.50.08 14619k video only
313 webm 3840×2160 24 │ 1.11GiB 7101k https │ vp09.00.50.08 7101k video only 2160p, webm_dash
I was able to watch the embedded YouTube video online in 4K on a real 4K monitor and the 35mm versus 16mm side-by-side split-screen difference was very noticeable. But the online 4K YouTube video split-screen difference was also quite noticeable on a 15 inch laptop with a 1920p x 1080p LCD panel and a wired GbE connection, which is certainly not true 4K UHD resolution. So does this mean it never hurts to stream at a higher resolution if it’s important and you can afford it – or does it?
One experiment I may try to eliminate YouTube entirely from the video equation is to download the 4K UHD video and audio streams from YouTube separately using yt-dlp [3] and store them locally, then recombine the video and audio streams with ffmpeg like explained in [4]. Maybe that will settle the matter – or will it?
References:
4K resolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution
Ultra-high-definition television.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-definition_television
yt-dlp utility.
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
Merging Video and Audio with ffmpeg (Thanks to: Giovanni Tommasini).
https://blog.gt0.dev/merging-video-and-audio
A Simple example(?)
ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i audio.mp4 -c:v copy -c:a aac -map 0:v:0 -map 1:a:0 output.mp4
This entertaining and illustrious presenter kept reminding us of how expensive the film stock was, so we can’t exactly ask him to shoot more footage, but his editing team could still make better use of what they shot already, especially the side by side 35mm and 16mm segment, and that is by digitally zooming in on the grain.
One big thing he forgot to mention is who used 16mm professionally before 1080p (HD) camera got good: the television industry. Not live TV, but all the scripted TV before roughly (and I’m estimating here) 2003. Why? Because on the “small screen” no one can tell the difference. Star Trek, 16mm, Monty Python, 16mm, Law and Order (the original series), 16mm, Foyle’s War, 16mm. You get the idea.
It is worth noting that when HD video cameras first appeared, filmmakers didn’t suddenly flock to digital. They complained that the dynamic range and the overall response curve of digital sensors and film were different. They just couldn’t get “the film look.” And they were right in both counts. Eventually visual effects companies wrote “filters” (think Photoshop) that converted the response of video cameras to mimic the look of film cameras. This became so popular that traditionally recorded studio TV shows like Oprah started running all their footage through GenArts’ “film look” filter to everything they broadcast.
On the other hand, it just reminds me how much some YouTubers make from Patreon.
Most US TV scripted shows were shot on 35mm back in the 1960s and 1970s, including Star Trek. 16mm productions became popular in the 1990s as cable channels proliferated. Half hour sitcoms like Friends, Cheers and various others were shot in 35mm on Panavision cameras. The original 35mm negatives were archived, which is why we have some excellent HD widescreen versions of 1980s and 1990s classic sitcoms.
British TV was a bit different during that period. There was more 16mm because of smaller budgets, and in the late 1970s various productions such as Doctor Who were shot in a combination of video (studio shots at BBC White City) and 16mm film (monsters stumbling around random outdoor gravel pits and nuclear reactors).