Film as a physical medium

Cafe Society
1

I was taking a long drive today and my mind wandered. One of the things I satrted thinking about was movies - not the subject matter but as actual physical objects. And I realize I know almost nothing about this subject. I obviously know what a movie looks like when its on a videotape or a DVD disc, but I have no real idea what a theatrical film is on.

I assume it’s on a big reel of film, right, or has that changed? What does the film look like? Is the soundtrack on the same reel or is it seperate? How big is the reel for a typical movie? Is it all one a single reel or is it broken up into segments? Are the reels open or are they enclosed in some kind of case like a videotape?

I’ve heard that some movies like the new Star Wars are “digital” - does this mean they aren’t on film anymore? If not, what are they on - some kind of hard drive?

How many copies of a typical movie exist? Some movies get released in hundreds of thetres across the country on their opening weekend, so there must be at least that many copies. How much does it cost to make a copy of a movie? How long does it take to make one? How do they decide how many copies to make? Who keeps track of all the copies and distributes them around the country to theatres? When the theatrical run is done, do they all go back to someone? If they’re sending a movie to overseas markets do they send the American copies or do they make new ones? When the movie’s done, what do they do with all the copies - store them all, sell them, or dispose of most of them?

2

I could offer guesses, especially considering that this isn’t GQ, but they would only be guesses. I am also curious about the factual answers to these questions.

3

IANAFA (Film Archivist) but the answer to a lot of these questions is it depends. Is the film being preserved the actual film that was used for shooting, or was it a print after editing? If it’s a print after editing, it’s likely to be just a few large rolls of film. If it’s the archival shooting film it may be hundreds of little strips. Additionally, it’s been found that celluloid doesn’t age particularly well - so trying to preserve film, especially the older films, can be quite a challenge.

The Eastman House and Museum is one of the premier film archives in the world, and has a website - I imagine that they could answer any specific questions you might have.

http://www.EastmanHouse.org/

4

I’d imagine this is one huge advantage to shooting digitally, as in the SW prequel drek?

5

I’d agree if it weren’t for the lesson of the various data that are encoded in punch cards that are effectively irretrievable at this time. There is no guarantee that advances in data storage will remain compatible with older storage formats. With film, itself, it’s very easy to see how to get the image into a viewable form - with a digital media, it’s going to be relatively easy to lose the assumptions behind the standards of today, and find our descendants looking a binary files trying to figure out just what sort of compression or viewing algorythms that were used to make those into pretty pictures.

And, remember: the scarcity of silent film isn’t because we can’t view the ones that are available, nor is it even the fragile nature of the film of those days - it was the attitude of the studios of the time that they were just making quickie entertainment, and no one would be interested in ever seeing the films again that lead to the destruction or improper storage of the existing prints.

6

I’ve seen a projection room at a theater that had window at that back, and IIRC, there were big platters of film that were feeding the projector. I think that theater had joined the reels into one giant one so that they didn’t need a person there to switch reels.

They also had a system for passing the film through a hole in the wall to the next projection room, making a small spool, feeding that into the projector, and starting the same movie ten minutes later. This saved them a rental from the distributor.

7

Regular theatrical-release films are shipped on a multitude of reels - just like what you remember from movies in school, each around 20 minutes long (IIRC) - most theaters today use the giant horizontal platters, so they need to assemble the film at a “make-up” table where the individual reels are spliced together and wound up into the pancake. When the theater is done showing it, they reverse the process and put the film back onto its original reels and ship it off to wherever it needs to go.

Usually, the soundtrack is on the film. I’ll leave it “as an exercise” for you to google up the various sound formats such as Dolby Digital, SDDS and DTS. Amazingly, the competing formats can co-exist on the print. Briefly, Dolby Digital is a series of 2-D barcodes in between the sprocket holes and DTS (IIRC) is a linear timecode track on the other side of the frame from the DD patches that’s used to keep a DVD in sync - the sound is on the DVD. If the DVD wanders away from the film in transit, the theater’s pretty well screwed. Dolby Digital’s been shown to be a very robust format - typically the film is beat to death and the sprockets are torn out before the DD soundtrack is unusable.

Digital releases are distributed on DVDs - basically MPEG video, and projected with a DLP or similar projector - similar to a conference room projector but much larger. Many digital releases never existed on film at any point in their production, except for producing prints for showing at non-digital theaters.

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gotpasswords, what sort of security does the digital release have, then? I mean - how are the owners of the movie able to ensure that no unscrupulous person at the digital theatre will make bootleg perfect copies of the film? Or is that how The Incredibles was available in digital format on the black market before the film was released?

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I’m sure Johnny L.A. or FilmGeek will come along presently and provide more technical information about film than you’d care for, but one point of note is that virutually all modern films–even little indie features–are now edited digitally, using (typically) either the Avid system or Apple’s competing and much cheaper Final Cut Pro, even (as is still more typical on well-funded projects) the native recording medium is film. The digital transfer (at 4k) is presumably stored and will not alter with time unless lost, and then theatrical prints are made from that “master”. The same is true with most current restorations; the image is transferred to digital and then restored, rather than attempting to transfer to another film, though some intermediate treatment steps are often taken to enhance the quality of the transfer.

However, digital shooting, even the best quality HD, is still inferior (or at least very different) in many ways to film. There’s a certain grittyness to the image, a lack of smoothness of tone that film offers, even when the resolution is greater than the grain size of film. The Manual of Photography is the standard and rather complete reference which makes a good, objective comparison between the merits of digital versus film.

Roger Ebert is big on a film system called MaxiVision 48, which runs at 48 fps and can accept the standard 35mm 24fps formats. He claims (I haven’t seen it) that it eliminates most of the blurring you see from rapid pans, and believes that it will be the format of the future instead of digital. While I might agree with the former, I suspect that digital projection will come to predominate for reasons of cost and convenience (i.e. not having to produce and distribute physical film rolls) for theaters. Then again, given the way that business is going, cinemas as a whole may be, if not actually on their way out, overdue for a downsizing.

Stranger

10

After experimenting with different film formats, Thomas Edison’s motion picture laboratory (Edison himself did virtually none of the research or development) by 1893 settled on a strip of film 35mm in width. Edison’s only major competitor in domestic movie production, American Mutoscope Company (founded 1895), used a strip of film about 68mm wide to keep from infringing on the patented design of Edison’s camera and projectors. A patent court decision in 1902 allowed all filmmakers to use a 35mm film like Edison’s, and they quickly did.

Originally, a reel of 35mm film was 1,000 feet long. From the late 1890s onward, it ran at 16 frames per second, or 1 foot per second (hence, one reel ran 16.7 minutes). The frames per second rate gradually creeped upwards until by the mid-1920s it was 24 fps, and sound motion pictures kept that speed (hence, making one reel run 11.1 minutes).

From at least the 1930s onward, 35mm motion pictures were exhibited theatrically on “double” reels of 2,000 feet. At the end of every reel, white circles (black circles stamped onto the negative) would flash in the upper right corner of the image twice, indicating that the reel was about to end. The projection booth would have two 35mm projectors standing next to each other, and when the projectionist saw those circles, he would flip the lamp off on one projector and start the other projector.

I don’t know when the big film platters became popular (1980s?), but today almost all theaters splice all the double reels of 35mm film together into one long strip, which is wound onto the horizontal film platter in the projection booth.

Curious about how many generations a film went through from camera to exhibition print? Typically (in the pre-digital era):

  1. Camera negative. Separately, soundtrack negative.
  2. Interpositives of those two elements, on a special fine grain film.
  3. Internegative (marrying the image and soundtrack), on a special fine grain film.
  4. Exhibition print.

In the silent era, before high quality interpositive and internegative films were available, prints were made directly from camera negatives, causing much wear and tear to the original negatives. Because of that, often two cameras would be set up on the movie set, side by side, filming a scene simultaneously. One camera negative was used to make American prints, the other camera negative was shipped to Europe to make European prints.

From the 1930s onward, for a movie not in release, typically the original negative and soundtrack would be stored in one location, interpositives of those two elements would be stored in another location, and a “reference” print or two would be kept on hand for exhibition to studio personnel as needed. When a film was in release, 35mm prints would be kept at, and shipped from, regional film exchanges for about two years. After the film was no longer in release, the exchanges would ship the prints back to the studio, which would have the prints melted down to reclaim the silver content (and to prevent the films from being pirated).

Soundtracks: From the 1920s onward, sound motion pictures used optical soundtracks, which ran along the side of the image in exhibition prints. (The notable exception was Warner Bros.-First National, which used a sound-on-disk process, 1926-1930.) The widescreen Cinerama (1952) was the first motion picture process to use magnetic soundtracks in exhibition; in Cinerama’s case, because there were five channels of sound, a separate strip of film was devoted entirely to the magnetic soundtracks (which were glued onto the film), and ran on its own playback equipment in synch with the image films.

CinemaScope (1953) widescreen films initially had four soundtracks. Three audio tracks (left, center, right) on magnetic strips glued to a separate strip of film (see Figure 6), plus one standard monophonic optical track on the side of the image film, in case the magnetic sound system would fail.

11

From the 1930s onward, a movie’s soundtrack was actually kept as three “separation” tracks: dialogue, music, sound effects. This allowed the studio to dub a movie’s dialogue into other languages, or change a piece of background music if they wished.

12

Let me give a specific example. Let’s use the film Spiderman. It was a popular hit a few years back - presumedly the studio wanted to get it inot as many theatres as possible and the theatres were anxious to get it. So let’s say it was playing in a thousand theatres in North America its opening week. Barring a handful of neighbouring screens using a single print as Cardinal mentioned, each theatre needed its own copy. So there were approximately a thousand copies of Spiderman floating around the country at the time.

Where are they now? There might be a few that are still being shown in theatres and a few that are kept in storage for whatever future needs might arise. But the majority are no longer needed. Did they all get shipped to overseas markets after their American run? Were they all dumped in landfills somewhere? Were they put up for sale on eBay? Recycled for guitar picks?

13

The used prints of Spider-Man (note the hyphen) were most certainly not sold no eBay, which has a “no 35mm films” policy, given that virtually all such prints are stolen or pirated property. Studios never have sold 35mm prints of their movies. Most prints are indeed destroyed after the first run. They can’t be used for foreign release, except in English-speaking countries, because they don’t have subtitles.

14

Ocasionally at the movie theatre you can see the cases the reels come in. The ones I’ve seen are hexagonal (or maybe octagonal) orange or bare metal, about 16 inches high and 5 inches thick with a folding handle on top. The ones I most recenly saw there were two cases for the movie (Monster In Law maybe).

Brian

15

Sometimes you can buy individual frames for popular movies. I don’t know if these are made special or are made from leftover prints.

Brian

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Well, I am a Film Archivist, plus I’ve managed megaplex theaters and helped oversee film festival operations, so I’ll see what I can do about answering some of this as I can…

The studio/distributor negotiates for screen space with all the various film offices of all the various theater chains to determine a solid screen count for opening weekend. This count is subject to ongoing negotiation on a week-by-week basis (based on performance and what new films are opening to compete for that space). These prints are tracked rigorously so they always know what print is where, and don’t forget–there are second- and third-run houses, so once a theater is done with a print (or no longer needs multiple prints of a film), that print is often routed to other theaters. It may be several months before the film is returned to the studio/distributor (after which it’s usually destroyed).

But don’t assume that x number of screens = x number of prints. If a 20-plex is showing a film on 5 screens, it won’t be uncommon for them to only have 3 prints, using an interlock system.

17

As someone who’s held the original camera negative to The Great Train Robbery in his hand, I have to make a qualified refutation of this commonly-held belief. Yes, film deteriorates–it fades, it warps, it becomes brittle. But that is because most of the time, it is subjected to conditions that are extremely unfriendly. If you take care of it, film can last a very long time (certainly much longer than videotape).

Film is more reliable for long-term preservation than any existing digital media as well–mostly because not only is the longevity of digital media mostly unproven, but the problem of format obsolescence, encryption, and proprietary formats mean that even if data can theoretically exist for x hundereds of years, what difference does it make if you can’t retrieve it?

Film is also universal. 35mm film is a standardized format around the world, so you can take a print run out of a lab in L.A. and screen it in London, Prague, Moscow, Tokyo, New Delhi, Johannesburg, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and then back to New York without a problem. Videotape is over 50-years old and we still don’t have a universal interantional format.

18

Here you go

Well, not really. All major chains have projectos compatible with all sound systems, and all sound heads are threaded for every show. This way, if one system gives out, there are back-up systems in place that will automatically kick in. Heck, they even thread through the optical reader in case the theater needs to resort to the "old-school"system.

19

The thing about digital media, though, is that you can make an exact bitwise copy, without loss of qualtiy or degradation of the master (in the case of optical media).

That being said, your points on the lack of standard format, accessibility of film, the lifespan of properly stored film as compared to videotape, et cetera are all on point (AFAIK). I think that eventually a standard digital format on optical media will be superior and have greater longevity, but we’re not anywhere close to that, yet. And helical scan videotape is just plain awful, both in terms of image quality and longevity.

Stranger

20

I’ve always wondered why the film isn’t just distributed the way theaters use it - it seems strange that the theater should have to assemble it. Why is this?

So is this a different standard than DVDs used at home? Because that sort of resolution would be completely unsatisfactory on movie screens, I would think. Wouldn’t a higher quality be needed for a larger screen?