recently I was shooting a band with a sony digital 8 camcorder. It was low light most of the time so I was trying out the low light (not night vision) function. From what I can tell, the low light function works by increasing the exposure time and therefore decreaseing the actual image (not frame) refresh rate. The image was slightly jerky due to the extremely slow refresh rate, but looked very grainy and “filmy”. When the lights came up, and the expsure went back to normal…it goes back to looking video-y immediately.
I like the cognative skills to figure it out…but there you go.
Thanks to Metroshane for the cites, and Gelaan , Hrhomer, and others for appreciating the OP.
Another thought: some people don’t notice the difference immediately. For example, if someone says “The Cosby Show”, I instantly can tell you that it was done on videotape - I just know this by conjuring up a memory of seeing the show years ago !
But my wife can’t remember a visual difference between “Cosby” (videotape) and “The Drew Carey Show” (film).
I’m still baffled. So far, the visual clues are :
CONTRAST
DEPTH OF FIELD
COLOR SATURATION (?)
GRAIN
(slightly OT)
…What about soap operas? They seem to have a different look to them, even different than other taped media. Is this because soap operas use a consistent lighting method or something along those lines?
There are a bunch of things that make film and video look different.
The biggest difference is grain. Film grain is organic. The particles are irregular, and change from frame to frame. Video has pixels, which are uniform, and remain in the same straight lines from frame to frame.
Film and video can handle different degrees of light. A film camera (shooting color negative film) can see stuff with seven stops of difference between them. A video camera can only see five stops. So you can’t have a bunch of lights and darks in a frame without something being exposed wrong. This makes lighting for video very different.
And finally, video just processes things differently. It ends up emphasizing lines and edges and contrast. It makes colors look saturated but not rich.
censored-you got it right- soap operas are shot with three cameras running at the same time. That means that the entire set needs to be brightly and evenly lit, and the cameras can only be placed in certain- fairly consistantly useful- angles. Live sit coms are also filmed like this.