Huh?
Digital movie cameras, like the the one that Lucas used to film Star Wars 1,2,3 use basically the same sensor as a digital camera.
If you are talking about Digital Theatre, clearly the entire chain (Camera, editing system, delivery medium, projector) needs to be updated to take advantage in significant increases in resolution, something that a film projector doesn’t need to do. Even so, doubling the resolution in movie film isn’t going to increase the perceived resolution very much - the ultimate resolution is limited by the lenses, focus accuracy, diffraction and the many copying steps that the film goes through before it’s projected.
So, I’m not sure what the Kodak guys are pitching, although it’s pretty clear that they see the writing on the wall and are trying to remain relevant for the next decade or so until digital replaces film entirely in the movie industry.
There is more to image quality than resolution, and although film still has a tremendous advantage there over any production model digital motion picture camera, film also has far greater dynamic range and low light sensitivity than any digital systems currently available.
At a conference I attended a couple of months ago, Joshua Pines of Technicolor pointed out that the dynamic range of camera stocks is 14 stops, much wider than that of release print stocks, which are in turn wider than digital projectors. So while shooting, filmmakers can “defer the decision-making process” as to how to render the final scene, and have much more latitude in manipulating the image in post than if they shoot digitally.
Today’s digital cameras’ dynamic range precisely match that of release stocks, so exposure of every shot has to be exactly right, or shadow detail or highlights can be lost.
For these and other reasons, film is still the preferred capture medium for the vast majority of professional film and television production. Sales of camera film stocks continue to increase year over year, including in formats like Super 8, which I would have assumed was dead. But as the emulsions improve it’s possible to do more with smaller frames in ways that weren’t possible before.
Kodak is not ignoring the transition to digital, hoping it will go away. Guess who Dr. Bayer, inventor of the Bayer array, worked for. The company recognizes the advantages of digital in many phases of the production chain, and is making film products specifically for digital scanning and recording.
But for now, and probably for the next decade at least, film will have many advantages over digital for motion picture capture.
And it has many disadvantages, such as price, speed (of processing), and size. Image quality is not the only reason for choosing a medium, although it is certainly an extremely important one.
Is this a property of current digital media storage formats (i.e. limited bit resolution), or of the camera sensors/projectors themselves? If the latter, then it’s not so much a shortcoming of digital technology versus film as it is a shortcoming of video technology (whehter analog or digital) versus film.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, old scratchy and noisy films need a higher quality digital reproduction than newer, cleaner films. This is due to the compression algorithms employed by DVD/Blu-Ray/MP4 being stretched by the higher random content of noisy/snowy pictures.
Something I’ve noticed with digital-shot movies is that the picture just doesn’t have that “warm” feel film does. I read somewhere that they are getting close to simulating the look of film but from seeing the “Public Enemy” movie with Depp, it definitely felt very digital.
OTOH, the third installment of the Desperado films was shot in HD (Once upon a time in Mexico) which looked fine. I saw an interview with the director (Rodriguez) who spoke about the advantages of shooting in digital. He mentioned the ability to replay the shot as it would show up in a movie theatre. frame by frame. He was able to scrap the shot without wasting film which made it cheaper to shoot. Post processing was also facilitated by the digital format (imagine the workhorses needed to process these movies).
My uninformed $.02:
About 10 years ago I was talking to a cinematographer I happen to know about the death of film. He told me that while for still photography digital was likely to decimate film in the very near future, for motion pictures digital was unlikely to take over anytime soon. His reasoning, which I repeat here without any prejudice or claim of his view’s veracity, was that while in still photography digital could soon reproduce an image with greater detail, the same could not be said for motion pictures. His reasoning was that while in a still image the grain stucture of a 35mm motion picture frame maxed out at somewhere around 12 megapixels, when taking into account the random nature of the grain of film coupled with the fact that the grain stucture changes with each of the 24 exposures taken each second means that the effective “megapixels” of a motion picture is (12 megapixels x 24) or 288 megapixels per second.
Whereas with digital motion pictures each pixel is reproduced in exactly the same location with each frame, with film the grain is random and therefore each “pixel” is in a slightly different location within each frame, 24 times per second. He claimed the results would be less immediately sharp in each frame, but overall of higher quality.
So, for example, on a closeup of an actress, rather than being able to see the brushstrokes of where makeup had been applied, a softer but still incredibly high resolution portrait of beauty would be the result. FWIW, he is still using film and making more beautiful images and money in a year than I could hope to in a lifetime.
But even when film photography was the only game in town, view cameras were a tiny tiny niche. I believe an entry-level camera goes for about $2K (plus lenses), the film costs at least a dollar a shot (plus processing) and you really need to know what you are doing to get a half-decent result. In the hands of someone possessing real talent and real expertise they are godly tools of imaging awesomeness, but they are not really representative of photography as a whole. It wouldn’t surprise me if there are more 35mm movie cameras in use than large-format view cameras.