| > It won't stay that way by the time you watch it, it will have been copied multiple times, and it's on 35mm again. No, it's not on 35mm again. I've watched the 70mm projection of The Hateful Eight. At no intermediary point the film was on 35mm. The intermediate film stocks and the print stock are very special low-sensitivity stocks (Kodak 2383 has ISO 1.6, Kodak 5302 has ISO 6) that have no discernible grain whatsoever. You can't see the Kodak 2383 grain with a grain focuser. All the grain comes from the original negative. You do lose some spatial resolution with multiple copies, but you don't add grain. I'll note that modern print film like Kodak 2383 can resolve 550 lines per mm, and contact printing has a minimal loss of quality due to imperfect optics. Granted, a showprint will always be better than a release print, but the copying process is much better than you give it credit for. > noise (like film grain) is always a problem Not really, dithering is essential for all video processing. Your very clean image is actually full of noise. Without dithering, videos (and movies) would look bad. > I suspect you are missing what never was. Digital is better on both. Absolutely nonsense. Kodak 2383 has a D-Max or 4, giving a contrast of 10000:1. Kodak Vision Premier Color has a D-Max of 5.5 giving a contrast of about 310000:1. Yes, not a typo, one-third of a million to one. There is no other technology that can achieve these deep blacks. Digital projection doesn't come any close, the best projectors today, (the ones that you won't find in any run-of-the-mill theatre) can barely do 2000:1. DCI-P3, the color space used in digital cinema was modeled after print stock gamut, but because of technological limitations, it's not identical. Cyans and yellow has a higher chroma on film. Green on film has a higher chroma at the expense of luminosity. Other colors are pretty much the same. The only way for digital projection to have a higher gamut is to switch to laser projection AND to retire DCI-P3. You need a green laser to produce more saturated greens. Digital cameras are capable of recording a larger gamut than film, but unfortunately there is no technology to display these colors outside laser projection, and you need to switch the whole movie industry to a new color space. |