Tweet
Something that I've learned from this is nothing directly related to 35mm, but the relative quality of other gauges being much more competitive than I ever expected, at least in our environment.
I'm at my very heart a Super-8 guy: My very first paycheck went towards a movie camera and for decades afterwards, that was "film" to me, I never imagined it would change, either. (16mm was kind of a "Why not?" thing in my mid-50s.)
CineSea was quite a few years old when 35mm first showed up and I was a little nervous at first! I imagined my skinny little gauge on screen with the Industrial Stuff would make S8 look bad, maybe push us off-screen.
-didn't happen!
For one thing, we have access to Doug's great Xenon GS, and also a lot of great, late S8 prints. For another thing, while huge on a home-screen scale, the screen at CineSea is not so big that 35mm is really showing all its high resolution capabilities.
Maybe if we moved into a theatrical auditorium on a screen the size of a barn, S8 would run out of steam and the difference would become stark, but as things stand, S8, 16mm and 35mm play quite nicely together. It's not unusual to look back and see which machine the beam is coming from: what's happening on screen is not always the perfect clue. For example, our last Friday Night feature was Poltergeist, and I thought it was 16mm until Doug told me it was a Derann!
It's like a Ferrari is undoubtedly a faster car than a Volkswagen Beetle: out on a racetrack the difference would be astounding. You put those same two in a School Zone with a 25 MPH limit and the Ferrari can be no faster because of local limits. It's just in this case the difference is not the laws of optics, just a Law Man with a Radar gun and a book of tickets!
I'm at my very heart a Super-8 guy: My very first paycheck went towards a movie camera and for decades afterwards, that was "film" to me, I never imagined it would change, either. (16mm was kind of a "Why not?" thing in my mid-50s.)
CineSea was quite a few years old when 35mm first showed up and I was a little nervous at first! I imagined my skinny little gauge on screen with the Industrial Stuff would make S8 look bad, maybe push us off-screen.
-didn't happen!
For one thing, we have access to Doug's great Xenon GS, and also a lot of great, late S8 prints. For another thing, while huge on a home-screen scale, the screen at CineSea is not so big that 35mm is really showing all its high resolution capabilities.
Maybe if we moved into a theatrical auditorium on a screen the size of a barn, S8 would run out of steam and the difference would become stark, but as things stand, S8, 16mm and 35mm play quite nicely together. It's not unusual to look back and see which machine the beam is coming from: what's happening on screen is not always the perfect clue. For example, our last Friday Night feature was Poltergeist, and I thought it was 16mm until Doug told me it was a Derann!
It's like a Ferrari is undoubtedly a faster car than a Volkswagen Beetle: out on a racetrack the difference would be astounding. You put those same two in a School Zone with a 25 MPH limit and the Ferrari can be no faster because of local limits. It's just in this case the difference is not the laws of optics, just a Law Man with a Radar gun and a book of tickets!
Comment