ABSTRACT
Despite the clarion call to shoot everything digitally, motion picture fi lm continues to hold its own. The reason for this is the fact that it is a proven technology that has been refi ned over a century of use and is the most high-resolution archival medium we have going. If fi lm were of poor quality, the digital folks wouldn’t be trying to mimic it so much. Two things make this clearly apparent. First, each time you shoot a motion picture frame at a rate of 24 frames per second (fps), you get an exposure time of 1/50 of a second. In that fl ash of an instant, a movie fi lm frame captures 40 megabytes of information! Second, I can go to a fi lm vault and pick up a roll of fi lm shot by Charlie Chaplin in 1916, hold it up to the light, and still see the image. I recently went to pull some digital fi les off an old Exabyte tape that was very popular a few years ago and was lucky enough to fi nd one person in all of Hollywood who could read it. Home movies have to constantly be copied onto the current medium of the day lest they be lost. Such is the modern world, and we all ride the wave of change. On the positive side, digital has eliminated all the annoying problems associated with fi lm, such as scratches, dirt, and image weave. There are many similarities between fi lm and digital regarding the way these mediums capture and record light. The fi lm system is an impressive template.
