Kodak resurrects Super 8(kodak.com) |
Kodak resurrects Super 8(kodak.com) |
Personally though, I would rather have something similar to analog that doesn't require the cost and time/complexity. I wonder how many folks will buy these to go with them: http://nofilmschool.com/2013/12/nolab-digital-super-8-cartri...
Which I actually sort of appreciate (in my less cynical moments). Though, if it's just that they've never shot anything on film, I'm sure they have friends or co-workers with old still cameras gathering dust. Borrow one, shoot a roll of film, send it off to be processed, and the urge will probably have gone away by the time you get your prints back. You can get those prints scanned too if you like.
An old boss of mine used to say something similar: "That's a cure for no known disease".
If you like in hollywood tho, it's probably cheaper to rent a 4k camera for your next blockbuster.
Photographs belong to the person who pressed the shutter release. The actual format or medium of the photograph (digital, print, negative, whatever) is irrelevant to the copyright, which is created during the act of taking a photograph.
So remember: Next time you hand someone your camera to take a picture of you, that person effectively owns the copyright on that image. Including a monkey[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie#Copyright_issues
PS - Although I'm sure you have to give them a license to your copyrighted photo so that they can display it back to you on their website. It is standard industry practice. Doesn't mean they have redistribution rights or own the copyright however.
"Instagram does not claim ownership of any Content that you post on or through the Service. Instead, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service, subject to the Service's Privacy Policy..."
AWS: "We do not access or use customer content for any purpose other than as legally required and for maintaining the AWS services and providing them to our customers and their end users. We never use customer content or derive information from it for marketing or advertising."
SoftLayer: "As a Processor, SoftLayer will not access the Customer Content for any purpose beyond providing You with support as described above, and will not disclose it to any person or entity."
I can still tell the difference between film and digital. It could be I'm too used to film? It could be I'm partially color blind? Whatever the reason, I like the look of film.
Recent example. I watched Dumb and Dumber Too. Yes--it was bad on a lot of levels, but what really suprised me was the look of the movie. It just looked cheap. Say what you want about a Farelly brothers movie, they always looked great. I then looked into it, and one of the Farelly brothers was given the choice between film, or digital. The producers brought him to a digital lab, where the techs applied the film "look" program to make the digital look like film. Farley couldn't tell the difference. I sure could? They went with digital. If this is their last digital film--they will have settled to controversy--in my little world. I just have a feeling their next movie will be in film?
As to digital photography. When digital finally hit the practical point, I went digital. For myself, it was the Canon 20D, I bought the camera, and three very expensive lenses. Yes, it took great pictures. Great pictures to what? I wasen't a photographer before digital? I didn't know better. Actually, as a kid, I was a photographer. I used a Pentax K1000, and a Canon 350D. A few years ago I found a stash of negatives. I had them blown up, and asked a couple of family members to pick the best pictures. These were nature pictures. All picked my kid pictures. Maybe I was a better photographer as a kid? I don't know.
If I was going to "gear" up again, I think I would stay with film. Not because I think it's that much better, but because the used lenses, are so cheap right now. A used Canon F 2.8 300mm lens is under a grand used. The digital Canon 2.8 300mm lens is a minimum of $3500 used(usually beat up.).
To anyone who honestly wants to get into photography, but funds are tight, look into film. Hell, I wouldn't even bother with color. I would set up a bathroom darkroom, and set up shop.
I guess it's easy for me to throw around this advice. I'm not going back to chemicals in the sink. I have bought the digital equipment, and probally won't go back to film. Oh yea, whatever you do stick with prime lenses. That was my biggest mistake. Buy whatever camera bare. Buy the lenses(glass--if you want to sound like one of those guys--I never wanted to be in that club.) Buy your primes separately. Try to keep your digital camera not in [fully auto] all the time, but then again, I sometimes wonder why.
My ex-girlfriend is a professional photographer--takes studio pictures of old stuff. She loved to brag about it. "I'm a professional Photographer. Did you know, I take pictures for a living?" Yes--it was worse than going to the dentist, but maybe I was being too critical? She has never been in manual mode, TV, or even AV mode. She doesn't know about F stops, or exposure times. I think she got lucky though. I told her the pictures were Spectacular, but I really though they were too Photoshopped. As to her job--well it's a lot about who you know at big corporations.
Good luck--
I got one of those as a gift, probably so I'd stop borrowing his Spotmatic (the K1000 was basically an 80s version of the 60s Spotmatic, with an annoyingly different lens mount).
I think a large aspect of picture quality when we were kids, is rich grandpa can give you triple digits worth of camera at Christmas, but I paid my own way on consumables and I had to push a broom at the food store for something like ten minutes per pix once all the costs of analog were accounted for. Large sheets of photo paper for enlargements were not cheap, either.
Something often overlooked is the analog era was extremely expensive.
If you want Instagram to display your photograph back to you (or other users at your request) then you have to grant them a license like this.
Where terms get concerning is when they want a redistribution license, or they want to allow unnamed third party "partners" to be able to utilise your photograph royalty free. Neither of which appear in the snippet above.
Does "sub-licensable" not allow the "partners" you speak of?
That's pretty much "Screw you we can do what we want now".
The final product will be delivered digitally for 99.9% of consumers. Why fight it? Why spend so much money, time, and effort, to work with inferior media? I dunno. I worked on analog tape machines (I was even a hold out, for a while, having a 1" 16 track machine, as big as a mini fridge, in my house for several years after digital multitracks were the smart choice), but there really is no good argument for it today.
There was a brief window where the best digital equipment was inferior to the very best analog equipment, but it didn't last long. Maybe five years. We may still be in that window for film when comparing 70mm film to the best digital equipment...but, on the low end? Hell no. This janky little camera from Kodak will be a joke compared to digital equipment in the same price range. And, the film/processing costs will be outrageous comparatively speaking, limiting ones options when shooting to a significant degree.
In short: This is just hipster bullshit. Just like analog audio is hipster bullshit.
This, and not superstition is the reason we still have tube amps, 24 fps polyester film ("celluloid"), vinyl records and the rest. That's not to say superstition is not rampant in the professional fields, We've all seen it: gold plated wires that deliver no measurable improvements, creators that refuse to touch the same application in an (much cheaper and faster) Windows PC as opposed to the "pro" Mac version, "magic" equipment brands that "all the pros use" and so on.
It's essentially a cargo-cult: we try to emulate successful creators and get fixated on the appearances. If we get success, often time by sheer luck, we attributed to brand X or Y and spread magic thinking to others.
I suspect its the same thing in cinematography.
Double blind tests do real havoc to all kinds of fetishism from wine-tasting to high end audio.
Mixing desks are said to colour the sound in certain ways, and in doing so, introduce harmonics and other sorts of imprecision that would be anathema to digital components, for which THD and SNR are paramount and utter precision is the ultimate goal. Then, in the end, people listen to the source material with their own ears, which have totally different frequency responses anyway and the eardrum is basically an analogue device that will color the sound in the end anyway :D
But then you start getting into things like guitar sounds. It's not that digital guitars sound better or worse - all you can really say is that they sound different. The real issue is that there's no objective sound that it should have - the electronics, whether digital or analogue, are effectively part of the instrument. And in the same way that analogue amps and effects colour the signal in specific ways that a guitarist or engineer might prefer, film imparts its own aesthetic qualities that a director or cinematographer might prefer.
I say yes, but I'm a software guy. And I've had this argument with a serious pro audio engineer who has a Pro Tools workstation built around a Neve 8816— even though every track is digital, and dozens of digital filters are applied, the tracks each pass through their own DAC connected to this old-school analogue summing mixer, and then are re-recorded on the other side. It seems totally foreign to me, but there are definitely recording professionals still spending a lot of money to set up and maintain these workflows.
Humans aren't designed for a 'virtual' existence - the technologies may be very useful and empowering in many ways, but they shouldn't take over life and reality.
I sometimes shoot medium format film and the artistic results are often better, albeit with lower fidelity. The reasons as far as I can tell are due to both technical constraints that force you to be more mindful of what you are doing, the unique way light is interpreted by film, and mechanically superior vintage optics.
Could I achieve the same results in post processing? Yeah, if I calibrate exactly to colour rendering of my sensor, figure out the correct white balance, colour space, and the necessary adjustments. Although, given that even DxO Optics with their FilmPack addon doesn't give me the exact results I get from say Fujichrome Provia 100F film, I doubt that it's that easy.
Telling everyone you're vegan is hipster bullshit. This is just an artistic tool.
Not sure I'd film on Super 8 though, it ends up being pretty costly and hassly, and you can get a pretty good match to those colours (if that's what you want) using flat or RAW profiles and film stock LUTs on digital cinema cameras
I feel like there's a difference between working with limited means as a tool for creativity, and something like this.
But, I guess, more importantly: I hate the delusion, under which so many people operate, that analog provides higher quality than digital. If your argument is that this is a great idea because it kinda sucks and working with kinda sucky equipment makes you feel more creative, then I can't argue (again, I enjoy writing music on a Gameboy, which is truly sucky), but the moment you make the argument that it looks/sounds better than modern digital equipment is the moment I dismiss the opinion as hopeless superstition.
However, the end result may or may not be better/higher quality. Transportation is moving from mostly hydraulic/mechanical to electrical/computer controlled, Comms (analog to digital), Food (local whole foods to distant mega farms and processing), etc.
Old technology is far less efficient, but can be much more robust. For example, knowledge recorded in a book cannot become corrupt due to a failing hard disk controller, or lost due to electrical surge from a near by lightning strike. And, one can still send a message over radio waves using Morse Code to distant places even when cell phones fail due to network outages or cyber attacks.
So while we are smaller, faster, cheaper and much more accessible today (in almost every way... thanks to technology), our systems are much more fragile and dependent on other components. In many cases, this is why older technology is used.
Look, I own multiple all-tube amps for my guitars. I understand the appeal (though it's much more complicated than "tube is better"). I even understand the science for why tubes sound "good" and why solid state amps sound "less good". (To be clear: It is not merely the presence of tubes.)
There are so many confounding variables, however, that people end up believing that a shitty so-called "tube" preamp that costs $20 to manufacturer and runs on a 5V power supply is somehow superior to a high quality solid state preamp just because it has a tube. The most sought after old Neve consoles and channel strips that people love so much? Solid state; not a tube in sight. They're loved because they were extremely high quality, and have a subtle distinctive sound that is what our favorite records sound like (at least, our favorite records from a certain era of well-funded studio dilettantes).
And, while we're at it, the best way to capture that particular color is digital. The difference between Dark Side of the Moon and a digital recording today that doesn't sound as amazing as Dark Side of the Moon has less than nothing to do with DSOTM being recorded analog vs. digital and everything to do with the kind of budget, time, and skill Pink Floyd had in the studio.
I'm not arguing there isn't a difference in quality to be discerned between different pieces of equipment. There absolutely is. But, Super 8 is not and never was, a high quality way to get images onto a screen. It was a compromise based almost entirely on cost. It just so happened that for many years it was a compromise that was necessary for filmmakers on a tight budget...video took a long while to catch up, and it probably took the switch to extremely high definition digital video to really put the nail into film's coffin.
Slide film was always a challenge to expose just right, its dynamic range is pretty narrow compared to negative film. Its what you needed to use for movies though.
I can't see this new revival being more than a niche market. Sending film away and waiting a week might not cut it in todays market when phones shoot hd and can edit.
There are a bunch of these. The "imposible project" [1] bringing back polariod film being another. Polariod though has the advantage of being instant.
Kodak makes movie film only because the major studios, at the urging of some older directors, pay them to do so.[1] (Pro movie film sales were down 96%) The studios have to pay for a certain amount of film whether they take it or not. This leaves Kodak with a paid-for, underutilized film production plant and film development facilities. That's probably why Kodak is doing this.
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/kodak-to-continue-making-movie-f...
Currently, there are small digital cameras like the Blackmagic Pocket Camera (BMPCC) camera, under $1k, which have a capability to shoot images that are so similar to 16mm film that the average consumer couldn't tell.
The bottom-line today: if you want the 8mm vibe, you oversample your image when shooting (16mm or 35mm digital) and then degrade the image in post-production to 8mm.
I suppose one argument might be that the additional hurdles of the traditional workflow can be a constraint that boosts creativity.
Edited and color graded on digital intermediate
Other people are going digital, but Quentin Tarantino seems to be busy taking film to the next level instead :)
But I suppose it could also have been shot digitally and nobody would have spotted the difference. Maybe.
That said, you can't get the entire Super8 look with digital filters. There are optical properties (have to use the same lens and sensor size), and the way it handles highlights vs lowlights is different than digital sensors. (The 'rolloff' in the highlights, rather than clipping at saturation, is very desirable.)
And it's true that film isn't entirely dead in Hollywood. Quentin Tarantino shot his most recent film on 70mm stock. But that's nearly 100x the resolution of 8mm film, so they're not really comparable. OTOH, I recently saw Wes Anderson's "Moonrise Kingdom," which was shot on 16mm reversal (color, not negative) film stock for the look.
In each case, the choice of film stock definitely affected the look of the film. It also affected the act of shooting the film; even if you can mimic a filmic look digitally (through digital acquisition and post processing), shooting digitally is very different than shooting film. I happen to prefer digital, but courses for horses.
But yeah, for consumers, it's pretty much a hipster affectation. Good for Kodak, though! Also of note in the annals of hipster retro photography is 'The Impossible Project,' which revived Polaroid film:
https://www.the-impossible-project.com/
Also, 'lomography.'
The problem with 9.5mm is that when the projector jams, which happens rather frequently, it tears the film apart right through the middle or, in milder cases, enlarges each hole between frames. It's horrible and nerve-wracking.
8mm projectors don't jam as frequently, and when they do, each frame is usually somewhat salvageable because only the track of holes on the side gets damaged.
Anyway, as most comments already said, there is no point in shooting analog in 2015 if you're not Tarantino (and even if you are).
That's the advantage digital has - you don't mail the pictures anywhere. Nobody can lose them for you. (Yeah, you can still lose them yourself...)
This is how wedding photographers who shot on film avoided getting sued into oblivion by angry brides (and yes, there are many, many photographers who have been sued into oblivion by angry brides, contract or no contract).
:-<
Amateurs for home movies? Nope, digital will always be cheaper, and faster/more convenient to work with to boot.
Aspiring filmmakers? Nope, if you want to shoot on film professionally you'll want at least 16mm to avoid the magnification/graininess Super 8 brings with it.
People nostalgic for the blurriness of old home movies? Do any of these actually exist?
From the wikipedia entry, "From the $90 range in 1997, Kodak shares closed at 76 cents on January 3, 2012".
[1] Anecdote.
Part of the problem is that there simply isn't as much money to be made in digital as there was in analog. A digital camera doesn't need film, but film (and film processing) accounted for much of Kodak's profits for many years. So it's not just a simple matter of "make digital cameras instead of analog ones".
Also, remember that Kodak was very big into digital imaging, and was considered the leader in the field of high-end digital cameras. That is, until the Nikon D1 came along around 1999. Even then, Kodak sensors were common among the next few generations of DSLRs.
I grew up with Kodak products -- had a darkroom as a kid and every chemical, every paper, every film was made by Big Yellow. My camera was a Kodak Instamatic.
It is sad to see these organizations evaporate from disruption. Progress and all that, but still sad.
Isn't this the mindset that drove them into the ground in the first place?
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2050601.m5...
Why would people pay that kind of money for this?? Do they need it to play their old disks? Wouldn't it be cheaper to have them transferred to another media by a lab?
He even bought a multitrack minidisc desk. Apparently it was going cheap. I understand why - with 4 tracks of audio, it'll record 15 minutes. No good for long jams.
I do not understand the fascination with it at all. Even an old Tascam portastudio or the modern equivalents that record to SD card would be better.
I'm surprised it's still popular enough however, I'd have thought modern flash based platforms would have killed minidisc by now. It was different back in the early 2000s.
As an amateur photographer I tend to see film users a lot. I shoot digital but I'd like to shoot film too. The reality is that there are some artifacts that film gives you that you can't replace in digital yet. In art, if the effect or feeling that you want is given on a certain tool then that is the tool for the job. In photography, if this is film, then film is the right tool for the job. There's also the large factor of workflows. People get used to a workflow that influences their style and it's important to them to maintain that workflow. What is measurably better in technical terms is not important.
What I see happening is that market trends like this will push digital forces to perfectly re-creating classic films. The difficulty with re-creating film with filters or presets is it's notoriously hard to do and usually not perfect. Fujifilm is a perfect example of this with their film simulation modes on their X-Mount camera lineup. I suspect that the film trend is going to push photography giants into creating more accurate emulation of film baked into their workflows and devices rather than the current trend of generic hipster Instagram filters or playing in Lightroom for a few hours (and still not getting the effect you want).
Whether you're a professional or a 16y/o girl with a K1000 and mix-matched 80's leg warmers film still does have a place amongst people and this will in turn affect the development of digital processing.
One of the most characteristic features of Super 8, at least to me, is the complete lack of audio (at least, on most Super 8 works). So if you went to a theater to see something on Super 8 there might be a live band playing the soundtrack.
I wonder if Kodak is doing something like putting audio on the SD card and then storing digital synchronization marks on the film somehow.
Edit: To be clear, I know you can already put audio on Super 8. It's just that most Super 8 films I've seen in the theater have had no audio or live audio. And yes, I looked at the specs. The specs don't mention anything at all, but the product rendering appears to show jacks for audio and data, and I'm wondering how that's incorporated.
http://priceonomics.com/why-every-movie-looks-sort-of-orange...
it's teleported to some hipster cloud storage now.
[Edit: And actually I don't believe Kodak makes a reversal Super 8 film any longer, although others do.]
With a video assist, that light is simply captured by a sensor (yes, exactly like in a video camera) and presented to the user on a video display. Some use a beam-splitter to deliver the analog view to the cameraperson while still sending some photons to the video tap.
Note, in both cases, the light that hits the film itself is never visible to anyone until after development -- the camera crew gets to see the photons that are rejected, which can do weird things when you go to unusual shutter speeds (the image gets darker in the viewfinder as you increase the exposure)... though I believe there were some 16mm Bolexes that simply used a beamsplitter, so the viewer saw the same scene as the film stock -- but don't quote me on that.
I'd guess it's cheaper/easier than using glass especially to support swivel. Unclear if there's a prism in the light path though or if they're getting the image to the sensor in some other way. It would seem to take away from the whole retro vibe though.
(Plus it has SD, USB, etc... but there's no documentation as to what they do. Maybe you can store lo-fi digital versions for rushes and offline pre-editing.)
1. DSLR users are not.
2. The whole point of this exercise is to make a product for people who want a retro (and largely impractical) film movie camera. What people are used to is [EDIT: 100% digital cameras].
But how else will your viewers know that you were hip enough to shoot on film?
I mean. "There are some moments that digital just can't deliver, because it doesn't have the incomparable depth and beauty of film." Um, we're not talking 70mm Panavision here. We're talking Super 8. Has whoever wrote this ever seen a Super 8 movie?
Sure you could shoot a perfectly in-focus colour corrected image and filter it, but there's something fun about not knowing the result instantly. It's the reverse of when digital cameras came out, then instant was exciting.
Let me guess, you have never ever used a super 8 camera. I have, and FUN is the last word that will come to my mind about those machines.
Using a new cartridge and not being sure about light exposure in complex scenes, only knowing about it after having sent the cartridge away and returned. Idem with motion response, color and lots of little things that now we have feedback about in seconds, but at the time, took weeks.
I mean, after all the pain now you need to mount the projector, switch light off only to discover that your film is ruined, because you did not take the right decisions or just the developer lab did it wrong. Frustration, anger, disappointment, anything but fun.
This happened several times to my father. It was an expensive process to learn, only fun if you did not pay for it.
It was a pain in the ass.
The skateboard scenes in the movie were shot on Super 8, as inspired by the common style for home made skate films.
Here's a short clip: https://vimeo.com/7170912
Look at all the people buying vinyl records and ask yourself that again.
Once upon a time the only way to get some text printed was to hire somebody to arrange lead type letter-by-letter and print your thing on a six-ton iron press. This required significant amounts of training to do well and still resulted in artifacts of the process, in this case slight debossing of the paper as the fibers were crushed between the press and the type.
Then came photolithography and xerox and laser printers, and nobody saw the point of all that labor and machinery.
Then came inkjet printers and Microsoft Word and email, and suddenly a textual message doesn't seem to have the gravitas or expertise that once did. At which point, having something letterpress printed is very noticeable and neat, even if you can't put your finger on what's different, and a person who does letterpress printing has necessarily invested enough time to correlate with passion and a keen typographic eye.
Once the old thing takes off, people really want those artifacts of the antique process, to the point where contemporary letterpress printers are goaded into ramping up the pressure on the press until the paper is crushed to oblivion and your print is ridiculously three-dimensional, more so than would have been acceptable back in old times.
Similarly, people who are shooting on Super 8 these days are really looking for grain and weird color temperature. And it also explains why, like photolithography, 16mm or analog video are neither distinctive nor expensive enough to be as interesting.
Digital music can't simulate having a physical album cover, an e-ink screen won't ever be similar to a printed page, no music encoding will physically prevent loudness-wars mastering the way a vinyl record will (the needle would just jump out of the track), no printer will ever be able to fool someone into thinking a document was written on a typewriter.
You can tell the difference if a piece of mail was signed by a human with a pen instead of a printer, and it means something.
The limitations of analog media are very often their strengths, especially in corner cases. The limitations of a medium are often a significant driver for the creative process and losing them or approximating them makes lots of things worse.
Normally people (morally) opposed to analog media spout just as much pseudoscience in defense of their position. (normally people arguing about such things on the Internet are idiots anyway)
I suspect this would allow you to record digitally at the same time you were exposing film perhaps, or even use it as a digital video camera without film.
I'm excited, I want one.
At 24 fps, with each frame being 4.01mm tall, means 96.24mm (3.7 inches) per second of magnetic stripes (there are two, presumably for left + right channels). This is roughly twice the speed that cassette tapes used (1-7/8" per second). Their announcement doesn't say if there's any audio compression/encoding used, but I used to use a dbx compression/expansion box to lower the noise floor on cassettes with very good results.
One of the nice things about Super 8 was how easy it was to edit. You used a cutting station that had pegs to ensure your cuts were between frames, and glued them together after scraping off a little bit of emulsion. Adding audio complicates matters, as the audio track is offset from the matching frame by about 3 inches.
I know some 8mm cameras can take standard 16mm film that's been cut in half.
http://www.kodak.com/ek/US/en/consumer/Product/Product_Specs...
"FILM GAUGE: SUPER 8 ( EXTENDED MAX-8 GATE )
FILM LOAD: KODAK CARTRIDGES WITH 50 FT (15 M)
SPEED: VARIABLE SPEEDS (9, 12, 18, 24, 25 FPS) ALL WITH CRYSTAL SYNC
LENS MOUNT: C-MOUNT
FOCAL LENGTH: FIXED / 6 MM, 1:1.2 – RICOH LENS (OPTIONAL ZOOM 6-48 MM LENS )
FOCUS / APERTURE: MANUAL FOCUS & IRIS"
etc.
And I agree with you, analog nonlinearities are more apparent when you generate the sound.
Having said that, as a practical example, there is a big difference in the sound of drums (loud, fast transients) recorded to tape vs digitally. I really like the sound of tape for certain things. For some things, it doesn't make that much of a difference. The amount of mojo depends on your tape recorder, tape formulation and amount of overdrive.
Remapping those onto new gear may cost them more than they feel it's worth, or they don't see the value somehow.
Whether that makes objective sense varies a lot.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/help-star-war...
Having said that, you are still probably right. There is always going to be someone that prefers an analog process--maybe BECAUSE of how inconvenient it is--to a digital process. Some people also like working within constraints as it stimulates their creativity.
You're ignoring the fact that the application must run within the confines of an operating system.
I'm not using a single application at a time. "The same application" you refer to might be nearly identical on both platforms, but I need to switch between applications. On OS X I have Mission Control (with trackpad gestures!) that makes context switching incredibly efficient. On Windows I have to click taskbar buttons, or press alt+tab hundreds (thousands?) of times a day, or take a break to hit windows+tab to have a laugh at the incredibly useless task switcher (I've never understood why windows+tab was allowed to ship). How people multitask on Windows is beyond me, with no friendly built-in solution and third-party applications that all have problems.
How about copy/pasting? Using ctrl+c and ctrl+v on Windows with a PC keyboard is frustrating compared to the cmd+c and cmd+v finger positioning on an Apple keyboard with OS X. Microsoft requires an awkward readjustment to reach for the control key, while Apple uses your thumb that is already resting on the spacebar to hit the cmd key that is right there. When you use copy/paste hundreds of times in a typical day (ex: programmer), this minor annoyance adds up.
How about finding per-application settings? On OS X this is always accessible via the cmd+, shortcut and the menu entry is always within the app's primary menu. On Windows every application has its own shortcut (if any), and the menu entry might be found under any of File, Edit, View, or Window. It's always a hunt just to open application preferences. I personally find this to be a frustrating experience and a waste of my time.
Finally, I simply prefer the visuals and widgets/controls of OS X compared to Windows. OS X is flat and simple whereas Windows tries way too hard to look "cool" (ie: designed by children for children). Also, OS X developers (other than for game clients) don't think it's cool to throw away the default window border and window controls (minimize, close, etc.). Whereas far too many Windows developers think it's cool to customize their fucking window style. Leave the system components alone.
If you're telling me that there is no sonic reason to put stuff to tape then I'm sorry, you have no authority to me. BTW, the reason old Neve boards sound that way it because of the transformers and the analog components in the path. You're so convinced of your own opinion that you didn't even read what I wrote.
Sarcasm aside, the modeling amp I'm looking at getting has a tube in it (Vox VT40X, 12AX7). I love my JVM410H but it's nice to not share with the entire neighborhood sometimes.
"a camera's running speed is locked to the digitally divided oscillations of a quartz crystal, with an accuracy of a few parts per million. The function of the pilot cable was to feed a representation of the camera's speed to the recorder. Since with crystal control that speed is precisely known, the cable can be replaced by a similarly accurate crystal generator mounted in the audio recorder. This eliminates any connection between camera and recorder, but permits them to stay in sync with each other. A pilot signal is recorded as above, but it comes from the built-in crystal instead of the camera. The resulting tape is resolved to mag film just the same as a pilot tape. You still need a clapper board for a start mark."
So, it doesn't actually record the sound, but it is capable of being sync'd to the recording of the sound.
There were quite some improvements between older and the latest models though, and the latter could also use uncompressed and/or lossless schemes.
the fascination with it at all.
One thing I really liked about it is the handling of discs. I don't know why, but I just liked the feeling of opening the player, ejecting a disc and inserting another one with a satisfactory 'click'.
Wobbling CDs into top-loading CD players was never as satisfying (and you were likely to scratch the underside of it as you slid it into the caddy).
Loading MP3s isn't satisfying at all.
Alternatively, you can buy a film factory when it gets shut down, but these tend to produce film in large batches, and it might be difficult to repair the machines. People have done this before.
Color film? Basically impossible. Probably comparable difficulty to building your own ICs. Only a handful of companies were ever successful at it.
Speaking of which, Kodak doesn't even make E-6 film any more.
C41 is a pain in the ass and I only bothered a few times - but with a little practice you can develop positive film perfectly at home - all about being able to work blind, and having a series of tubs at the right temperatures. Admittedly my first few tries ended up with lomo quality from a rollei!
Go look at great pixel art from the 80's and 90's era on an analog CRT.
Overall, modern displays do more and are better in every way. But, I find watching SD media is best on analog SD media.
Or I see a movie in ultra high resolution. Looks like a set. I can see it. But my copy of "How The West Was Won" reissued on Blu Ray is one of the very best I've seen.
This stuff has subtleties that people appreciate.
I find it much easier to go looking for and appreciate art where I see it, and largely ignore the more objective persist of perfection. It's a good thing, but I don't always care.
> Overall, modern displays do more and are better in every way. But, I find watching SD media is best on analog SD media.
Well, this is because the pixel art was specifically designed (sometimes intentionally--sometimes just because that's what the artist used to make it) to the limitations of the CRT's is was going to be used on. Consequently, it looks worse when viewed on something that doesn't have the particular blurring, filtering, circularizing characteristics for which it was designed.
There is a fine art there to be appreciated. This is why Spielberg still shoots film. He has a mastery that continues to have value. He may find all of that blunted in the digital realm. Can't blame him.
I think we will eventually find the art in high resolution digital comes down to things other than perfection. Sometimes too much of a good thing is too much.
On another thread, I mentioned Pink Floyd, "The Wall" and how it has been reissued on CD and a remastered gold version that is insane good.
Actually, it is too good. The average person may well appreciate the production values from the earlier work more, despite its considerable distance from perfection.
The trouble on all these discussions centers in on what people like as opposed to perfection. Those two are not always the same, and "better" has that subjective component to it always.
Many digital movie productions I see have subtle aspects to them one can find distracting or that break the immersion a movie is supposed to deliver. Not breaking that is Cinematography. I remain unconvinced everyone really understands that.
That's where the art is.
This is not to say advances in tech are bad or to be discouraged. Neither is true.
However, value perception of said tech may vary considerably from expectations.
On your last point, we actually lose the pixel art, and often the discussion goes to other things. Fine, but it's not always bad to see the pixels.
With gaming, extreme realism, or just extreme quality, can break some of the escape and fantasy, abstraction inherent in the entertainment form. There is definitely room for both and an active retro culture and indie scene taking liberally from retro in order to see that art continue.
The are also some economies with analog means. I'm on a chip project right now that can offer up great analog display. (Truth is, it will do a 4k on analog, no sweat, if one wants to do that)
Some of that is lost on digital devices. The thing is, generating the analog is at least an order more lean, while being able to offer comparable quality. Barrier to entry is low. That is also high value.
Raising that bar is good in many cases, but not all. So I find myself dealing with many subtle timing matters, artifacts of A to D conversion all a non issue on actual analog displays. I will end up with a lean device that can do HDTV signals nicely, while still maxing out an old TV, which does way more than most expect, and do so sans an awful lot of hassles.
As a "do it myself" kind of person, I do not always see the benefit of complex, resource intensive signals, compression, etc... as a good, or the better thing. And there are IP concerns too, all near completely absent from analog means and methods.
So then, "better" takes on some new depth when on is making or building from first principles. In the end, the system will deliver a great display for a fraction of the effort required to employ a fully digital path.
That's tech I know down to the core, can trust and control in any way desired. Does exactly what I want. High value as far as I am concerned. Timeless too. Works on anything ever made.
I just got a media player that refuses to interface with my other goodies. HDCP in play. It's hooked up via analog component, and delivers the great experience it is supposed to. Funny how that mess can all work.
The thing is, if a tune is really good, that it was done on SID won't matter. It's good art.
Not better in an objective sense, just something we crave.
I think it's the principle of "you can't work with what's not there" - film (especially talking several years ago vs. today) will capture a different and usually wider dynamic range, and lend a different starting point that that might not be possible or easy to simulate.
These days it's really more of a tactile choice - 'do you want to work with film' - than aesthetic.
More on-topic, it also occurs to me that the Kodak cameras mentioned here will produce an image that the average film student or hobbyist (I guess that's the market?) with a canon or red wouldn't likely be able to reproduce convincingly, so that's interesting.
Anyway what I'd really like to see resurrected is 3-strip technicolor! That'd be retro
There was, at one point, good reason for doing this. Digital summing is really easy to get very wrong. ProTools used to introduce some really nasty artifacts back in the 16-bit days if you had non-linear effects.
24-bit chains have made a lot of this moot. And using 32-bit float as intermediate calculation steps makes even more of it moot. And, increased computer power ... etc.
Then there is the always present "Magic Box X adds tonal coloring that I like." You can't actually argue against this very well unless the box really doesn't do anything at all.
Artistic workflows definitely rank among those reasons; they do tend towards Taylorist efficiency when the artist doesn't want a restriction, but desire to be a maximally efficient artist in every aspect can lead to a deep probing of your motivations for doing any art to begin with, instead of just jotting down what the piece is supposed to be. So most artists will take on at least one technical restriction of some kind, consciously or no. That restriction subsequently guides and shapes everything else they're doing.
So for people who want their focus to actually be built on the limitations of analog, they need analog. Period. And that isn't most people, since there are many other ways to go about setting limitations, and what is usually needed when it's called for is an indication of analog, not its every nuance and imperfection. But like a car enthusiast who can enjoy old and inefficient designs, someone who really cares about analog audio will want to have the experience of the real stuff, despite the painstaking elements of doing so.
edit: And I welcome digital imitations. The newest VA synths really capture the imperfections of old stuff in a way I haven't heard from previous attempts, and I want to use them for that. But I don't want to have an analog box to tote around and maintain.
In principle yes, but it's surprisingly tricky, to the extent that even some very simple analog audio things, like '70s-era voltage-controlled-oscillator synths, are only recently able to be emulated reasonably well. The research field is called "virtual analog synthesis". I'm not sure if there's a canonical overview, but some googling turns up this 2014 PhD thesis: http://lib.tkk.fi/Diss/2014/isbn9789526055862/isbn9789526055...
Have to say the gap is narrowing though.
One approach I haven't seen used yet is using the latest AI/neural networks to learn and model the inherent nonlinearities in analog audio
I thought you were making a good point about how filters were shitty needless imitations and then you threw it all out most unexpectedly.
The most compelling reason to shoot film is because it gives you access to a range of camera and lens technology that is impossible to replicate with digital without significant compromise in quality and/or shooting style.
Nolan shoots on IMAX cameras with modified Zeiss lenses that give an extremely shallow depth of field (witness some of the scenes in The Dark Knight Rises).
Tarantino shooting on Super Panavision 70 could not be replicated on digital without extreme cropping of a wide angle digital source, which would change the depth/perspective, or stitching (difficult if impossible in motion picture shooting). See also panoramic cameras: Fuji 6x17, Hasselblad X-Pan.
Large format and even medium format, because the available digital backs have not yet reached the size of a full 6x6 negative. The digital back manufacturers claim they are "full frame" but when used on actual full frame 6x6 cameras they are anything but (this is not a resolution/quality argument, it is a "oh, my 100mm lens is now actually cropped" argument).
As for books, I simply learn better from the physical book... every time I try e-books I wind up in a blur.. can sometimes happen with very long online articles too. There's no context or position to it all.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather never again have to lug around an 80# monitor, or use a typewriter again... for that matter, I don't much see the point of film over digital capture.
All of that said, there's something to like about natural flaws.
Not any more. There's an app for that now.[1]
However, the bottom line is that it would probably have been very difficult for even the most brilliant management to replace the film, photo paper, and chemicals consumables business. That revenue basically doesn't exist in the digital world unless maybe you count inkjet ink--though that's trending down too.
Fujifilm did end up doing OK by, among other things, applying their film making expertise to other industries like medical. But they had a tough run too. [1] The film business fell off a cliff that made CD sales look like a gradual decline.
[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/01/how-fujifi...
Most people today can't comprehend the scale of American manufacturing as it still was at that time. The Elmgrove plant where I worked (one of a dozen facilities in the Rochester area) has over 14 thousand employees. Our start and end times were staggered in 7 minute increments to manage traffic flow.
That none of that would exist 20 years later was inconceivable at the time. The word "disruption" wasn't in business vocabulary. Nor was the phrase "made in China". Some senior technical managers saw the "digital" writing on the wall. But what could they do? What could anyone do? There was no way to turn that aircraft carrier on a dime.
There was no business model in digital cameras that would employ 100 thousand engineers, managers, factory workers, technicians, and staff.
(That said, Fujifilm provides an existence proof that Kodak could have, however painfully, probably navigated this with better management making better choices.)
I live in Rochester - Kodak was literally one end of the entire city; the scale of the operation was huge.
What I regret was that it was a good place to work, though I was never there. Car dealerships would plan annual sales around bonus time at Kodak, and retirees had health care for the rest of their life, for instance.
I'd say less size than diversity. Conglomerate aren't subject to this and still preserve a lot of the benefits of size (although as GE Capital shows... that can go badly too if not risk-managed).
Another thing they did was carve out a very nice niche for themselves with their X-mount cameras. They've done quite well in part because the in-camera processing engine does a good job of emulating a lot of the old Fuji film stocks (as well as making very nice cameras that offer something different to the canokin mill).
I don't know how much money they make off that line but they've done a nice job of it to the point where I don't use my DSLR very much unless I'm shooting action or need either ultrawide or telephoto lenses.
I believe that photo-chemical prints are better and longer lasting than any inkjet (anything really other than dye transfer and offset printing), but they didnt get digital cameras out there fast enough, and couldn't let go of the film based model.
But I feel like if your business is a mature process based around a singular need, having a future disruption department to keep tabs on the market and feed back into high level management should be de rigueur. Innovating amazing and critical components of digital cameras and then spending $5B to buy a drug company in 1988 deserves to get you some future flak on your corporate leadership's decisions.
The company as a whole probably makes it through OK and that's probably a net positive given HQ staffs and so forth will be more likely to keep their jobs and there's less disruption than a bankruptcy but a lot of the same net effect is still the same.
Interestingly Olympus are one of the few traditional camera vendors whose camera division are moving up in profitiability, so it seems that "doing something different" can work quite well.