My father was involved in the early transfer of film to video and the hurdles that he and his engineers had to overcome were staggering. They finally developed the Videola, which basically was a film projector with a screen, and a mounted video camera would shoot the screen through a specially designed rotating prism, which eliminated the “flicker effect” common in that process. He and his engineers actually won an Oscar for that process.
Are you sure about that, Rico? I’m under the impression that almost all, say, primetime dramas are indeed shot on film. The “film look” technology is really amazing, but it just isn’t the same.
The newer generation of HD cameras will change all that, but for now I think it’s still done with real film. If not, I’d love to know more about what high-end series are using this technique.
I do recall a short-lived soap opera in the mid-90’s called “Sunset Beach.” It used a film treatment applied to videotape, but the technology just wasn’t ready yet and the effect annoyed viewers.
This statement is true but misleading. My understanding is that many primetime shows (I’m told most) are shot on film, then transferred to videotape for editing etc before broadcast.
I asked the same question back in college when I was acting in short films…(keep your eye on IFC, you’ll see me sometime). The director told me that certain films cut out every other frame or ever other 2 frames shot at a high speed giving a different effect. Normal speed or live TV footage resembles home videos and such and doesn’t have some certain “quality” that is a trademark of feature films. Also, it sometimes cuts back on what he called “background detail” which did something bad to the point of perspectives…I forget what. He was a weirdo, he had really long hair, 5 cats and he smelled like armpits.
-M
There was a thread about this a while ago in which someone referred to Douglas Trumbull’s experimental Showscan format, which was high resolution film shot at 60fps. Trumbull abandoned the filming of a Showscan movie - because the resulting film “looked too much like video”. This suggests that frame rate is an important factor.