Does modern 35mm match up to 60s 65mm?

[Coenskubrick]

Just wondering, you know, with how film stocks have improved... anyone compared prime examples of modern 35mm negatives and old 65mm negatives from the 60's (or pristine transfers thereof)?

[42041]

Match up how? In terms of resolution? 65mm from the 60s would win out - although with the sharpest anamorphic glass (or super35 scanned from camera negative, for that matter) and careful shooting, modern 35mm gets within spitting distance for any practical purposes. Hard to fight against a 2x increase in linear resolution though.
Grain, probably a toss-up for stocks of equal speed... my guess would be in modern 35mm's favor overall. Modern ISO 50 (the only speed for most of the 60s) negatives have almost no visible grain in 35mm.
Things like color, dynamic range, speed, archival life - modern film stocks are far better.

[ZoetMB]

Back in 1992, Ron Howard shot "Far and Away" in 65mm and it was supposed to revive the format. The only thing is that it really didn't look better on the screen and it pretty much killed the format.

Since then, only Baraka (which did look really good), Hamlet, Samsara (which was never actually shown in 70mm) and The Master have been shot in 65mm. And when I saw the The Master in 70mm, I thought it looked like crap. No way could anyone tell it was shot in 65mm.

Tarantino is shooting the upcoming "The Hateful Eight" in 65mm Ultra-Panavision. Hopefully, that's going to look great.

As far as film stocks are concerned, 35mm and 70mm stock is exactly the same. Today's stocks are pretty good.

But as others have pointed out, 70mm is a lot larger frame than 35mm. 35mm anamorphic films are ideally projected with a gate of .825" x .690" (x a 2:1 unsqueeze). 70mm is projected at 1.912" x .870". That's 231% the image area of 35mm.

Digital sacrifices a bit of warmth, color subtlety and natural looking grain, but gains sharpness, screen brightness and a rock-steady picture. 2K digital will also exhibit the "screen door effect" on bright scenes. Film prints get dirty, scratched and wear out while a DCP is going to look as good 50 years from now as it does today, assuming there's still a device to break the security code and play it.

I watched a low-budget independent film from the late 1970s on TV the other night ("Girlfriends"). Especially during the first reel, the film image jumped all over the place (sprocket holes in the negative were probably worn out) and the film was scratched and dirty. But back then, unless you saw a film within the first few days of its premiere, that's how film used to look projected in a theatre. So while film has the capability of being superior to digital, in the real world, it's frequently not. Also, most of today's films get digital intermediates, and when they do, you lose a lot of the advantages of film anyway.

It's like the people who now collect vinyl because "analog sounds better", but they don't realize that over 85% of new vinyl pressings are from digital masters, so they're just fooling themselves.

[42041]

Originally Posted by ZoetMB

And when I saw the The Master in 70mm, I thought it looked like crap. No way could anyone tell it was shot in 65mm.

I think you got unlucky with either the print or the projection. The one I saw was gorgeous - tack sharp, bright, no grain (except for the segments shot in 35), rich colors. Easily the best image quality I've seen theatrically.

[applemac]

I would put a vote in for 65mm in the 60s vs modern 35mm.

Modern 35mm is very good, but having over double the emulsion area surpasses improvements in the stock.

[trevanian]

I think the more modern stock show a bit too much in the shadows, I'm much more in favor of the contrast from older slow speed stuff, or, if you're of an old super-8 or slide mindset ... KODACHROME!

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by ZoetMB

...Tarantino is shooting the upcoming "The Hateful Eight" in 65mm Ultra-Panavision. Hopefully, that's going to look great.

it’s (good grammar one-handed) in post now

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by trevanian

....or, if you're of an old super-8 or slide mindset ... KODACHROME!

that be me - https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...ar#post8883334

[42041]

Originally Posted by trevanian

I think the more modern stock show a bit too much in the shadows, I'm much more in favor of the contrast from older slow speed stuff, or, if you're of an old super-8 or slide mindset ... KODACHROME!

My personal favorite film is Velvia 100... Pity that color reversal films never managed to find a place in the DI world (though I would not envy the DP that had to use em).

[trevanian]

Originally Posted by 42041

My personal favorite film is Velvia 100... Pity that color reversal films never managed to find a place in the DI world (though I would not envy the DP that had to use em).

There was one other s-8 stock that gave really nice results, but you had to buy it from Kodak direct and get it processed at 'pro' labs. It delivered very soft almost Fuji-like colors, and it was called 7242 or 7244. I got turned onto it by the late lamented Super8Filmaker magazine, and it really created a whole different look for S8flicks, as THIS Ektachrome wasn't the grainy mess the regular 160 was, and it didn't have the color problems of the 'G' type, which was a stock that didn't deserve to even exist.

I made this one short that opens and closes on Earth, but the bulk of the film takes place in offices of God and Satan, and to give these a different look that didn't require tons of dry ice, I shot them using this film, and it was a revelation. The reds of Hell outside Satan's windows was muted and the warm tones of God's chambers didn't get a 'too much' look. I booked a suite at the LeBaron Hotel in San Jose and converted the two rooms into their respective offices, which was a real trick given that the second room actually had cool-to-green fluorescents in it. I guessed about the color temperature and wound up using the built-in 85a plus another CC filter to compensate -- and the skin tones came out really nice. Also put 600 watt bulbs in the desk lamps (surprised we didn't start a fire) for God, which gave nice heaven feel.

Only time I ever used this other stock, but man, it looked so nice that when I put in flashbacks to the guy's life on Earth in Kodachrome, they stuck out like sore thumbs.

[Brightstar]

I would go for 65mm film any day too but its too expensive that's why they stick with 35mm

[ZoetMB]

Originally Posted by 42041

I think you got unlucky with either the print or the projection. The one I saw was gorgeous - tack sharp, bright, no grain (except for the segments shot in 35), rich colors. Easily the best image quality I've seen theatrically.

But that's the point, isn't it? It's not what one medium can accomplish under ideal circumstances - it's what it accomplishes on a daily basis in the typical theatre. And in most theaters, film is presented extremely poorly, especially now that most of the trained projectionists are long gone. While one can screw up digital, it's much harder to do so if only because you don't have the negative impact of dirt or wear. One piece of dirt in a gate can ruin an entire print since the age of the platter.

And I say that as someone who was in heaven watching a 70mm film in a great theater and who was inspired to work in the industry (I became a recording engineer) after seeing "How the West Was Won", "West Side Story" and "Lawrence of Arabia" in 70mm (and 3-projector Cinerama in the case of HTWWW) as a kid.

If you go to the projectionist forums, posters are already taking bets that 98% of the 100 forthcoming 70mm Ultra Panavision prints of "The Hateful Eight" will be ruined within three days.

It's like the vinyl freaks who brag about how great vinyl sounds when played on a $100,000 sound system. Well, if that's what it takes for vinyl to sound good, then it's not a very good audio delivery system (and I have 500 vinyl LPs in my living room).

There weren't that many 70mm prints made of "The Master" so I have trouble believing that one of them was bad. And I saw it at the Ziegfeld in NYC, which usually does a pretty good job (plenty of premieres are held there), although it's not as good as it used to be. On the other hand, "Interstellar" in 70mm IMAX looked about as perfect as a print could look and I don't think I saw it the first week, so there had been at least 30-40 showings before I saw it.

But as I posted earlier, no one could tell that "Far and Away" was shot in 65mm either, which is why so few films have been shot in 65mm since. It will be interesting to see how "The Hateful Eight" looks and whether audiences can tell the difference.

[KRW1]

What have you got against people buying vinyl? You've insulted us twice now, for no reason I can see, it merely detracts from your larger argument, which I think has some merit.

[ditcin]

Originally Posted by trevanian

There was one other s-8 stock that gave really nice results, but you had to buy it from Kodak direct and get it processed at 'pro' labs. It delivered very soft almost Fuji-like colors, and it was called 7242 or 7244. I got turned onto it by the late lamented Super8Filmaker magazine, and it really created a whole different look for S8flicks, as THIS Ektachrome wasn't the grainy mess the regular 160 was, and it didn't have the color problems of the 'G' type, which was a stock that didn't deserve to even exist.

I made this one short that opens and closes on Earth, but the bulk of the film takes place in offices of God and Satan, and to give these a different look that didn't require tons of dry ice, I shot them using this film, and it was a revelation. The reds of Hell outside Satan's windows was muted and the warm tones of God's chambers didn't get a 'too much' look. I booked a suite at the LeBaron Hotel in San Jose and converted the two rooms into their respective offices, which was a real trick given that the second room actually had cool-to-green fluorescents in it. I guessed about the color temperature and wound up using the built-in 85a plus another CC filter to compensate -- and the skin tones came out really nice. Also put 600 watt bulbs in the desk lamps (surprised we didn't start a fire) for God, which gave nice heaven feel.

Only time I ever used this other stock, but man, it looked so nice that when I put in flashbacks to the guy's life on Earth in Kodachrome, they stuck out like sore thumbs.

Wasn't the Fuji film you mentioned the same used by Jeannot Szwarc for Somewhere In Time for the past sequences - to contrast the Kodak film used for the modern sequences?

[ZoetMB]

Originally Posted by KRW1

What have you got against people buying vinyl? You've insulted us twice now, for no reason I can see, it merely detracts from your larger argument, which I think has some merit.

I don't have anything against people buying vinyl. I have 500 vinyl albums in my living room and a working turntable.

What I'm against is hype and complete misunderstanding of the technology. Hype is talking about the CD being dead and the resurrection of vinyl when in 2014 in the U.S., only 13.2 million LPs were sold against 144.1 million CDs. While LP sales are increasing substantially and CD sales are in free-fall, there's still going to be way more CD's sold than vinyl this year, although they both pale in comparison to downloads and streaming revenue.

Misunderstanding of the technology is when people hype the analog qualities of vinyl, yet at least 85% of new or remastered LP masters are digital and usually the same master as the CD, so people are just fooling themselves. Similarly, esoteric audio LP fans hype vinyl as sounding better than CD, but only when they buy $50 pressings, clean them on $2000 cleaning machines and play them on $20,000 turntables with $3000 connects. I've been to those esoteric audio shows and to my ears, most of that absurdly overpriced audio for idiots who somehow have managed to make far more money than they'll ever need sounds like crap - devoid of impact or any kind of life with metallic sounding midrange and no high-end.

[KRW1]

Originally Posted by ZoetMB

I don't have anything against people buying vinyl. I have 500 vinyl albums in my living room and a working turntable.

What I'm against is hype and complete misunderstanding of the technology. Hype is talking about the CD being dead and the resurrection of vinyl when in 2014 in the U.S., only 13.2 million LPs were sold against 144.1 million CDs. While LP sales are increasing substantially and CD sales are in free-fall, there's still going to be way more CD's sold than vinyl this year, although they both pale in comparison to downloads and streaming revenue.

Misunderstanding of the technology is when people hype the analog qualities of vinyl, yet at least 85% of new or remastered LP masters are digital and usually the same master as the CD, so people are just fooling themselves. Similarly, esoteric audio LP fans hype vinyl as sounding better than CD, but only when they buy $50 pressings, clean them on $2000 cleaning machines and play them on $20,000 turntables with $3000 connects. I've been to those esoteric audio shows and to my ears, most of that absurdly overpriced audio for idiots who somehow have managed to make far more money than they'll ever need sounds like crap - devoid of impact or any kind of life with metallic sounding midrange and no high-end.

There's a debate there, to be sure, but I'm not sure shoehorning into this thread is ideal. It seems to be a wild tangent, a hobby horse, if you will. Let's just say I've had wildly different experiences to you, and never heard any of those arguments presented seriously.

Anyone who says one format sounds better than another simply hasn't listened to enough of any format. The 'CD is dead' thing is usually clickbait or a press release dressed as news and the digital master thing I don't quite understand. The engineering process has to be different so there might be something in what those people say to you.

[applemac]

Originally Posted by ZoetMB

But that's the point, isn't it? It's not what one medium can accomplish under ideal circumstances - it's what it accomplishes on a daily basis in the typical theatre. And in most theaters, film is presented extremely poorly, especially now that most of the trained projectionists are long gone. While one can screw up digital, it's much harder to do so if only because you don't have the negative impact of dirt or wear. One piece of dirt in a gate can ruin an entire print since the age of the platter.

And I say that as someone who was in heaven watching a 70mm film in a great theater and who was inspired to work in the industry (I became a recording engineer) after seeing "How the West Was Won", "West Side Story" and "Lawrence of Arabia" in 70mm (and 3-projector Cinerama in the case of HTWWW) as a kid.

If you go to the projectionist forums, posters are already taking bets that 98% of the 100 forthcoming 70mm Ultra Panavision prints of "The Hateful Eight" will be ruined within three days.

It's like the vinyl freaks who brag about how great vinyl sounds when played on a $100,000 sound system. Well, if that's what it takes for vinyl to sound good, then it's not a very good audio delivery system (and I have 500 vinyl LPs in my living room).

There weren't that many 70mm prints made of "The Master" so I have trouble believing that one of them was bad. And I saw it at the Ziegfeld in NYC, which usually does a pretty good job (plenty of premieres are held there), although it's not as good as it used to be. On the other hand, "Interstellar" in 70mm IMAX looked about as perfect as a print could look and I don't think I saw it the first week, so there had been at least 30-40 showings before I saw it.

But as I posted earlier, no one could tell that "Far and Away" was shot in 65mm either, which is why so few films have been shot in 65mm since. It will be interesting to see how "The Hateful Eight" looks and whether audiences can tell the difference.

The reason no one can tell is they are shown on small screens. If you show a 70mm print on a cinemark XD or IMAX sized screen (or even the cinerama dome size) you will definitely notice a difference. There just aren't enough screens that size with a 70mm projector in the booth around; or arent going to be filled with STAR WARS.

[Poya]

Originally Posted by ZoetMB

Back in 1992, Ron Howard shot "Far and Away" in 65mm and it was supposed to revive the format. The only thing is that it really didn't look better on the screen and it pretty much killed the format.

Since then, only Baraka (which did look really good), Hamlet, Samsara (which was never actually shown in 70mm) and The Master have been shot in 65mm. And when I saw the The Master in 70mm, I thought it looked like crap. No way could anyone tell it was shot in 65mm.

Tarantino is shooting the upcoming "The Hateful Eight" in 65mm Ultra-Panavision. Hopefully, that's going to look great.

As far as film stocks are concerned, 35mm and 70mm stock is exactly the same. Today's stocks are pretty good.

But as others have pointed out, 70mm is a lot larger frame than 35mm. 35mm anamorphic films are ideally projected with a gate of .825" x .690" (x a 2:1 unsqueeze). 70mm is projected at 1.912" x .870". That's 231% the image area of 35mm.

Digital sacrifices a bit of warmth, color subtlety and natural looking grain, but gains sharpness, screen brightness and a rock-steady picture. 2K digital will also exhibit the "screen door effect" on bright scenes. Film prints get dirty, scratched and wear out while a DCP is going to look as good 50 years from now as it does today, assuming there's still a device to break the security code and play it.

I watched a low-budget independent film from the late 1970s on TV the other night ("Girlfriends"). Especially during the first reel, the film image jumped all over the place (sprocket holes in the negative were probably worn out) and the film was scratched and dirty. But back then, unless you saw a film within the first few days of its premiere, that's how film used to look projected in a theatre. So while film has the capability of being superior to digital, in the real world, it's frequently not. Also, most of today's films get digital intermediates, and when they do, you lose a lot of the advantages of film anyway.

It's like the people who now collect vinyl because "analog sounds better", but they don't realize that over 85% of new vinyl pressings are from digital masters, so they're just fooling themselves.

I agree about DIs. Films like Inherent Vice, Interstellar, and even Transcendence, all look like actual film, because they were finished photochemically. They looked beautiful and I was fortunate to see it in celluloid, and in 70mm for the first 2 films. Even Tarantino, who preaches about film, finishes his in a DI, which defeats his points. It's sad how a lot of films shot on films don't even look like films anymore. I swore Edge Of Tomorrow was shot digitally when I saw it and was surprised to see it was celluloid shot.

As to the vinyl debate, I agree about the 85%, but that's why I do my research on which one was made the old fashioned way, and they do sound amazing than a normal CD. Heck, even with the LPs made from digital masters sound better due to the different process to make them. Still, I disagree that you need crazy expensive equipment to fulfill their potential. Many expensive equipment aren't as good as those priced lower, because price doesn't equal quality.

[SillySauce]

60's 65mm films used inferior lenses and filmstocks. A user on cinematography.com was saying that modern 35mm is the same as 60's 65mm because of the lenses/filmstock. He had seen Lawrence of Arabia and other re-released older 65mm films. He also said the 70mm version of Lawrence had more detail in the far off mountains than the bluray version. I'm seeing 2001 in 65mm/70mm this November.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Poya

I agree about DIs. Films like Inherent Vice, Interstellar, and even Transcendence, all look like actual film, because they were finished photochemically. They looked beautiful and I was fortunate to see it in celluloid, and in 70mm for the first 2 films. Even Tarantino, who preaches about film, finishes his in a DI, which defeats his points. It's sad how a lot of films shot on films don't even look like films anymore. I swore Edge Of Tomorrow was shot digitally when I saw it and was surprised to see it was celluloid shot.

poya, if you’re a celluloid connoisseur, might want to follow this tweeter…https://twitter.com/newbeverly

next week for one day on traveling to the SMPTE 2015 annual tech conference and exhibition i’ll be passing thru your neck of the woods (North Hollywood) to get in some other business (2 birds with one stone) and just wondering if there’s still ? road work going on at Lankershim (off the 134). please pm if you know.