Early days of digital film

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

They were able to put together Seinfeld and Friends on HD because they had preserved the original 35mm elements. But there were other sitcoms, like The Cosby Show, Married with Children or Three's Company, were shot directly on video, like most of the daily programming such as soap operas, while most of the prime time offering, which was more prestigious and got bigger budgets, was film (there were also union factors, apparently).
Friends and Seinfeld looked like they were shot on video, because the masters had been supplied to the European networks from NTSC videotapes. Up until the 80s or early 90s, networks would get masters on film (or on a tape directly transferred from film), because shows were still edited on film. Then, for convenience and costs, VFX-heavy shows or sitcoms shot in 35mm multi-cam then dramas would do the editing on video, with foreign markets being a distant concern. These masters needed some de-telecine, then NTSC-to-PAL (or SECAM) conversion, hence the "video" look, which is now gone as they're sourced from the HD 24fps remasters.

If I remember correctly, Arrested Development was one of the earliest shows shot on HD, its mock reality TV style being a factor for using video.

[Noodle Lizard]

It's mad to think that Friends was shot on 35mm. The difference in production costs between Friends and something like The Big Bang Theory must be astronomical.

It's kind of fascinating how dingy the first couple of seasons of Friends look. It seems almost underlit at times. A sort of dark, brownish hue to it all. Completely at odds with its perception as an oversaturated, bright and bubbly piece of fluff (although it did become that from around season 6 onwards).

[Sebastian Cobb]

It's mad to think that Friends was shot on 35mm. The difference in production costs between Friends and something like The Big Bang Theory must be astronomical.

I think the production quality in American tv was much wider than over here but in both directions.

Take Always Sunny - it started in 2004 but the first couple of series look utter shit, 4:3, washed out, the blacks are greyish, its almost as bad as The Trailer Park Boys (which seemed to use those compact prosumer cameras that had that annoying ability to go so wide angle you could see the lens hood).

4:3 seemed to persist much longer too, and although they had budgets for 35mm you had weird stuff like The Wire being shot on film yet edited on tape with a crop of 4:3, even though it was a mid 2000's show. I think the first few series of Six Feet Under was in 4:3 as well.

[Noodle Lizard]

I think the production quality in American tv was much wider than over here but in both directions.

Take Always Sunny - it started in 2004 but the first couple of series look utter shit, 4:3, washed out, the blacks are greyish, its almost as bad as The Trailer Park Boys (which seemed to use those compact prosumer cameras that had that annoying ability to go so wide angle you could see the lens hood).

4:3 seemed to persist much longer too, and although they had budgets for 35mm you had weird stuff like The Wire being shot on film yet edited on tape with a crop of 4:3, even though it was a mid 2000's show. I think the first few series of Six Feet Under was in 4:3 as well.

Yeah, definitely. I listened through the Always Sunny podcast recently and they talked a bit about that in the first episode or two. If I remember correctly, they'd shot the pilot on a consumer camcorder, and apparently wanted to keep that aesthetic (and also keep their already tiny budget down).

I guess the question is when did digital become an acceptable substitute for "proper" stuff? The introduction of the Canon 5D in the late 2000s certainly made broadcast-quality shooting accessible to low-budget filmmakers (and they're still used, even in pretty high-profile productions), but I missed the moment where it became normal for the majority of film and TV to be shot digitally. I suppose it still hasn't totally transitioned - Breaking Bad was shot on film, Spielberg still shoots on film etc. - but there was a point somewhere around the turn of the 2010s where digital became the norm rather than a selling point. What was the main thing, though? It certainly wasn't Sky Captain or Sin City.

Incidentally: I think BlackMagic cameras are by far the best affordable option for low-budget filmmakers. The Sony A7 series and Canon 5D are both great, but BlackMagic cameras are designed purely with "the film look" in mind. It's astonishing how cheap they are compared with the output you can get. Pen to paper, it's not going to be quite as good as its ($20k+) counterparts, but with the right tweaking I could easily be fooled into thinking BM footage came from an ARRI Alexa.

[Ron Maels Moustache]

Yeah, I read more of that SOTCAA piece and it's credibility started to fall apart a bit when they claimed Trainspotting was shot on FRV. Actually they claimed Trainspotting was "filmed directly onto FRV" which leaves me scratching my head a bit. But's it's bollocks anyway, it was shot on film.

It's completely ill-informed nonsense which they only got away with at the time due to no-one else knowing too much about it. What kind of comedy nerds don't realise Friends, Frasier and Seinfeld were shot on actual film? Complete drivel.

They really were the Maconies of internet comedy criticism, spouting any old bollocks and hoping you're just too uninformed to notice.

"Even cinema films are shot on a form of FRV" - again, total bollocks. Circa 2000 when that article was published the majority of studios were still using film as standard, HD digital video was very new and untested as covered elsewhere in this thread.

"Also, it doesn't look so bad if the movie is shot directly onto FRV, rather than converted in the editing suite. It still looks a bit rubbish though. You'll notice that an FRV film like Trainspotting still has that slightly 'plastic' look to it." - What the fuck does this even mean?? It's gibberish. They're just pulling this out of their arse.

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

4:3 seemed to persist much longer too, and although they had budgets for 35mm you had weird stuff like The Wire being shot on film yet edited on tape with a crop of 4:3, even though it was a mid 2000's show. I think the first few series of Six Feet Under was in 4:3 as well.

Since the eighties, they wouldn't use four perforations per frame on 35mm on TV (as it's the case for movies), but three. Instead of a 1.33:1 image, they got 1.78:1, but they would only use the middle section to matte it as 1.33:1 again. So, they could use standard 35mm equipment and save 25% on the cost of film with the downside being a loss of resolution (but still superior to 16mm), which didn't really matter now that they wouldn't need anymore to make film copies of an episode (to send to local stations) but would just get a videotape instead.

Because the 1.33:1 framing was standard, they wouldn't care during production if there was a boom mike or any other equipment on the sides. In technical terms, it was composed for 1.33:1 but not protected for the 3-perf full frame in 1.78:1.
Around the mid and late nineties, some studios and networks started to pay attention to the inevitable switch to widescreen, and ordered showrunners to protect composition for 1.78:1. As 1.33 was still the target, you'd get some dead space on the sides instead of interesting information, but at least they were ready for the future.
The first two seasons (IIRC) by The Sopranos were broadcast and released on DVD in 1.33:1, because almost every TV was still 4/3 at the time, but this was a cropped presentation as they had been shot with widescreen as the intended aspect ratio (and protected for 1.33:1 so there wouldn't be too much loss when reframed), and the DVDs got re-released as widescreen down the road, when they remade video masters for the seasons.
For The Wire, there was a different creative (and financial) decision that resulted in 1.33 being the intended aspect ratio (but there would be more picture of the side because of the 3-perf thing). And when it was considered to switch to widescreen, they had already developed some aesthetic that required 1.33 as the base. And David Simon has (quite precisely) explained how much work they had to put in the HD 1.78 new masters to make them work.

https://davidsimon.com/the-wire-hd-with-videos/comment-page-2/

I don't know what the situation is for Six Feet Under. The first two seasons were 1.33 and the rest 1.78. And there hasn't been any HD remaster for the show. So, either they shot in 1.33 during the early seasons then made the switch to widescreen as soon as HBO asked them, or they could get some 1.78 version of these two seasons if there was a market for this.

The Shield is in a very bizarre situation. It was shot on 16mm film, but with the 16mm equivalent of 3-perf 35mm, which means that the frame was also widescreen (1.65:1). It was then protected for 1.78:1 (so they wouldn't take into consideration the top and the bottom of the frame), but the frame composed for 1.33:1 (and then they would also remove the left and right side). It was the preferred aspect ratio for Shawn Ryan, who wanted to achieve some grainy, gritty look, like a documentary shot on a handheld camera.
As a result, the episodes were shown on FX as 1.33:1 and released up to the fifth season on DVD in the US by Fox as 1.33:1. As the show was originally distributed jointly by Fox and Sony Pictures, Europe always got 16/9 DVDs from Sony, and the rights got into Sony's hands worldwide, starting with season 6, which means that they rereleased the early seasons and released the later seasons as widescreen. Shawn Ryan also had to accept that 16:9 had become the norm and approved the HD transfer that was readied in 2018.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Since the eighties, they wouldn't use four perforations per frame on 35mm on TV (as it's the case for movies), but three. Instead of a 1.33:1 image, they got 1.78:1, but they would only use the middle section to matte it as 1.33:1 again. So, they could use standard 35mm equipment and save 25% on the cost of film with the downside being a loss of resolution (but still superior to 16mm), which didn't really matter now that they wouldn't need anymore to make film copies of an episode (to send to local stations) but would just get a videotape instead.

That's interesting. Does that mean the cameras were incompatible with ones used for 4 perf productions as they shuffled less film around per frame, and required comparatively shorter lenses?

[greenman]

That's interesting. Does that mean the cameras were incompatible with ones used for 4 perf productions as they shuffled less film around per frame, and required comparatively shorter lenses?

3 perf 35mm would use the same lens systems as 4 perf, your losing a bit of coverage in height but the longest needed coverage that gets closest to the edge of the image circle is width and its the same in both of them.

A big shift I think you see in a lot of lower budget films/series using photography size 35mm(so horizontal not vertical as traditionally on film or super 35mm) is that shallow focus is used a lot more because its much easier/cheaper to achieve, when the Canon 5D mk2 started being used around the turn of the 2010's you started to see a lot of films/series going in that direction using shallow focus.

A lot of early digital stuff is exactly the opposite, the very small sensor sizes they were using meant that the ability to control focus is much more limited and I think you can see that in stuff like Attack of the Clones.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Yeah, I worked for a telly station for a bit and they had a sister channel with a shoestring budget that had to do some local programming to meet licence regulations so used to do OB's with dslr's connected to Dejero Goboxes*, the guy in charge was pretty chuffed at the fact they looked a bit more filmic than standard ENG cameras.

*These were pretty nifty basically a lunchbox sized box that can send the video back to the studio via either WiFi or by bonding several mobile connections together.

[buzby]

That's interesting. Does that mean the cameras were incompatible with ones used for 4 perf productions as they shuffled less film around per frame, and required comparatively shorter lenses?

There are different models of camera for 4-perf, 3-perf and even 2-perf 35mm (2.39:1 ratio, similar to anamorphic but obviously at a lower resolution). Some cameras can be converted between them - the Arricam ST/LT and Arriflex 235 have movement block kits that can be swapped out to give different pulldowns, others like the Arriflex 435 have to go to a workshop to be modified.

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

Sergio Leone shot most of his films on 2-perf 35mm (with a process called Techniscope) to save money on film stock, and because it allowed him to go widescreen without the help of an anamorphic lens. That's how he could achieve all those extreme closeups without the extra distortion brought by anamorphic (you also need to put more light). The film copies were converted to anamorphic, so theaters would still get regular 4-perf copies that needed to be shown in Scope.
Now, all those processes that carried distinct names in the past are now more or less regrouped under the "Super 35" umbrella term, with the aspect ratio being in the end 1.33, 1.78, 1.85 or 2.39:1, depending on the number of perfs used and the cropping applied. It became quickly used in TV and then gained popularity for cinema in the second half of the eighties, after film stock makers such as Kodak or Fuji were coerced into providing stocks of better quality, instead of the murkier stuff that they had started to favor in the late seventies due to the oil crises and the rising costs of chemicals, which causes the grainy look you have on most early eighties productions. With better stocks, the grain was less obvious and the definition was better, which allowed people to use less space for a frame on the film stock.
Super 35 is a favorite for some filmmakers, at least when they were shooting on film (Scorsese, the Coens, both Ridley and Tony Scott, David Fincher, late-era Spielberg, Tarantino...), and it's the reason for which there are 4:3 versions of many James Cameron films, as he framed for 2.39:1 but protected the shots for 4:3 on 4-perf Super 35.

The first two Daniel Craig Bond titles were Super 35, as Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) favored the gritty look that Super 35 allows for this particular entry, and Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace) stayed on the same course. Skyfall was shot on digital, framed for 2.39:1, but IMAX theaters got a non-matted version in 1.90:1 (that's also the footage you can see in the "Being James Bond" documentary). Spectre was regular 2.39:1 anamorphic 35mm (Panavision), and so is No Time to Die, with a few sequences in IMAX 65mm (and most likely, in both cases, a handful of shots that were digital).

[Sebastian Cobb]

In terms of blowing things up for display in the cinema I think Spielberg blew ET up onto 70mm projection mainly to take advantage of it's 6 track sound.

https://www.in70mm.com/library/engagements/film/e/et/index.htm

[Blumf]

after film stock makers such as Kodak or Fuji were coerced into providing stocks of better quality, instead of the murkier stuff that they had started to favor in the late seventies due to the oil crises and the rising costs of chemicals, which causes the grainy look you have on most early eighties productions.

Oooh, always wondered why late-70s/early-80s film had that grainy look. Very interesting, thanks.

It did work quiet well for a lot of the stuff from that period.

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

In terms of blowing things up for display in the cinema I think Spielberg blew ET up onto 70mm projection mainly to take advantage of it's 6 track sound.

https://www.in70mm.com/library/engagements/film/e/et/index.htm

Definitely. And as every step of duplicating film brings some extra grain, it would also allow the damage done to be much more limited.
That's a thing that film stock obsessives tend to overlook. The native resolution for 35mm film may require some scan at 6K of the original film negative to get the full information without any loss, but as there were an interpositive, an internegative, and copies that would wear out, the final resolution of the copy shown in theater was actually quite lower. Not to mention the trembling from frame to frame during projection.

It did work quite well for a lot of the stuff from that period.

Yeah, that was my thought. You can't imagine some of these films without that particular look.
Aliens was still particularly grainy on release, because they had experimented with a film stock that didn't work as planned. That's why it got some extra degraining when the Blu-ray was released, and that was a reasonable job. But it doesn't explain the amount of DNR for the current versions of Terminator 2.

[Sebastian Cobb]

My Arrow Bluray copy of Videodrome has some really prominent yet fine grain on it. I think it was supposed to be getting a 4k scan and UHD treatment at some point, dunno how much difference it'd make.

[Noodle Lizard]

I never quite understood why they bothered with fullscreen "pan-and-scan" versions of wide-screen movies for VHS. As if people would be angered by the black bars on the screen, or perhaps (more likely) the average consumer TV set wasn't big enough to see a matted image clearly from the sofa. But surely nobody liked the fullscreen versions, and sometimes it inspired whoever was running the operation to make other changes such as cutting out some violent shots from my copies of Spartacus and The Vikings, for some reason or other. Perhaps it's because the fullscreen versions might have also been designed with TV broadcast in mind.

I don't know, but thanks for letting me try and work it out in front of you all.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I think it was just sizing of tv's. I can't find it now but there's something in an old BBC standards manual about it being the preferred choice due to size of screen and effectively 'wasted definition'. Of course in those days everything else would've been broadcast as 4:3 so people would've been a lot more used to it.

[buzby]

Definitely. And as every step of duplicating film brings some extra grain, it would also allow the damage done to be much more limited.
That's a thing that film stock obsessives tend to overlook. The native resolution for 35mm film may require some scan at 6K of the original film negative to get the full information without any loss, but as there were an interpositive, an internegative, and copies that would wear out, the final resolution of the copy shown in theater was actually quite lower. Not to mention the trembling from frame to frame during projection.

Some directors and studios did commission small runs of Technicolor archival or exhibition prints of their films too, which came direct from the camera negative and had much finer grain than regular Eastman print stock. They also had the advantage of being much more colour stable due to the dye sublimation based print process. The most famous of these being the small run of Technicolor Star Wars archival prints.

I think it was just sizing of tv's. I can't find it now but there's something in an old BBC standards manual about it being the preferred choice due to size of screen and effectively 'wasted definition'. Of course in those days everything else would've been broadcast as 4:3 so people would've been a lot more used to it.

Up until the late 80s the average home would have had a 20" to 24" 4:3 TV.

Viewing a letterboxed film on one of those while sat on the sofa would have needed opera glasses. Even worse if you were watching from a VHS tape which had 300-line definiton if you were lucky, so your letterboxed film would have maybe 150 lines of resolution.

[greenman]

Definitely. And as every step of duplicating film brings some extra grain, it would also allow the damage done to be much more limited.
That's a thing that film stock obsessives tend to overlook. The native resolution for 35mm film may require some scan at 6K of the original film negative to get the full information without any loss, but as there were an interpositive, an internegative, and copies that would wear out, the final resolution of the copy shown in theater was actually quite lower. Not to mention the trembling from frame to frame during projection.

You did also have the effect of fades/credits as well which would add in an extra generation, that does now arguably stand out quite a bit more on UHD although some films like Lynch's Dune thats very heavy on that  they went back to the original elements to avoid this.

They did also do a bit of CGI work on the recent UHD of Flash Gordon I believe taking out a few more visible wires on the hawkmen.

Really though I think if at the time you'd offered directors the chance to display their work in modern quality the vast majority would have agreed to it, hence using 70mm when they could to limit the loss in quality.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Viewing a letterboxed film on one of those while sat on the sofa would have needed opera glasses. Even worse if you were watching from a VHS tape which had 300-line definiton if you were lucky, so your letterboxed film would have maybe 150 lines of resolution.

Luxury! Up until 2001 the main TV in my parent's lounge was a Sony KV-1820UB.



At some point my dad did a diy install of a Teletext board, removing the (seeming annoyingly bright) power light and fitting the IR receiver behind it. After that it ended up in my bedroom and even made its way with me to university, it only got put out to pasture because I got fed up of dot crawl on video games and wanted something with RGB (god I regret not keeping hold of the Philips CM8833).

The KV-28FX20U that replaced it is still going although rarely used as they have a panel in the extension.

[Blumf]

I never quite understood why they bothered with fullscreen "pan-and-scan" versions of wide-screen movies for VHS. As if people would be angered by the black bars on the screen

Oh god, they were! Always dimwits, and always whining when films were letter-boxed. Same idiots who can't handle black and white films.

In favour to pan & scan; a lot of TVs back then were small. Plenty of 14" units, and even the standard sized ones might not stretch past 21". Plus, a good P&S operator could work really well with the source material, kind of an unsung talent in the production process.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Oh god, they were! Always dimwits, and always whining when films were letter-boxed. Same idiots who can't handle black and white films.

The same people who watched everything in stretchyvision on wide-screen sets.

[beanheadmcginty]

Looking at these, I didn't realise how lucky our household was in having a TV where the Teletext lined up properly with the screen.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Those sets predate fasttext which means no Bamboozle for you, IIRC from personal experience you couldn't even select your answer by manually keying in the page the fasttext short-cuts mapped to even if you knew them, because they tended to be in the hexadecimal range (e.g. page 20F).

I love how in each television description they need to point out that "mute button turns sound off". And the PYE sets can helpfully forget your picture presets at the push of a button. I'm sure dads loved that one!

[peanutbutter]

Teletext tangent but I saw recently that it's apparently possible to pull old teletext pages from VHS. Feels like the kind of thing I'd've noticed at some point as a kid but I've no recollection of it. https://github.com/ali1234/vhs-teletext

[Sebastian Cobb]

I think that's been around and is pretty impressive, I hope it ends up in archive.org or wherever.

On the VHS resolution tip I have a film I've been meaning to rip and bought a decent enough panasonic machine to rip it with. My Dad still has a vcr and tapes so I asked him if he had a spare one just so I could try it out and give the thing a good clean in case it decided to chew the film. He sent me one up with both standard and long play recordings on it and I'd forgotten how bad long play can be although to be fair the source was an episode of twin peaks and a bit of a ghosty signal. Neither of the LCD tv's I tried could maintain reliable vertical sync on it (although fine with SP), I've not tried servicing the machine yet so don't know if it's that, a bit clapped out or the fact that modern tellies don't play well with crap signals, I suspect an old set with a traditional flywheel sync circuit might be a bit less fussy to begin with. I've definitely seen modern digital tuners struggle with the crappy modulators that come with games consoles.

The machine can actually do Extended Play, but don't have the remote to switch it to that, tempted to get a universal just to bask in how terrible it looks.

[Mister Six]

Absolutely. There's also something to be said for how this ease of use affects our cognitive function, creatively or otherwise. Having to circumvent or solve problems forces a lot more focus and attention to detail, a bit like a muscle being exercised. In the creative fields, at least, deadlines and turnaround times have jumped to match the absolute quickest workflows current technology can offer, so you don't get to exercise that muscle nearly as much.

That's a double-edged sword though. I was talking to a bloke who works in CGI and asked him why so frequently it looks smudgy, underlit or obscured by smoke/snow/rain/whatever. He said it's frequently because the CG bods have been given too short a deadline or not enough resources, and are trying to fudge dodgy takes or rough rendering. In particular, he said, films run into trouble because directors won't plan CGI sequences properly, or will rely too heavily on the idea of CGI being some kind of magical cure-all, and will demand retakes of graphics-heavy scenes up to the wire.

This was just a bloke in a bar so might be a load of bollocks, but he sounded very convincing.