How big would digital resolution go, before it outsizes 35mm film?

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The new framerate thing has been around for ages.
It's one of the reasons The Hobbit got screwed up. Jackson's cameras were using a high frame rate, and it messed up the aesthetic of the movies.



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Oh okay, but no one else besides Jackson is actually taking this new framerate seriously though, and it won't become a thing, will it?

I mean if wanted to shoot slow motion on 240fps, you would have to shoot at around 720 fps, or if you wanted it really slow, you would have to shoot at around 1200 fps. You would need so much more light for that, it will be ridiculous and hard for the cast and crew to see.

So would they really take 240fps seriously therefore?



Doesn't Cameron have some interest in higher fps? I could be wrong.



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I'm surprised since The Hobbit movies got such negative responses to the high shutter speed, everyone saying it looks like a soap opera, and comments like that. You think other filmmakers would be turned off by comments like that.



Anyways, I love my 4K Blu-rays, but the resolution plays a smaller part. It’s more the HDR that’s amazing. For every film lover out there should really experience properly calibrated 4K content of older films. Movies have never come closer to looking and feeling like actual film prints being shown on your tv screen. So cinematic and so beautiful.



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Well it seems that if we move to 8K TVs later, that filmmakers who still want to shoot on film will have to move up to shooting on 70mm film, more than 35mm to keep up.



Well it seems that if we move to 8K TVs later, that filmmakers who still want to shoot on film will have to move up to shooting on 70mm film, more than 35mm to keep up.
Well yes and no.

Most big films today are 2K digital intermediates and those can still look beautiful on a 4K screen even the source is half the size. That would be the same of 4K content to 8K screen. And if it ever gets possible, a 6K scan of 35mm and then shown on an 8K screen would be even better.

But I wouldn’t worry to much yet. 4K is still not widely supported or integrated yet. I mean, Samsung’s first 8K screen didn’t even have the needed hardware to even support the 8K content available



35mm film is about 90 megapixels... which equates to around "6K" in modern terms.
Working in photography really its not that simple, you can scan 35mm film to that degree but your well into the realms of diminishing returns.

Film generally behaves in a rather different fashion to digital, flaws are visable earlier but the dropoff in quality as you increase display resolution is also more gradual and pleasing.

So its less a case of 35mm suddenly hitting a wall and more a case of diminishing returns as you increase resolution. I'd say 4K is likely to show improvement for most films with decent source material but perhaps not quite as much as you'd expect purely from the figures, 8K will probably be more of a letdown, more suited eo either modern films or films with a larger format film, no coincidence that 2001 was chosen for an 8K demo.



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Oh okay. At how much resolution does film start to diminish though?