More than one hundred years of Film Sizes
wichm.home.xs4all.nl86 points by exvi 2 days ago
86 points by exvi 2 days ago
I think this is the earliest-born person I've ever seen have a personal website like this — 1929 ! https://wichm.home.xs4all.nl/amsterdam1.html
R.I.P. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Rogge
I went ahead and mirrored this entire site, and his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/MichaelRogge
I'd imagine there are a good few, but that for a lot of them their websites expired when the owner did. For example my Dad's is gone now and he was only a bit younger. Wayback machine likely has a lot of them in its index if you can find them.
i went down this rabbit hole and in fact Tim Berners Lee is/was not old (b. 1955), though one can argue George HW Bush (b. 1924) had the White House website running he evidently didn't have a personal one
and then there is Olive Riley (b. 1899) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_Riley
It’s amazing to think that film / moving images as an art form is only a little over a century old. Painting, sculpture, drawing, etc. are orders of magnitude older.
It also makes me wonder what the future of the form will be. Historically speaking we’re still at the very beginning of it.
The oldest surviving photograph is 200 years old this year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_from_the_Window_at_Le_Gra...
Film formats still rule, but I’m curious what comes next. What I’m seeing in the mainstream is large-format 65 mm / IMAX 70 mm film, which feels like a premium big-screen experience, almost too premium to access nearby.
Film formats are out for a long time already. No cinema has film projectors, everybody went digital only already. Only very very few still can do 70mm for the tiny percentage of superstar vintage directors.
Super 16 was one of the best formats. All the film schools had only 16 mm cameras, certainly not 35mm. And all the best revolutionary 70ies productions were shot on cheap 16mm in natural light. This changed with Spielberg and the new blockbuster approach, and then the depressing Reagan years when everybody went back into the studio with huge lighting efforts and psychological dramas.
Mumblecore and Dogma 95 brought back some pure 16mm with post blowup efforts (cinemas only had 35mm projectors then), but digital with the Arri Alexa and Red killed that. Next is better projector technology for cheap. The format and camera wars are over.
I'm sure there are still some stubborn old directors shooting movies on film but aren't most shot digitally today? And even those shot on film are surely immediately scanned so post processing can be done digitally? Can't imagine anyone is still sitting with razor blades and splicing tape putting scenes together.
Stubborn old directors like Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorcese... https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/page/shot-on-film/
Films are mostly post processed digitally - but some, like Oppenheimer, are color graded the old optical way. While Dune was shot digitally, printed on film, then scanned back in again!
One Battle After Another was shot and released on VistaVision. Sideways 35mm basically.
VistaVision is being used more often as a cheaper way to get to IMAX or 70mm projections sizes. The gear and filmstock is less expensive for production and you can laser out to the other formats at roughly the same resolution you capture at.
There are far less working VistaVision cameras than 70mm. It wasnt used at all, or just for shooting vfx, for 50 years until recently
Interesting that 35mm seems to be the only film format which crosses over between the movie and still photography worlds.
It's great to see Vistavision making a comeback, a perfect format IMHO, exemplified by Hitchcock's Vertigo - https://youtu.be/95o-QM-lz8g
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Film is manufactured on huge rolls, and is cut down to different sizes and formats, so its not really that expensive on the manufacturing side to support a lot of formats. From the buy side, cameras are expensive, and almost all cameras only support one format. The big change came with film developing labs on teh high street, as when development was at home it was fairly manual, but once it was automated the machines were designed for fewer formats (for a long time 35mm, and often medium format). But even then, the process doesnt change per format and the chemicals are the same, so supporting variation is relatively cheap.
In the early days there were as many formats as there were camera backs because the exposure was at the size of the print. These were positives that were developed directly rather than that they went through an intermediate step of a negative and subsequent enlargement.
The glass plate sizes were relatively well standardised, eg whole plate, half plate quarter plate, although other countries had metric and imperial versions. Before the plates were mass produced they may have varied more.
My dad collected old cameras, he had 100's, and the number of formats in use was not all that much smaller than the number of cameras, to the point that we had to cut glass or paper quite often. We also sensitized our own plates and developed metal plates (which is insanely dangerous).
"Where was the emphasis on compatibility over design"
Im confused by this line, standards are meant to promote compatibility, not design. They're a way to, well... standardise processes and things. Its almost a given that you'll have to compromise on design to be able to include enough variance to appease the majority of use cases. It is also desirable, I think, of a standard to not give in to edge cases and niche uses and stay as simple as it can to the general use. There will be other niche standards for those and that is a good thing.
Standards survive and die for the same reason they're created, they make things cheaper, faster and easier. Once they fail at those, they give in to newer entrants. Physical standards can also make things safer, but safety must be enforced as people often are bad at judging risk and prefer the other features to a fault.
VistaVision has made a comeback with "The Brutalist", "One Battle After Another" and "Bugonia".
IKR. This is why i'm always angry at little kids for making a hundred mistakes. why can't they see like i can see? why am i the only one in here that can see?!?!?!