Got a short note from Chris – she wanted to know if movie theaters still used film reels. The question is really do they still use film in movie theaters, and it’s an interesting question. Almost no one uses film to take pictures, or home movies these days – it’s a digital world. If fact, people don’t even take home movies anymore – they’re videos – a term that probably wasn’t even in the dictionary when a lot of our generation was taking “home movies.”
So given that digital technology has already taken over almost all the home entertainment market, one would think that theaters would get rid of film. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of motion pictures continue to be shot and distributed on film, just like they have been for years. Over the years, the film itself and the projection equipment have improved and produce the high quality pictures we see in theaters today.
Digital cameras and projectors are also getting better all the time and probably the biggest boost to the use of digital cinema came from George Lucas when he “filmed” “Star Wars: Episode II, the Attack of the Clones” entirely on digital video. Due to the popularity of the movie, most theaters showed it after it had been transferred to 35-mm film, but a number of theaters played it using digital movie projectors.
Obviously the days of film projection in theaters and even the capturing of the movie itself are numbered – everything will be digital – and fairly soon.
There are lots of advantages to making movies using the new technology – in all aspects of the process, production, distribution and projection. There are also lots of problems or “issues” associated with converting all movies to digital.
Currently film and video have a lot of differences in image quality or clarity, depth of focus and color range, but the biggest difference is frame rate. Film cameras shoot at (typically) 24 frames per second and TV (video) cameras shoot at 30 frames per second – but the big difference is that most video is interlaced (the picture is “printed” by scanning every other line from top to bottom, and it’s scanned again, printing the lines that it left out.) This process is used to reduce “flicker” in the picture. Anyhow, all these factors combine to give video a completely different flavor or look than film. The newer professional video cameras can now shoot at 24 frames per second and can “mimic” film cameras. Things are progressing really fast to make video look just like film..
One of the big expenses in the movie industry is distribution of the film. The movie company has to make many copies of the film (costly) and then spend even more money shipping the heavy reels of film to theaters all over the country or world. If the movie is in digital format, it’s basically just a big computer file that can be written to a DVD, or sent via cable or over a satellite link, so there aren’t any “transportation” costs and it doesn’t cost the company much more to show the movie in 100 theaters than in just one.
Of course digital projectors are getting better all the time too, and now rival the film projectors. One disadvantage of digital projector technology is the fact that individual pixel elements within the projector may become defective and when that happens, it degrades the image of every movie shown on that projector. In the film world, if a film print gets scratched, it’s only that particular print that’s bad – just change the film.
So, the short answer to the question is “yes,” but practically speaking, video or digital is going to essentially replace film -soon. Thats just reality and practicality taking over. Maybe it’s for the best, but old films on reels are considered works of art these days – I wonder if the same content on a DVD will ever be considered to be art…
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