spiderman 3

[SALLYNABIL]

in an interview with the asc (american society of cinematographers) magazine, bill pope the director of photography of spider man 3 said that they chose to shoot on super 35 mm instead of high definition because "high-definition video leaves no room for compositional repositioning in post". i really can't get this because i thought that it is easier for computer graphics to intervene in a digital medium to make any changes required in the picture.

can anyone explain this to me? here is an extract from the interview:

Four months before principal photography commenced, Pope began testing. The cinematographer recalls that he initially suggested shooting digitally, given that the entire picture would be scanned to facilitate the addition of extensive computer-generated (CG) effects and the digital-intermediate (DI) process. The idea was rejected, however, because high-definition video leaves no room for compositional repositioning in post, and Raimi frequently does that to refine shots featuring CG elements. “Sam is big on being able to repo in post,” says Pope. “When you’re dealing with CG characters, the repo room is really important. You can previsualize a sequence all you want, but when you’re operating, framing and following something that isn’t there, there’s a lot of room for the result to be imperfect — you might pan too fast or too slow, or tilt too far or not far enough. Once the final elements are added, Sam often wants to tweak the shot.

“So Sony Imageworks just said ‘no’ to the idea of shooting digitally. As a result, we shot on Super 35mm and did the effects sequences on VistaVision using Greg Beaumont’s Beaucam, just as we did on Spider-Man 2. We went with VistaVision both for the finer grain and for the much larger negative area to repo in po

 

[David Mullen ASC]

35mm has more resolution than 1080P HD (4K versus 1.9K) and 8-perf 35mm VistaVision has even more resolution than 4-perf 35mm, so you have more freedom to zoom into the image and reposition things, especially if the final efx composite will only be 2K.

HD is close to 2K, but you therefore don't have as much room to zoom in and reframe compared to working with a 4K file that will end up as 2K anyway.

And even with a 4K scan of a 4-perf 35mm frame, while you could crop by half to a 2K area if you wanted to, you'd normally see too much grain... but if the original negative was even larger, like with VistaVision, the grain is therefore smaller even in a 4K scan (and you could scan at even higher levels if you wanted to, like 6K or 8K), giving you more freedom to zoom in and crop the image without seeing too much grain.

Now with HD, because there is no film grain in the image, you do have some flexibility to zoom into the image in post, but you will still have a loss of resolution -- you just won't see grain enlargement, that's all.

"HD" is usually 1920 x 1080 pixels. "2K" can be 2048 x 1556 pixels (vertical dimension depends on the aspect ratio). "4K" is 4096 pixels across.

 

[SALLYNABIL]

thank u so much Mr. David for your valuable information.

And even with a 4K scan of a 4-perf 35mm frame, while you could crop by half to a 2K area if you wanted to, you'd normally see too much grain... but if the original negative was even larger, like with VistaVision, the grain is therefore smaller even in a 4K scan (and you could scan at even higher levels if you wanted to, like 6K or 8K), giving you more freedom to zoom in and crop the image without seeing too much grain.

could you just elaborate on the difference between vaious levels of scanning and the type of film material needed to achieve such a high speed scaning ? why do we lose a large part of the movie's resolution in the scanning process?

 

[David Mullen ASC]

First you have to understand that film does not have pixels -- you can scan a piece of film at 1K or 100K if you wanted to. It's just that at some point in scanning, you aren't gaining any more out of the film above a certain pixel resolution level. But there is no firm definition of what pixel resolution is the "correct" one for scanning film. For the most part, people have settled on 4K (4096 pixels across for scanning Full Aperture 35mm movie film) as the ideal level where nothing will be lost, although some feel that 35mm is more like 6K while others prefer a 2K scan for practical reasons but also because they don't like every bit of detail and grain to be perfectly captured in the scan -- they are using the lower resolution scan as a type of softening.

So a higher resolution scan also allows more flexibility in cropping and enlarging without losing too much quality, especially if the final resolution will be lower anyway (let's say you scan at 4K but the final work with be at 2K.) But the other factor with a film image is that when you enlarge the frame, the grain gets larger, so working with a bigger negative like VistaVision or 65mm or using a much slower-speed finer-grained 35mm stock gives you more flexibility in cropping and enlarging without seeing too much grain in the image.

 

[SALLYNABIL]

Mr David i think Bill Pope perfectly agrees with you concerning the scanning speed (which i'm still trying to understand) in his interview with the ASC magazine:


Although the visual-effects work and final filmout were done at 2K, Spider-Man 3 was scanned at 4K for the DI. Pope notes he was very excited to do a 4K scan for Spider-Man 2 (see AC June ’02), but he would have preferred to work in 2K on its sequel. “I’ve found that I actually like 2K scans better. There’s a certain softness to 2K, in addition to softening filters that are not yet available in 4K, that hides a lot of flaws. 4K is so brutally sharp and clear there’s nowhere to hide. Every blemish, every wrinkle, every hour of work into a late night or a long week shows up on the actor’s face, and that’s not what I want to see — especially not in a movie like this, which is set in a made-up wonderland. It’s just too much to fight later on.