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Particularly for those not in SoCal -and thus don't read the LA Times:

Kodak as a corporation is in real trouble...

will there be any of today's digital photos left in a 100 years? If Ansel Adams lived today would his pictures be remembered in 50 years from now? film is a semi-permanent media that lasts without any technology.

http://www.latimes.c...ewed+Stories%29

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i read the article this morning on the net. eric brings up a great point, which is related to what i've been thinking about regarding hd and the frame/aspect ratio. i think we're losing out on the intimacy of the performance in the wide frames. our human stereoscopic vision field is kind of narrow. here's 2 old tv commercials, and an arbuckle-keaton clip.

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I'm not sure I agree w you Gerard-NYNY. I think most commercials get in too close. Same with a lot of TV. The close up looses it power when used all the time IMO. Now on the RightGuard commercial I think it was the correct framing. That was a very successful spot BTW. It played all the time. The Buster Keaton n Fatty Arbuckle clip was brilliant acting and playing the frame as actors/dancers. I have never seen that piece before. Fantastic find.

CrewC

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I think Eric hits on an important point. Is it the look of HD or what we are used to seeing after 100 years of film. Still a fan of film.

CrewC

Another way of looking at this would be, if HD was 1st would we accept film as the new medium now and why isn't anyone complaining about the demise of analog tape?

Eric

Eric

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i agree, old school, that the cu is over-used. it was ready made for tv to beat to death. i think the alka seltzer commercial link (it wouldn't embed well, but i may try again) had a lot going for it, and against it in montage, but it seemed, like all of these clips, to not need an hd frame. but that's what we got now. the resolution is great. but the way lenses and framing worked in those days is something i miss.

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I agree Eric.

I think the time in ones life, as well as the state of the art at that time in any media/art-form has a lot to do with ones taste. To kids today, mp3 and iphone images and clips on youtube may ring their bell as say Sam Peckinpaws "Wild Bunch" or Jimi Hendricks "Axis Bold as Love" did mine way back when. I believe it is what you grow up with that becomes your base line of personal taste. What happens when one studies music or film say, taste can change with knowledge and exposure, but I think the base line always remains in ones taste or interpretation of media.

CrewC

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it works both ways. imagine if keaton and arbuckle (in the link embedded below) had our cameras, grip, and crane equipment. this simple stunt work (at least for keaton and luke the dog) would've been unimaginably funnier. although, these days it's a lot of special effects and greenscreen. stuntmen have been losing work these days.

The Scarecrow -- Mad Dog Scene:

http://youtu.be/TWyfxFAUbNo

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I believe that whatever the frame is and for whatever the reason for the frame, the performance within the frame is the deal. The reason for the effort. Sometimes the duration of a shot has more power than the framing and editing of the shots. I think the dance routine is a prime example. I'm not sure it would be unimaginably funnier with all the swooping camera moves available these days, but it would be a funny mash up of "Times" in media production.

CrewC

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I was in Costco today and noticed their HD TVs playing the latest Pirates of the Carib. movie on blu ray. The image was so clear that I felt like I was actually on set watching the actors say their lines. I guess that was the problem. It really didn't feel like a movie anymore.

Yeah, there's an awful "240Hz" mode that line doubles the image, essentially getting rid of the 24fps image character and making it look very "electronic," almost like video. It's h-i-d-e-o-u-s. I can't imagine why an engineer would create a feature like this and think, "yeah, that makes the picture look better." Morons. This is why whenever you buy a new set, the first thing you have to do is turn off all this automatic crap and set it all up by hand.

This is a very sad story about Kodak. So many paradigm shifts have happened in the last few years: the downward slide of the middle class, the collapse of the record industry, the shift to digital for film & TV production, the shift to digital for movie theaters, the death of bookstores, the rise of downloads. It's happening very quickly.

I just bumped into an old boss at the ASC clubhouse the other day, and he introduced me to an ex-Kodak exec. We chatted for a couple of minutes about how sad Kodak's fate is today, but the guy told me that he knew in the early 2000s that things were gonna fade out. I think nobody realized that 2011 would be the pivotal year, but this is when it really happened.

One hopes that all photographers and studios will keep lots of backups (in the cloud, on servers, on external drives, and all that), but I can see where a physical print might still last a lot longer. I know of a couple of major studios that still rely on 35mm negative as their major archival medium -- even if it's sourced from digital files -- for the reason that a 35mm film will probably still work 50 years from now. I'd strongly doubt that any digital file format will be recoverable in that amount of time.

--Marc W.

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We should etch the 1's and 0's into granite tablets and lock them away in a mountain for super long term storage. Then the next civilization after were gone will find them, decode them, and then "Battlefield Earth" will tell the tails of what happened to the last civilization. Or well until they find the tablet with "Hitch hikers guide to the galaxy" on it.

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We should etch the 1's and 0's into granite tablets and lock them away in a mountain for super long term storage. Then the next civilization after were gone will find them, decode them, and then "Battlefield Earth" will tell the tails of what happened to the last civilization. Or well until they find the tablet with "Hitch hikers guide to the galaxy" on it.

LMAO!!!!!

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" a physical print might still last a lot longer. "

It is, I think, interesting that some of DW Griffith's early films survive today only because rolls of 35mm contact prints on photographic paper were sent to register the copyright.

The huge % of early films, and I do mean light sensitive chemical emulsion film, has been lost, completely from barely +/- 100 years ago, and less, as even the original "film" (nitrate) turned out to be unsuitable for archival purposes, coupled with a lot of disregard for the historical significance of the movies themselves, which allowed them to be lost.

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The huge % of early films, and I do mean light sensitive chemical emulsion film, has been lost, completely from barely +/- 100 years ago, and less, as even the original "film" (nitrate) turned out to be unsuitable for archival purposes, coupled with a lot of disregard for the historical significance of the movies themselves, which allowed them to be lost.

Yeah, the number bandied about by the AFI is I think "50% of all American motion pictures made prior to 1950 are considered lost or damaged to the point where they're incomplete." Some major stuff -- like all the pre-1935 Fox films -- burned up in warehouse fires. A lot of the 1920s and early 1930s Warner Bros. "soundies" were lost, because the shellac Vitaphone records didn't survive, so they have the picture, but no sound.

Lost Film Article on Wikipedia

I have told this story before, but a major A-list movie I worked on in 2004 had unrecoverable digital files just a few months ago. The HD videotape was fine, and the 35mm negatives were fine.

The long term survival of movies is a big question for American culture. One of the best things about Scorsese's new movie Hugo is that a good chunk of the film touches on the subject of film preservation, and the tragedy of important historical films that are casually destroyed.

--Marc W.

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And back to audio!

I've just repaired and aligned three Nagras for a local university and re-lived my analogue days.

Sadly analogue tapes now suffer from the binder causing replay problems and do we remember that

during the early days of DAT that we were advised to archive everything in analogue formats!

Maybe LP vinyl would be the best solution!!!!!!!!!!!

mike

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Sadly analogue tapes now suffer from the binder causing replay problems and do we remember that during the early days of DAT that we were advised to archive everything in analogue formats!

The sticky-shed analog tapes we can bake and salvage. The DAT tapes... when those go, it's a nightmare. I haven't encountered any shedding DAT tape yet, but I bet it'll eventually happen.

--Marc W.

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