A couple of years ago I projected, side by side, the trailer for the second Harry Potter film.
One screen had the trailer from super 8
One screen had the trailer from DVD, using a well set up LCD projector and RGB input from the DVD
No contest. Super 8 won hands down in resolution and colour reproduction.
It really does depend what you are trying to achieve. Somebody tells me that their 12 Mpixel digital camera can capture as much detail as a 35mm still camera and in some respects that is true....but the CCD can still only capture 5 f-stops of contrast compared to 7 or more for film...and the colour reproduction is usually more accurate with film. On the other hand sometimes you don't want accurate colour rendition, or don't care.
If people cared much about colour accuracy then Kodak Gold and VC films would never have been launched and nobody would have been satisfied with the NTSC television standard.
electronic imaging has been around almost as long as chemical imaging (the first fax machine was developed in the 1870's believe it or not) but it has always lagged behind. It continues to do so but obviously has it's uses. As long as people appreciate the differences and choose their medium wisely...
Please, this is hardly a test of digital vs. super8
this is a test of Mpeg2 encoded video vs. super8, this would be akin to comparing mini-dv to 35mm film it is hardly a fair fight
maybe you should try compareing digibeta or dvcpro50 24p footage straight from the deck through a well set up 8" or 9" CRT projector (especially with a DVDO iScan hd+) to that from super8. I think that your results will be far different. (24p minidv would probably be amazing as well)
It's a valid point regarding the films' softness but I would look at this from a different angle.
When Film-Thurso developed the PIP 65mm system we also had some questions about the graphic detail per frame but then we saw another way to consider this. The question of how fast the human eye registers detail came into play. We can see things at the tiniest fraction of a second but it is only in a very basic way and our brains make up the rest.
From here we looked at the size of the PIP frames and found they used about 80% of the full resolution on offer from the photo printing sections per second of action. For technical reasons we don't use the whole area available. In transfer tests we found the resultant picture quality was largely equal to the original prints which was just fine.
Naturally frame for frame we require the best possible resolution but the audience viewpoint is from a motion image consideration rather than frame for frame.
PIP 65mm is printed at it's optimum resolution and per frame initially isn't as good as you might want but as a moving image it is more than capable of rendering results that meet audience demands.
Although you frame scans show softness on smaller objects the overall appear on screen is made up of many frame, not just one. What is lost in one frame is found in the previous or next and so on. Per second Super 8mm offers a very good resolution and even frame for frame beats digital mini DV hands down especially because the grain is not in the same place on each consecutive frame. This is where it gets the advantage in definition where details can be lost between lines of pixels.
This is a jpeg compressed resized frame from my HD telecine. If you look close you can see rivet heads on the canopy. Try that with SD DV video. Use a fair compairison and 8mm wins. By the way this was shot hand held by a guy who had never held a super-8 camera before. Imagine if he had focused properly
Regards,
Paul Cotto[/img]
Don't worry about equipment so much and make your movie!
