From VistaVision to Virtual Production: Film's Unexpected Second Act

0:00In this episode of the DeNoise podcast, we're going to do a big breakdown of film and how it's still being used and if it's still relevant. Let's get into it.

0:12All right, so we're gonna do a little special episode here because right now NAB is happening and we're recording this before NAB as this evergreen-ish episode. And we have mentioned talking about this for a while. You and I have always been wanting to cover this topic. Yeah, and I think a big reason why was Team Two Films did this really great YouTube video about a month ago where they shot on 35 millimeter film, 60 millimeter film compared it to digital kind of showed the whole chemistry chemistry process processing it but kind of did a good breakdown of you know what it's like shooting on film if you never shot on film before and good kind of cost comparison yeah of you know is it really that much more expensive and i think the other interesting thing was the psychological benefits of shooting on film we'll get into that yes and the restraints that it forces on you and how that could also make you shoot better.

1:02Yes. To couple that, it feels like film is making a mild comeback. I know. I mean, last year, a lot of the Best Picture nominees were shot on film. Anora shot on film. The Brutalists famously shot on VistaVision, which resurfaced as a old format that found life again. Yeah. And we're getting to like how difficult it was to get VistaVision processing up and running for The Brutalists. Yeah. I mean, just to recap with the difference in VistaVision. So most film cameras are shooting 35 millimeter and they're shooting vertically. And the picture comes in like in the vertical strip. And so you can only get as wide as the film is wide.

1:36VistaVision rotates that 90 degrees. So the film strip is going in horizontally being exposed and you're able to expose a larger image, not as large as IMAX, but larger than you would get with a three perf or four perf 35 millimeter. Yeah. So like if you're shooting anamorphic, You're squeezing all that aspect ratio into a vertical, like a square box versus VistaVision, where you now have more of a rectangle, more of a 16.9 box. So you're getting more film grain per pixel. I can't even say pixel. More real estate per frame. Yeah. What did we call resolution back? What did we call it? What was a pixel before pixel?

2:15Anyway, I'm glad we're having this conversation because these are some of the things that are challenging right now. I feel like we've lost the language of what we even call this. Make it a comeback. Vista Vision. IMAX. Also, like Christopher Nolan, huge fan of IMAX. What's he working on? The Odyssey. Like Homer? One of my favorite books reading in high school. I'm excited about this one. That's awesome. But yeah, they're shooting that on IMAX. And there was talk that IMAX was developing a new IMAX camera, sort of specifically for Christopher Nolan, that was supposed to be smaller and also run more quiet because a big issue with IMAX is it's very loud and very heavy.

2:54It's huge. I think it's like 200 pounds. Yeah, that's crazy. Like you can't shoulder rig that. No, I don't believe so. I think they were trying to do more version that you could shoulder rig handhelds and quieter so they could record sync sound because I believe everything has to be 80 yard after because it's just too loud to record anything practically. Talk about the expectations of this film. I mean, Christopher Nolan has been hitting home runs like 100 % of the time for the last two decades. And now you have Matt Damon as Willisies. You have some big A-listers. It's being shot right now on a new camera.

3:28I can't wait to see it. This is the return of the film that Seth Rogen was talking about. Just takes one film to turn it all the conversation around. Yeah, I'm excited. Yeah, we mentioned that last time too. It's like this year might be a little bit quieter in the big big blockbuster films, but there's a lot coming out in 2026. Okay. So yeah, film, let's see, I have a crap bag of just film ish stories. I don't have any good logical order to go through them, but talking about team two films. And so one of their arguments was like shooting on film because it is a limited resource because you know, every time you hit roll, you're running through film, you got to pay for the film stock, then you got to pay for the processing, you got to pay for the digitization.

4:04So there's a counter in your head. Yeah, you need to like have that discipline to know like when you hit record you want to use this whereas i feel with digital there's such a you know it's it's pixels it's like yeah bits you know it's a media card we got tons of storage right just copy it over we don't have to there's no actual like monetary cost we can talk about there's actual there are costs associated with storage and hard drives and all that but you're not like oh we got to pay the you know per foot we don't have to do that with digital yeah i've worked with some dps you know that are younger and there's seems to be more of a habit where they'll just like kind of hit roll and like let the thing record and then five filmmaking yeah and then you get a whole like you know string out of just like the different b-roll shots but then i still see them moving around in between takes and it's like one big long file one of the things that bugs me the most is like when you get into double digit take numbers you're like on take 25 are you sure you didn't get it in the last 24 takes no i mean uh fincher is known for doing a lot of takes and he shoots film as well so i think social network they did like 99 takes on one of the like the the restaurant scene so you're on one shot the entire day pretty much yeah that needs to have more discipline i agree so film is gonna enable you to naturally build that into your head it forces you to have that discipline and that was something so yeah a good story with this is el mariachi so you're familiar with el mariachi robert rodriguez's absolutely first film legendary film legendary film and one of the parts of it being legendary was that he shot it on a$7 ,000 budget.

5:30And part of the lore, I mean, true story, but lore behind that was that he raised the money by doing a medical test for a month and living in this medical facility to do some drug trial stuff. And that was the$7 ,000 was like the payment. That's such a cool story for such a cool film. And this is like in the early 90s, I think. I believe it was the early 90s. Like 91, 92. Yeah. So just that for inflation is probably like, I don't know, 15, 20 ,000 today. Yeah, which is still nothing. Right. And obviously, but you're in the 90s and your options are either film or like VHS or something that where the quality is nowhere near what film would be.

6:08And I believe his original plan was like he was just going to try to crank out these kind of low budget action films, you know, shot in Mexico where he has friends and family and call in a lot of favors and then try to sell it, you know, for whatever, 50 ,000 and, you know, make more of these. Yeah. And but two things sort of went under the radar from like that story. I mean, then the story happens, he makes a film and then he gets it into Sundance and then it sort of becomes this big like hit and then they get that launches his career. Then Desperado. Yeah, Desperado, What's Find in Mexico, Spy Kids, Sin City, some of the Star Wars TV shows.

6:38But one of the things that are two things that get lost in that, I mean, a part of the reason the film was so good and so dynamic was he shot like over 100 or 200 films, like growing up as a kid on VHS, and he would just make these kind of short, fun action films. So he had the reps experience. He like, yeah, the reps, he had the reps. And even though he's shooting VHS, you know, which is a cheaper format, he was still, you know, back in the day, it was a linear editing, not nonlinear editing. So you cut the film or two VCR, you know, the two VCRs and you got to like play your, you know, your raw footage and then you're editing by like hitting record on the other one.

7:15And so you got to like piece your VHS together in sequence. Insane. And so he got very good at like, you know, I need the shot. I need the shot. I need the shot, which came into play in El Mariachi when he like sprung to get some film, but he had a very limited film stock. And so he knew exactly what shots he needed to get. And then the other thing was that$7 ,000, pretty much that entire budget went to film stock and processing. That was the bulk of the money. What a smart way to spend the 7 ,000. It's like the one thing that he physically can't do because he doesn't have a chemical processing lab and a dark room and all that.

7:46But everything else he was able to scrap up together, you know, whatever friend has an extra, whoever his house has a location. Yeah, I think he was able to borrow the camera. Yeah. Yeah. And he just like knew some people. So he was able to like, you know, the production value raises the perceived value of the budget. Incredible resourcefulness. Using all the resources. Yeah. And then the punchline to that is like, once it played at Sundance, he met some rep from Kodak. And I think they found out that like all of the money went to film stock. And then they were like, oh, we have an independent film program.

8:11We would have just given you the film stock.

8:15That's awesome. But yeah, the big thing is like, he had the discipline to, you know, that film forces you to have from all of his previous roles. I mean, can you imagine him not completing the film because he ran out of film stock? Like, that's the tragedy. That's the pressure you're under. You know, this is like all the money I have. I went through some horrible drug medical exam thing to get the$7 ,000. You better believe I'm going to make the movie of my lifetime. Right. You got to make it work. Yes. Yeah. I mean, even at a film school, they would give us, it was like everyone had to have the same resources.

8:47And so basically for like one level of films we did, it was like, all right, everyone, you get like two cans of film. Yeah. And that's it. Yeah. And so it's like, you know. Go make magic. You know what your limited resources are. You know, there's no other additional media cards or anything. It's like, it's two cans of film. That's all they're going to pay for. And that's all they're going to pay for processing. Yeah. And that's about, a can is about 16 minutes, I believe, a reel for 16 millimeter. I think like now you have two terabyte cards and a lot of the directors are like, oh, but I want the four terabyte.

9:14Like, really? What are you going to do with all that data? what if you're shooting on the 12k pixels or the 17k ursa yeah that fills up but that's the other hidden costs of digital especially like storage and archiving yeah where okay sure you're not paying for the processing but film we know that is proven to be archival time yeah it's like you like when resolve or whatever premiere is um transcoding there's hours and hours of transcoding on, you know, two, four terabytes of data. Time is money. Yeah. But even after you're just, you're done and storing it. Like we know we could just take a film canister and throw it in a shelf in a climate controlled environment.

9:52And it's good for a hundred years. It's literally good for a hundred years because you have this hundred year old film. You know, you can literally see it. So that is the technology and standards change. It's like, well, we just need to shine light through it. We can see it. We can figure out how to scan it a hundred years from now with better scanners, but you still have. We can see it. It's still there. whereas digital storage it's like hard drives fail cds will fail dvds will disintegrate outlet you know right like what did you ever put stuff on zip drives or jazz discs or those other formats that now are obsolete like what's open exr 20 years from now whatever format that is you know yeah is it going to read this format i remember seeing some rough numbers where it was like the cost to archive a movie shot on film was roughly like a thousand a year and the cost to archive of digital was like about 10 ,000 a year.

10:38Yeah. Just from like having to keep moving the data around and make sure everything stays relevant. How do you take a leap here with the discipline and the psychology thing? Cause it's really interesting. If you know that you've only got, you know, a couple of takes per shot, you're going to spend as a director way more time with the actors to rehearse and get those emotions, get those beats right. And then shoot it. And I think that overall makes the production cheaper. Cause then you're not spending as much time on set. speeds up the editing. Yes. All of the above. So I think having some kind of a funnel with film here is actually very conducive to a better film.

11:13Yeah. Or even if you just do like learn on it, you know, shoot a film on it, kind of get some of that discipline that you can apply to digital. Obviously it doesn't make sense to shoot film for everything. It's still costly, but it's not off the table as I think people, you know, might think or perceive. Yeah. NFL films is a separate part of NFL that shoots, they don't really do anything with the broadcast. They're shooting on the sidelines, like very cinematic, super slow-mo, high quality looking shots of the games that they license out or use in documentaries or other films. And they were, I could have sworn, I saw a stat a long time ago that they were like the single largest purchaser of film stock, like for a few years running.

11:49I can't find proof to back that up again, but they were a very large purchaser of film stock because they would just shoot film to get that like 120 frames per second, like very beautiful. And imagine how many NFL games there are at any given time, how many cameras you need for coverage. Yeah. And they were big film users. And again, also they remember there, I did find some articles saying like, well, I don't know if I'll switch to digital because, you know, film, you could just put on the shelf. It's, you know, the archive quality. Yeah. And I, this was another thing I can't prove, but I believe Ari had a few 16 millimeter cameras.

12:19There was the SR2, the SR3, kind of the workhorse, 16 mil cameras and then they came out in the early 2000s with the 416 okay which was a more updated streamlined uh shoulder mountable version of their 16 millimeter camera yeah and it was also kind of came out at the time when everything we started to switch to digital so yeah but you got to remember the early days of digital like broadcast cameras were terrible yeah and i mean maybe you had like collateral that was shooting digital but it had a very distinct look yeah yeah And then maybe like Star Wars Episode 2 was like another early digital.

12:50Yeah, like if you go to like Ayrton Senna F1 coverage or some of like the 90s stuff where they first started to use broadcast digital cameras, that footage just didn't hold up, man. Like, you know, you have chromatic aberration, you have like scan lines and all these other things. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, the 416 was a new, I mean, I kind of came out and then the digital switch happened. But I also could have sworn that that camera was developed for NFL Films, but I can't find proof of that. but NFL Films was a big user of film stock. So we're sort of talking about like the last fall of film and now we're talking about the rise of film.

13:24Right, and we can't talk about film too without talking about the two big film manufacturers, Kodak and Fujifilm were pretty much the two main ones. Yeah, how are they different? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, every film stock has a distinct look. I mean, so Kodak had... The Chroma. 7219, 72. I mean, it gets to the point where you remember the numbers of the film stock. Kodachrome. Kodachrome was their... Photography. Yeah, I don't think I ever did a film stock with Kodachrome. I'm curious about that. But yeah, Kodachrome was known for accurate... I mean, a lot of this comes down to color science and like how well these stocks can accurately reproduce the color they see or have the vibrant colors.

13:59And then sensitivity. I mean, so, you know, 50D was a popular one if you're shooting outside. A 50 ISO, daylight. I mean, your film stock was color timed based on the color temperature that you were going to be filming in or there was a variety of techniques to... Yeah, you know what? What blows my mind is they did all this without knowing what the final look and feel of the image is. And now we could just look at it in a viewfinder. I will say, I feel like, yes, being able to see what you're getting. Like you're using light meters for exposure and just trusting that whatever. That is why I have to be a seasoned cinematographer to know, like, well, when you hit record, you know what you're going to get.

14:34And you're talking about recording on like million dollar film sets where there is like, you know, imagine shooting Gone with the Wind. i mean this is like a fear with um the godfather this is like i can play like the studio was watching the dailies and you know they're intentionally shooting dark but it's not like shooting raw format now where it's like oh it's dark but we can recover all that yeah like posters dynamic range left yeah there are a few things you could do but you're pretty limited on like what you shot is what you get yeah no but the nice thing about film was like if you did blow it like if it was overblown the highlight clipping would be very aesthetically pleasing it would bloom and and not just be the ugly like white yes that we get now so it was like oh that looks cinematic even though you completely blew the exposure or if it's too dark then the crushed range also looks really cinematic so it was kind of like a give and take yeah it's funny or ironic to mention you know it's like there's also a lot of resources and research and tools that go into adding film grain back into digital oh boy resolve has its own built-in film look emulator that they just launched last year.

15:37It's really good. Dehancer is another big popular resolve plugin that is pretty much adding inhalation, adding film grain. I mean, just film grain overlays are hugely popular. I remember like early 2000s, I would go back and forth from work to home and there would be a really nice souped up expensive Corvette on the freeway. Probably gets out to work at the same time as me. The license plate said film look on it. So it's somebody who made their living a pretty good living just converting digital to film yeah and yeah that was a big business for a while and now everybody has that power on their resolve desktop yeah but no as far as difference kodak and fuji i'm thinking back i mean because also i've not shot film in a long time but i think i pretty much always just leaned on i think it was the 7219 was the stock number uh 500t 500 tungsten because for that reason i knew with the 500 tungsten we would definitely get something like it was more a safety net of like i know if we hit record we're gonna pick up stuff is that we're not going to run the risk of being underexposed and stuff's going to be too dark.

16:33Exactly. Yeah. You rather err on the side of overexposure with film, I think. Yeah. Again, don't listen to us. Listen to a real cinematographer. Listen to someone who has ASC after their name. Yes. So it's interesting that Kodak and Fujifilm are going in two completely different paths. They are now. I mean, you know, there's still the famous story where it's like Kodak did develop digital camera, like the early digital camera technology and then was like, it's going to cannibalize our film sales and, you know, ish. Yeah. Looking at them today. So I was at CES earlier this year and it was crazy because there was a, there were two Kodak booths.

17:07One Kodak booth did have like consumer cameras, like kind of Polaroid ish and, you know, actual camera stuff. But then the other booth was the wildest thing. It was like the Kodak brand on every type of product under the sun, like boom boxes, smartwatches, binoculars, yellow and red and Kodak. I mean, yeah, it was like purely, i mean the brand obviously still has like it's probably the most valuable part of this company like it is still a very like valuable also i would think that brand would resonate with gen z a lot because it's it's like a legacy brand free dates it's a great brand yeah but yeah it's basically just licensing like on everything and it just it just made no sense i mean did they have money didn't they have that bitcoin miner box was not a kodak it was like a kodak like a bitcoin mining box absolutely crazy nothing i mean i think anything they're still generating visually wise photographically is like consumer still cameras.

17:57Yeah. And I'm going to guess they're probably just bringing in other people's chips. Yeah. And building that. Fuji on the flip side. Yeah. What's Fuji up to? Has successfully, I would say successfully, embraced the digital age. Yeah. They've had their digital still cameras for a while. Yep. And then last year they came out with the Fujifilm GFX Eterna. Yes. Which is. With the weird handle on the side. We're going to put up a screenshot here. a 65 millimeter digital sensor camera for around seven or eight thousand dollars yes so like and the crazy big really compact body small body yeah compared to other 65 millimeter sensors pretty affordable price yep and this is their you know original sensor and color science yep yeah fuji i would say has successfully transitioned transitioned and adapted maybe like slower than you know other companies where you have red and re that successfully transitioned earlier we We talked about Panavision, right?

18:47Panavision, yeah. How they sort of went the way of the dinosaurs a little bit. You know, Kodak did as well. Fuji made the... Then it's so hard for a tech company to do, you know. Yeah, it's a completely separate thing. The last episode, we were talking about Apple and are they going to transition into the AI age, right? Although they dominated the hardware software age. So yeah, we'll see. Yeah, but yeah, Fuji has definitely been doing a lot more updates. Also, you know, going back to the flip side, if you're still shooting film and then digitizing, not a lot of people realize but like black magic sells a film scanner that's a thirty thousand dollars centel film scanner i believe it's one of the companies they acquired years ago i think thirty thousand is a bargain because those are generally like giant refrigerator size things that are like hundreds of thousands of dollars yeah most likely will be at nab they usually have it a little corner you know or it's just like by the way we still we still sell film scanners you can scan your film into resolve yeah so how does how does that work so you scan a frame of film and it's like an EXR file and then you apply like a Cineon LUT to it to get it into Rec.

19:46709 or whatever? I have no idea. Okay. I just don't know what the post-production workflow is. Plug it into your Thunderbolt on your computer and hit import? Almost, almost. You got to spool up the perforations. I do remember it wasn't the Cintel scanner, but in the Team 2 films, they did show that process of how they were scanning it. And the other interesting thing was like how many times they would have to run the film through like just dusters just to ensure like that there's like zero dust because like if you scan yeah if you scan it and you have dust on the negative yeah when you scan it's going to be in the image so like maybe some some new creators like that they're sprinkling in more dust for a more grimy look yeah when's the day that uh mr beast is going to start shooting this i spent a million dollars on film stock to shoot this video I would love that.

20:35So yeah, they still, Black Magic still sells film scanners. And yeah, we mentioned at the beginning of the episode that there were a good amount of Best Picture nominees that were shot on film. But then there's also been a good blend of movies and TV shows that are shooting on film and using virtual production. Two of the big ones, Poor Things from a few years ago. Virtual production background for a lot of the sets, but shot on film. And then also Fallout more recently. I think the most amount of minutes shot on film with vp is probably fallout yeah that makes sense it's interesting so when fallout was being shot obviously it was a big secret there was a giant stage in new york i knew some of my friends who were working on it they couldn't talk about it and then uh i was at a party and one of my friends that is on it kind of whispers to me and says hey uh they're shooting on film i'm like wait what yeah it's amazing because you don't need genlock there's no more the pixels bloom better like film and VP work really well together.

21:34So there is no concern of like, you don't, do you have to sync anything or it's just because the refresh rate is so fast that doesn't. Yeah. I think because so much light is entering each film exposure, it doesn't matter what refresh rate the LED really is at. I mean, those things are refreshing at three, 4 ,000 times a second versus this thing is open for 33 milliseconds. So you can imagine how many times it's being sample and then more A goes away because you have no pixels on the sensor. Because there isn't. It's film. It's film stock. Yeah. Like the pixel would be the actual chemical molecule, which is like way smaller than a pixel.

22:11Yeah. And then also you get all the added benefits of dynamic range on film, which is arguably more aesthetically pleasing. So like if you do clip something, it looks beautiful and not harsh. Or if you crush something, it also looks beautiful. Color reproduction is also amazing, right? yeah like a lot of sensors struggle with red specifically uh-huh uh so like if you have a really saturated red by the time you bring it into post it starts to look more burgundy like it starts to have an off color okay where film preserves the red really really well so yeah all right great marriage and who would have thought yeah older tech and newer tech yes that is interesting yeah i never thought about those benefits i remember because i remember one of the earlier uses of virtual production was the sandra bullock film the space well oh gravity gravity yeah yeah gravity was all green screen there was no led volume work oh that wasn't led yeah the virtual production or maybe i'm thinking of um first man that was another space man did use some led volume work yes and i think it was shot on film but yeah their led volume stuff was like stars in the moon not yeah yeah crazy stuff far away yeah i mean fallout was i would imagine really difficult for a vp volume because of all that detail in the environment and then all that physical set that had to sit in front of it and blending and matching between the two they're shooting season two right now here in LA.

23:27Hey, LA production. Yes. Aside from the discipline, you know, benefits that we talked about, you think there's any visual advantage shooting film? And also sort of the question of like, can you shoot digital and use the tools at hand to make it look as visually pleasing as film? Or, you know, is there something that like film's always going to contain that like digital can never can never replicate? All right, I'm going to make a really extended reach here. Hang with me. Let's go. I think it's the same difference as a really capable photographer versus a generative AI image that's meant to mimic photography.

24:07So what I mean by that is you take something like the Brutalist, which was shot on Vista Vision, and it just naturally intrinsically has this cinema feel to it. Right. of course the aspect ratio and like the contrast and the color shifts like those are the things you can quantify but then you're consuming this thing for 90 minutes and now your brain is kind of in in this style aesthetic choice yes you can totally replicate it with resolve up to a point but i think there is a 10 of it that you just can't get that just comes naturally with the territory and it's the same thing with real life photography you give you know a really capable photographer a canon 5d mark 4 like a very standard dslr tell them to go do some street photography and then you give a really capable generative ai artist chat chp team as generator tell them to prompt and yeah they'll look about the same 90 there but you will prefer the natural one and you won't know why because our brain looks for fine fine details that sometimes we don't even process like we just prefer things i'll even give you another stretch it's the same reason why we have uncanny valley you know with digital humans we're so used to looking at real faces our species have survived on trusting families and friends and partners over the eons that anytime we see something, anything off about a face that we look at a TV, instantly stuff gets triggered in our brain and we don't really know why.

25:44So these are all the things that are unfortunately very esoterical and very kind of out in the ether, but it's definitely an element that is there. And it is why I think film ultimately is the most natural medium for cinema. Was that too much? You can edit it up. Okay. Yeah. I'm thinking too, like all these things, you know, AI and film and digital, it always comes back to the story and, you know, like you could have the most beautiful VistaVision or IMAX shot film, you know, but if it's crappy, you're boring story, you know, versus something that's on an iPhone and is engaging in a, you know, moving story, like you'd still prefer to watch the engaging moving story.

26:27Absolutely. I mean, I don't want to say film is the only way. Like, we've had... No, I mean, my question was like more on an aesthetic level. Yeah. You know, can you... Is there something that just film and cellulite will always have that you can't match with digital? Yeah. I mean, one of the things that digital cinema cameras have a really hard time matching with film is motion blur. Because that exposure is happening over time. And that film frame is getting exposed. And then it is then going away. And the next frame is coming in. and then that shutter angle is going in and out like these are physical and chemical reactions there's a literal shutter yes spinning in front of the film yeah i mean that did improve when we got like global shutter and and a different way to process even then it's all electronically controlled like it's mimicking something that is physical yeah i feel i mean that's a good i think that's probably the biggest takeaway it's like so much of digital is mimicking what we already created with you know even going all the way to specifically the film emulation plugins and modifications.

27:25Yeah. I mean, there's a reason why Lawrence of Arabia holds up even today. Like it was shot, what, 80, 90 years ago. It's as good aesthetically as anything that we're producing in 2020. I think that's a whole separate conversation. It's something I'm not even familiar or knowledgeable enough, but seeing the discourse online of like, why do more films today look just color-wise, like a bit more muted, a bit less saturated compared to something like Lawrence of Arabia or the Technicolor films that had like these very vibrant, very saturated colors. It imprints on your head so much better because it's just so much more stimulating to watch.