Post
by carllooper » Sat Jun 23, 2012 2:38 am
Testing the limits of film becomes rather simple using the analysis projector. Even just projecting it on a wall.
I projected the image up large and got right in close with a digital camera, capturing a small portion of the image. The capture resolution was the equivalent of scanning the whole 16mm frame at 24K (or Super8 at 12K, or 35mm at 48K).
In and of itself this didn't tell me much but when I differenced that against the equivalent of scanning 16mm at 12K (or Super8 at 6K, or 35mm at 24K) I was still getting a strong signal for the edges in the image. Plenty of noise everywhere else of course.
I did a heavy noise reduction on the difference signal, which looks weird. But the fact that there is still a perceivable image in the difference signal means that one still hasn't exhausted the signal component of film, even at these ultra high definitions.
So basically, if you are happy with the grain structure of film (ie. the way it looks to the eye when projected) then to reproduce the remaining signal component in digital can easily require scanning the film at definitions way higher than 4K. Easily.
So this "overkill" theory regarding scanning resolutions is really just complete and utter nonsense. The only real limit I've found (so far) is not technical at all, but one's budget!
Of course all of this is cheaper (in terms of hardware) to understand and forsee when you work through the theory (as Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory would appreciate). On the other hand, working through it experimentally (emperically), while more expensive (in terms of hardware) has it's own peculiar and profound rewards. There is that physical aspect. I wouldn't be seeing cows in paddock, if I were looking at the equations.
Where do those cows come from?
Carl
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Regarding the cow question ...
In relation to the difference between theory and practice touched on above, there is a framework which retakes ownership of the term "theory" and gives it back to practice, in which practice becomes just as theoretical as 'theory'.
Phenomenology and empericism have never quite attained the respectability of rationalism. One of the criticisms of phenomenology/empericism is it's apparent focus on "presence". While this is historically true, one must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Presence is certainly a problem, but a critique of presence is not quite a critique of phenomenology and empericism.
Deleuze once described himself as a transcendental empericist. But what does this mean? In simple terms it means extending traditional empericism (and phenomenology) beyond the immediate, the moment, or the present, into the domain of time and duration.
It is not quite right to say the cinematographic image is in the present. What is in the present is what the image 'represents' but not the image itself, which, in cinema, as in painting, is never to be confused with what it represents. (Preface to the English edition, Cinema2, Gilles Deleuze)
The image, in a Deleuzian universe, constitutes something which can be regarded as "transcending" the present. Rationalism is no different in this respect. Rationalism also transcends the present. But in rationalism (traceable back to Plato) an image was regarded as no more than what was immediately visible. In rationalism an image becomes a secondary thing - an effect for which some (rational ) cause was outside the image, beyond the image, in a reality that was not an image.
An alternative approach, and what Deleuze does, is to expand the definition of an image beyond what is immediately visible (or audible, tactile etc) into the invisible. Invisible images? Yes, but unlike rationalism, such images would not be fundamentally invisible. The concept of "hidden images" might be more appropriate here. Or "transcendental images". The image, not just as what is immediately visible but also what can be hidden (eg. a photo in a shoebox) or what could come to light in the future, neither of which are in the present. In a Deleuzian universe, these would remain part of what constituted an image.
The catalog of images in a Deleuzian universe includes not just those of perception, but of recollection and dreams as well. In this regard, can it be said that Deleuze goes beyond where the Stoics might have gone? Was it not the Stoics who put down "figments of the imagination"? No, what the Stoics argued is that what we imagine, as much as what we perceive has it's basis in what we experience or could experience. So even figments of the imagination would be part of the Stoic universe. What they rejected was anything which was fundamentally beyond experience. It would be the fundamentally invisible (as distinct from the hidden) which the Stoics would rhetorically call "figments of the imagination".
Now this sort of thinking is the complete opposite of classical philosophy of the platonic variety. It is also the complete opposite of what many theoretical physicists would propose. But it's something that experimental physicists and artists might otherwise intuitively understand.
I find this helps me heaps to understand the cows in the paddock.
Carl Looper
http://artistfilmworkshop.org/