shouting into an empty room

[john59]

as the title says, just lately it seems that posting a topic on all the film forums has dwindled off and it can take at least 3 to 5 days for a reply.
Is there any reason that you can think of that causes this.

My view is that all the subject matter has already been discussed and maybe people who are or was interested in the film format has given up due to the fact that film is now in its last part of history due to digi.

please discuss

[super8man]

Not sure, but I think in general non-professional interest in "real" film has pretty much died. You could say when Kodachrome died, it pretty much put it all to rest.

Fast forward to today and everybody casually "videos" everything and anything...and some things that should simply NOT be filmed, LOL.

So, as to whether this forum is actively answering the questions, not sure. I like to answer things that I have a personal interest in. But otherwise, the internet has become very good at answering questions simply typed into your address bar at the top.

Perhaps forums are changing too. I am thinking they are becoming more like clubs where like-minded people try to challenge/encourage/inspire others to take their use of the subject of the forum at hand to a new level. The role that forums used to play, educating people on the basics, has given way to a simple FAQ or PDF instruction manual. Lots of forum replies will say "google: your question" then come back and ask a more developed question.

Just a thought. I may be wrong and have no problem with that.

[S8 Booster]

I completely agree with you S8 man. At the days of K40 or even K40 sound or even better K40 Sound /60M cartridges we had this fab K-lab in Switzwerland and we got our films back in a week and we immedately projected the stuff, magic.
It was a huge fasination, it was a huge system, it was a magic community, enthusiasm.

Taking the K40 away from us took the enthusiasm away from us - in the longer run I think.
We have later seen various reversal come and go without partiulary success at least it could not restore the K40 Allmighty. Heydays back.

Forums has turned more and more into wikisupportmedias. Before they were sort of brainstorming dink danks.
There are still a lot of brainboxery here but film enthusiasm seems down.

Digtizing film is a neat option but expensive second option to probjecting.

I may pick up my Sony PJ with 1920P shooting HD on to big memory cards all day long due to extremely low power consumtion and transfer the film into the MAC in seconds.

And then there is the New Wave" smartphone instant publishing on
to Twits and Twats basically defragmenting the whole game of film.
Now, that possibly replicated what s8 man said but never the less.

As of beginning if this year our national film organisation/forum - once 8 and 16mm
film past deades only video trash now had shrinked to the level that the asked to rejoin the original photo group they once split up from - to actually survive.

Anyway, film, shuut.. Still lovely ....?....;)

[carllooper]

This is on a slightly different tangent ...

When something passes into history it is not lost as such. Indeed, quite the reverse. History is precisely that which survives loss. History is that which survives in libraries, in archives, in museums, in warehouses, in boxes under the bed. What is lost to history (in a manner of speaking) is that which escapes history - that which does not survive. That which dies a non-returnable death.

It remains to be seen whether digital can become history in this sense. History shows us that it is capable of not doing so. For example, much of the digital data acquired during the Lunar missions of the sixties and the seventies, is effectively lost forever. Or it would take a herculean effort to reconstruct. It is probably cheaper to fly to the Moon and reaquire the data again rather than to reconstruct what the bytes on magnetic tape might mean. But even if reacquired it would not be history as such. It would be another candidate for history. What has managed to become history are many, if not all of the photochemical photographs that were taken on the Moon. These have not escaped history. They have done a better job at surviving loss: a better job at becoming history.

To become history is to survive loss.

Nostalgia is something altogether different from history. Nostalgia is about loss. History is the opposite. It is about what survives loss and becomes, for a new generation, an actual gain. Heritage. Tradition. Handed down. The photochemical cinema is a heritage handed down to us. Regardless of how many people are interested in that history, the history itself is immense. More than a hundred years worth. A massive treasure.

Photochemical cinema is not gone precisely because it has become history. It has been becoming history for a century. Whether it continues to become history is the real question.

But what of the digital age, in the decades ahead? Will it become a history? Will it even be capable of nostalgia, because even nostalgia assumes there was at least, for a moment, an opportunity to survive. In a completely throwaway environment what is it that can even become nostalgic, let alone history?

C

[kuparikettu]

as the title says, just lately it seems that posting a topic on all the film forums has dwindled off and it can take at least 3 to 5 days for a reply.
Is there any reason that you can think of that causes this.

My view is that all the subject matter has already been discussed and maybe people who are or was interested in the film format has given up due to the fact that film is now in its last part of history due to digi.

I think there are many different reasons behind the lack of discussions here. To list some:
1) One reason is certainly that some people have given up film or even all film making. People grow up, they have families to feed, less time for hobbies, other hobbies become more important... but writing on a forum might be a hobby as well.

2) Beginning of 2000s was somekind of a reneissance for 8mm film. People who never had heard of it discovered it. I was in my teens and I remember the great wonder when I realised there was a difference between VIDEO and FILM. Never before had I really realized that movies were shot on... film. However, the core of this reneissance was that this information came to Internet. New people became aware of something inspiring and new (vs. early digital video cameras). There was really only K40 available, everybody wished for better films and scanning.. and now we have those. Super-8 has become mature. Answers are available just by googling for them. There are many film stocks. It is possible to use super-8 to achieve professional results...

3) ...which brings us to the third reason: many people are shooting film instead of discussing shooting film. My friend who started the super-8/16mm laboratory here in Finland has had quite steady flow of people sending him film, both super-8 (ECN-2 & E-6!) and 16mm (ECN-2). And there are still Finnish people sending film abroad for processing! Film is certainly still alive.

But has everything been discussed? Is all information available in Internet? Certainly not. I'd be very interested about how some CCTV/Machine Vision C-mount lenses compare to Switars for example. Or seeing even all those vimeo test clips. Be enthusiastic and it'll wake the enthusiasm in others too. I for one wish for the death of the lamenting about death of film or how expensive it is or how everything is getting worse. It isn't!

Today is an excellent day to make some new film converts and bring them here to discuss everything about it! :mrgreen:

[super8man]

Carl, I think I need a drink and a smoke to better interpret your thoughts. Interesting perspective for sure.

I was thinking that the one thing digital needs is electricity. Always. In fact without it, it's hard to say you even still "have" the digital visuals at all. Not so with any other format. You can always wait for the sun to see what is in your archives. But, unless you print your work, with all the complications and limitations that brings, you need electricity to have access to your work.

As for the loss of the moon information, I did not know that. However, we "could" pay students or kids in India to dutifully transfer the information but we have collectively decided that it's not worth it. The same goes when a digital archive ceases to exist on an electronic storage medium. The work to get it back is simply not deemed worthwhile.

Perhaps history just saves all the easy stuff. Makes you wonder what happened to all the computers and information the Mayans "must have" used. LOL.

[timdrage]

I think it's more that web forums in general are on the way out... At least, every niche subject forum I post on is getting more and more sparse, people are talking elsewhere (facebook, twitter etc) and leaving only hardcore otaku, trolls and actually insane people to monopolise the forums and drive out the rest of the less dedicated/obsessive posters

[jpolzfuss]

Hi,

my two cents:

• Fewer and fewer people are still shooting film - due to rising film-prices, discontinued products, full-HD-video-cams integrated everywhere (cell-phones, pens, tie pins, digital-still-cameras, key chains...), lack of time... . However you'll also notice that fewer and fewer people are still making proper videos (incl. having a script, editing the result, ...). So it looks like the whole idea of doing a movie is "out of fashion" at the moment.
• filmshooting.com being down (power-outages, non-forum-part removed, dead links, ...) scared some people away.
• Some stopped using filmshooting.com as they're scared away by having to change their password every three days.
• The interest in all forums and mailing-lists is dwindling. (I used to read several German and international forums for model-rail-roads, still-photography, filming, computer-games, DTP... and approx. two years ago all of them used to have at least 10 new postings a day. Now they are down to less than 10 new postings a month.)
• There are fewer and fewer new products to discuss. And discussing the discontinued products doesn't make much sense.
• Most current topics could have been solved by using the "Search"-function. Hence I'm bored by most of them and will neither read nor answer these threads (even if they switch topics).
• Several competent people stopped using this forum. Hence it doesn't make much sense to ask certain questions as the remaining users couldn't answer them anyway.
• I started several threads on this forum (and other forums), but never got any response. Hence I'm sulky and not willing to waste time answering other threads.

Jörg

[Nicholas Kovats]

Carl,

Your excellent writing has spurred another response. And the comment about digital's dependency is very insightful. Myself, I continue to be very busy with my filming, film projects and film camera systems.

Standby for a steady output of new work as I perfect my new editing setup. I have some amazing 40 year old historical footage that will blow some forum members out of the water. Well, some of you. It is being presently scanned and will be a world's first.

Carl! I have potential access to a 21/4 Hasselblad digital back for my proposed 70mm scanner project. Apparently the shutter can be locked.

Glorious, glorious film. More please. Ok. Back to work.

[Will2]

It certainly takes more effort and dedication; especially when digital is so easy. I shoot plenty of family stuff on a waterproof digital camera but it's the film work that I always love to look at. Expensive, time consuming and completely worth it.

I also love trying different stocks...I should have some B&W 16mm 3224 & 35mm 2234 (EI 6!) to post in a month.

[carllooper]

The forum has two sides.

There is that aspect where one can talk to others, in the "present", even if that present might sometimes be a question of days or weeks. Or not at all.

But there is also the Search box, in the right hand corner of the screen, which represents the forum's history. Perhaps an under used resource. It is where one will find that the forum is not an empty room at all. It constitutes a history. Even if contributions to that history ceased tomorrow, the history itself continues to exist. And it is a digitally sustained history at that. One that has survived.

Carl

Below is a random fragment from the history of this forum (from 2002). Not sure how to link to a particular result from a search query. Anyway, despite a completely random search, a topic popped up with the following line standing out, fortuitously written by S8Booster:

"This is not nostalgy, only realisation of how unique the film stuff really is."

This is not nostalgy. Indeed. Whatever one is discussing, be it contemporary tech or inherited tech, nostalgia is not a desireable, as expressed in S8Booster's line. This is why it's important to ensure that history is separated out from nostalgia. History is that which arrives, or comes back, from the past. Nostalgia is a lament (and/or acts of substitution) for what can not arrive or come back, a lament for what has departed, never to return. Loss. When we treat history and nostalgia as the same thing (and they are not) it just means we risk losing history. Converting it into nostalgia. Into the lost. We risk losing history to nostalgia: to the corresponding acts of substitution for such loss. Nostalgia wins. History loses.

Fortunately, by definition, this is impossible: history is exactly that which is not lost. It can only be hidden (in archives, etc). If lost, it would no longer be (or is not) history. History, therefore, by definition, never loses. But insofar as it can be hidden, insofar as it can spend longer than it should, in the dark, nostalgia can certainly make it suffer. If nostalgia provokes tears, perhaps we should read this as really a hidden history that is shedding those tears, the answer to which is to unhide that history: to defeat the nostalgia (sense of loss) that masks it and to celebrate what is not lost: history.

There is also another side to history. History is not only that which survives or arrives from the past, but can also be that which survives or arrives from the future, but that's a more difficult but certainly interesting subject.

Anyway, from the archive, some random history, using a random search, which threw up the fortuitous line that caught my attention:

Have been doing DV edits / Video filming since 1994 with the MAC and I am not ever going to buy or use DV 24P until it doubles in quality from now.

It just isn´t good enough.

Have to add that my experience is entirely based on PAL 25 fps stuff that appears to considerably superior t the 29.x fps NTSC world.

The DV computer edit stuff is truly a dream to work with but having used it since 1994 I am quite fed up (bored by working with it) and have gone back to S8 film, reversal for projection for my homemovies.

That is the magic the current video systems never can offer in the same manner.

Apparently many other people around (Check newsgroups) start to feel the same way and turn back to film. This is not nostalgy, only realisation of how unique the film stuff really is.

The video is and will allways be a flat dead looking movie medium despite how film-like it is promoted as.

Recently here in Scandinavia there has been a few Professional TV productions aired that obviously is made by 24P or 24P like systems. Frame jittering yes, Colours, well? different but not filmlike, general impression: Something in between "flat" video and film.

So what´s the point of flushing big bucks on 24P DV now? It will not survive the S8 anyway.

There is so long way to go before it going to be acceptable and the 24P is obviously only a madium stage too.

I believe that in some years we may see vectorized pixel scan & storage. Each pixel stored separately with a vector that can be split into x-y-z axis vectors for manipulation. The frame scan is a ghost from the past. When that is dumped the DV may move ahead.

There must me so much more to gain. If vectorized single pixel scans (not frame scans) are used at a scan rate of 100 or 1000/s and each pixel stored separately the data storage will not be limited to any FPS/frame/field. This may only be needed to be decided at the playback.

And, when Opticom/Intel/Dell get their new data storage systems on track it will all be stored in extreme high capacity chips, no disk or tape and have basically no limit on speed or data capacity, thus maybee not the same need for data compression. These chips are developed on molecule level and it is now said to be possible to store 3 full size DVD movies on chips inside a cellular phone. Within short you can store all movies you ever made inside you Video cam at the same time if you want.

IBM is said to work on a similar but even more advanced system on atoms level.

WIll be OK to dump hard drives forever? This is one result.

The only fair reason to buy DV / 24P now is to put more money in the hands of the developers so they can ditch the 24P asap to move ahead.

[john59]

Well, i honestly didnt think it would bring that kind of response, cheers guys, the forum seems to have picked up a bit.

[kuparikettu]

Certainly!

I just hope that the "old ones" who have been extremely excited about some new things and then disappointed many many times let us younger ones have our own disappointment or joy.

You have shot film in the 70s, 80s? I was born in the late 80s. Our family never owned a small gauge film camera. Instead we have quite a lot of home videos. I have no nostalgic moments connected to 8mm film or projecting it. We did watch slides when I was younger, but really, I have been very digital oriented since my childhood. I guess that the first photos I took were taken with a digital camera which recorded the photos on a floppy disk. MS-DOS, Win 3.11, ... Linux (Gentoo), OSX - seen them all.

I'm one of those late comers to this party. People of film twilight. Film is a choice for me, such as listening to vinyl LPs. Digital is plain boring. I have seen it, it gives me no joy. It's a tool and I'm quite much as excited about some new digital gadgets as some one would be about ... a new screwdriver. Sure, nice, it has more megapixels, more DR yaddayadda.

But exactly because of this many such things in the film world which seem like utterly stupid, hard and pointless to do in this twilight time are not that for me (and for many others like me). For us film was already dead in a sense when we entered this world. It had already become non-mainstream and business-wise only for those who wish to choose it. And in a sense it is also one part of the magic: not doing things out of necessity but of choice.

My friend built a laboratory & machine for processing super-8 and 16mm film, a feat most would call impossible or way too expensive, considering it is no longer a viable business for feeding oneself. But he did it and because of him new people have come to embrace small gauge film. His original reason for building it? He wanted to make an animation film, draw and then shoot on film. How much easier it would have been for him to just do it with a digital camera...

The thing is, I wish for forums which could be forward looking and inspiring. Sure, one can be realistic and remind everyone every now and then that quite probably one in three of us on this forum is going to have some cancer at some point of our life. Or remind that quite probably most people never achieve any of their dreams. But do those reminders inspire us to try? Or even to dream? If information can be obtained through Google, what point is there then to come together on a forum? To get a healthy dose of realism? Do we not get enough of that elsewhere?

I'm not really that surprised if some forums tend to die and wither away when they become counterproductive to the hobby they should be dedicated to. It's like going on a forum on soccer on which there are four old members: all having nice memories of how things were much better before, one has moved on to basket ball because "soccer is already dead" -- but has stayed there to make sure newcomers realize that as well -- and if some new comer would happen to become excited about a new league starting, they'd tell him or her that they tried that already in the summer of 1988 and nobody came there and it was so bad that they'd rather have just had gone fishing and times have certainly not gotten any better since then, so better just kick the ball in your own garden alone -- or move on to basket ball, since that ball can be at least thrown and not only kicked...


EDIT:
Sorry if I sound harsh. I'm extremely grateful to all of those who have long history with this film format and who have been helping us newbies through all these years. A big thank you to you all, you are very important people. Just voicing my frustration on this all gloom and doom

[carllooper]

... Sorry if I sound harsh. I'm extremely grateful to all of those who have long history with this film format and who have been helping us newbies through all these years. A big thank you to you all, you are very important people. Just voicing my frustration on this all gloom and doom

Excellent post. Very well put.

Carl