The shift from Film to Digital
The film industry has steadily shifted from film cinema cameras over to digital recording technologies. While film does have advantages over digital, the reasons for shifting outweigh those advantages for most filmmakers and are meant to help the industry’s overall efficiency.
Most of this efficiency increase comes in the pre-production, production and post-production stages of film making. Working within your budget becomes much easier, when you don’t need to pay a lot of money just to store your footage. Sure, some digital storage technologies are pretty pricey like RED’s mini mags where at minimum it is $850 for 120GBs, but that is better than filming on 35mm where a feature length film can spend $13,500 on reels alone.
If you’re a small-time filmmaker you want to preserve your budget as much as you can, so it can be used in other aspects of your film, like with crew, special effects, etc.
There also comes a point where the ease of use of digital cameras outweighs the visual improvement that film offers. Film has superior dynamic range and it will bring out the minute details in your shots. You can also see a lot more in most cases when you shoot with film, because of the size of the actual frames. That means you’re going to have better colors, less over-exposed shots and more detail with film.
But does that matter when it can be hard to work with? You can do a shoot with a digital camera and look at exactly how your shot turned out right after you finish it. Then you can decide whether to re-shoot it, or move on. Not to mention there’s the possibility of doing longer takes with digital, because of the price of digital storage and how much data can be held on it. This gives filmmakers far more flexibility in where and for how long they shoot. On film, with a 1000 foot roll, you can expect to get around 11 minutes of footage.
Unless you need a certain look for your film or you have the budget to spend the extra money on actual film equipment, it just becomes unfeasible for the average filmmaker. The money spent on the equipment could be better spent on something else and the overall efficiency that digital provides, makes meeting your deadlines much easier.
