Kodak sponsors film/HD taste test - Post News - John Bailey, James Chressanthis and Aaron Schneider test for Eastman Kodak Company - Brief Article

Post, June, 2002 by Matthew Armstrong

NEWYORK -- With momentum seemingly growing by the day for shooting 24p HD instead of film, Eastman Kodak Company recently commissioned three accomplished cinematographers to shoot identical scenes in both formats and compare the attributes of each. For the past few months, Kodak has been screening the 22-minute project,. The Cinematographer's Test: 24p vs. 35mm Motion Picture Film, and brought it to New York City in May.

While Kodak obviously has a stake in showing that film affords a superior picture quality, it largely stayed out of the pre-production, production and post process. DPs John Bailey A.S.C. (American Gigolo, As Good As it Gets, The Anniversary Party), James Chressanthis (Nowhere Man, Martial Law) and Aaron Schneider (Kiss the Girls, Simon Birch) picked their own equipment and crews, CFI Labs performed all the negative and print processing, Laser Pacific Media did all the film-to-tape and tape-to-tape transfers, Imagica did the opticals, Sony Imageworks handled the tape-to-film transfers and the cinematographers themselves supervised the timing of the final tape and print.

Bailey used a Sony CineAlta 24p camera with Panavision lenses while Chressanthis and Schneider chose the Sony HDW-F900 24p HDCAM with standard HD Canon and Fujinon lenses. Panavision provided an HD camera engineer to work with Bailey, and the camera rental house Plus 8 Video provided a videographer/technician for the two other shoots. To help achieve an unbiased comparison, lighting remained constant for both film and HD.

The cinematographers discuss each shot and the nuances of both formats as the images are shown on a split screen, so even a novice can notice subtle differences. Both film and video images were projected side-by-side on a 35mm print Although, the cinematographers were impressed with HD in some respects, the common theme among them was that film won the test. They all agreed that film achieved a vaster dynamic range, afforded a better sense of depth with superior coloring and more controlled depth-of-field and gave a warm golden hue to flesh tones. The limited dynamic range was especially noticeable in the night scenes where the blacks looked murky in HD. In addition, given the greater depth-of-field of HD with almost the entire image in focus, the image looked flat. The cinematographers did have some good things to say about HD and the fact that they were even comparing film to video speaks volumes for the HD format. But still, if the decision is solely theirs, they say they will continue to opt for film in t he future.

While the majority of audience felt film offered the superior image quality, some were not convinced and made their voices be heard during the Q&A section of the presentation. Some vehemently questioned the transfer process and stated that they'd shot hundreds of night scenes in HD and never had the image look so murky and the blacks so washed out.

An experienced HD cinematographer noted that while HD does inherently have less dynamic range, that obstacle can be overcome in the transfer by using a high contrast film stock, Some pointed out that subtle changes in lighting would have improved the HD quality and some challenged that while the three cinematographers, while obviously very talented, hadn't worked enough with HD to bring out the best of the format.

So as Kodak sponsored this test to show the differences between the two formats and settle some of the arguements between the film faithful and HD fanatics, it seems this test has only fueled the debate that will likely rage on for years to come.