Digital Filmmaking

Why Are We So Concerned About Resolution Anyway?

September 15, 2008  

I’ve been obsessed with doubling frame rates for almost ten years.
 
It was 1999, and I was a freshman in film school. I’d yet to drink the inexpensive, instant-gratification Kool-Aid that is digital filmmaking. I’d never shot a frame of film, or experienced the disappointment of getting film back from the lab over-exposed or soft (after dropping a hundo on stock/processing). To be fair to film, I’d also yet to get back a perfectly-exposed, focused and composed roll of film -- achieved by trusting my skills as a filmmaker instead of relying on on-set playback and umpteen takes.
 
But still I decried the rumblings of the digital filmmaking revolution as heresy. Film was beautiful! It had been around for a hundred years!
 
So? Tell me something I don’t know. The fact is, all the benefits of film are true. I love the way it looks. I love the workflow. I even like the smell of it.

But the future is here, and it ain’t film. Digital cinema is, as Will Smith would say, ‘the new hotness.’ It has been for a while. And it keeps getting better.

So why are we still trying match the 4K/24fps standard set by film? Why are we so wrapped up in resolution when it’s FRAME RATE that we need to address?

This leads us back to ’99 – a great year for film, though I still say that American Beauty is overrated. In my quest to outwit George Lucas (this ‘tip-of-the-spear’ of the digital revolution had become my bearded, bad-movie-making nemesis), I stumbled upon a process called MaxiVision 48. Invented just that year, it allowed film to run through the projector gate at 48fps. By doubling the speed, each “frame” was held a fraction longer. This eliminated the strobing effect of panning shots and gave a clearer (read: higher-appearing) resolution than film projected at 24fps.

The downside was that in order to be projected at 48fps, the film had to be shot at 48fps. This meant double the amount of film stock and double the cost. Needless to say, no one but Kodak was all that enthused, and I’ve heard neither hide nor hair of this process since.

The same fate befell effects-wizard Douglas Trumbull’s Showscan process. That brilliant lunatic wanted to shoot 60fps on 70mm!

Fast-forward to now: George Lucas is still my nemesis and, while we’re shooting digital, we’re still shooting 24fps. Some of us are still shooting 60i…

I’ll admit that during my own digital conversion, my obsession with increased frame rates fell away. I was lulled into complacency by Panasonic’s DVX100/24p siren song. But leave it to James Cameron to snap me out of it. His interview with Variety back in April reminded me that maybe we’ve got all of this backwards.

Yeah, we’re shooting digitally, but we’re still shooting 24fps while we chase K’s. 2K, 4K… RED’s EPIC will shoot 5K. It comes out next year. Maybe. Maybe not. At the very least, it’ll probably be late.

All of this resolution is choking up our hard drives, making distribution pipelines look like John Goodman’s arteries and essentially slowing the transition to digital cinema.

Why are we forgetting that perceived resolution is pixels x refreshment rate? A 2K image at 48fps is just as sharp as a 4K image at 24, and it doesn’t have the strobing effect. We can keep going with this: an HDV camera with a horizontal resolution of 1920 could, at 48fps, have a perceived resolution of 2,048 horizontal lines. That’s the equivalent of what you’d get from Sony’s $150,000 F23 camera.

And we’re ready to display films shot like this. Our digital theater projectors can handle up to 144 frames-per-second. Even our laptops can refresh fast enough to show us a film captured this way. Yet all we care about is resolution.

I say, keep your pixels. Give me more frames.
 

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