2.1. Film vs.Videotape There's only one crucial aspect of Hollywood movies that you can't duplicate with your DV camcorder and iMovie: Real movies are shot on film, not video. Film, of course, is a long strip of celluloid with sprocket holes on the edges. It comes on an enormous reel, loaded into an enormous camera. After you've shot it, a lab must develop it before you can see what you've got. Videotape is a different ball game. As you know, it comes on a cartridge, pops into a compact camera, and doesn't have to be developed. Many TV shows, including sitcoms and all news shows, are shot on video. Visually, the differences are dramatic. Film and videotape just look different, for several reasons: -
Film goes through many transfer processes (from original, to positive master, to negative master, to individual "prints," to movie screen), so it has a softer, warmer appearance. It also has microscopic specks, flecks, and scratches that tell you you're watching something filmed on film. -
Film has much greater resolution than video billions of silver halide crystals coat each frame of the film. As a result, you see much more detail than video can offer. It has a subtle grain or texture that you can spot immediately. Furthermore, these specks of color are irregularly shaped, and different on every frame. A camcorder's sensors (CCDs), on the other hand, are all the same size and perfectly aligned, which also affects the look of the resulting image. -
Film is also far more sensitive to color, light, and contrast than the sensors in camcorders, and different kinds of film stock have different characteristics. Hollywood directors choose film stock according to the ambiance they want: One type of film might yield warmer colors, another type might offer sharper contrast, and so on. -
Film is composed of 24 individual frames (images) per second, but NTSC video (page 8) contains more flashes of picture per second (30 complete frames , shown as 60 alternating sets of interlocking horizontal lines per second). All of that extra visual information contributes to video's hard, sharp look and lends visual differences in the way motion is recorded. This discrepancy becomes particularly apparent to experts when film is transferred to video for broadcast on TV, for example. Doing so requires the transfer equipment to duplicate a frame of the original film here and there. Of course, the content of the film or video is also a telltale sign of what you're watching. If it has a laugh track and a brightly lit set, it's usually videotape; if it's more carefully and dramatically lit, with carefully synchronized background music, it's usually film. |
