วีดีโอ

If you prep for any Capture Format, anything can be done to play within the limits of each format and match everything. But film is going to have that intrinsic characteristic of overexposing the negative in a way that even an Alexa will clip, and then under develop with less time in all the photo chemical processes to acquire pitch perfect and detailed (with correct color information) highlights rolling off to natural and tangible (without artifacts) specular, more so with the sun on frame (at every time of the day). In controlled lighting TAKES this is a no brainer, but in long takes with only natural light, like in Terrence Malick films (ex:The Tree Of Life), there is a huge difference. And in 15 perf 65mm IMAX, the under develop technique is going to give astronomic differences. But yeah, sure, I too love digital work arounds because I don't have big budgets. Nevertheless every time I shot sunsets at the beach with the sun on frame summed to talent, back ground and foreground, I wish I had film. And I don't say that digital is the worst for that, I'm just clarifying the science underneath. Now, for low light that's another matter, and that's where I love digital the most. Fincher was before Yedlin in that matter, because he worked in matte photography on The Last Jedi before directing Alien 3, and he broke all the rules more than even George Lucas, only that is not noticeable at first glance. Though Yedlin is very important in the "Open Source" filming community, and Fincher is a bit more hermetic.

To me this seems like an attempt to hide the supremacy of film

This man FULLY fooled me with Knives Out, I 100% believed that film was shot on film

Bland vision3 film made for digital processing looks like digital yes. Try replicating the look of Kodachrome 25. That would be the easiest A/B blind test of all time. Sadly they don't make em like they used to.

In the years since this test was done, more and more digital cinema cameras have started to produce images that are ALMOST on par with the Alexa (and with higher resolution). Arri themselves have released the Alexa 35 that unquestionably has more dynamic range than film ever has. I will always love many of the visual characteristics we tend to associate with film but workflow of digital is ultimately much more important to me. I like telling stories with moving pictures. I like working with a DP to craft a look and working with actors to craft a performance. I like the creative stuff so I want the workflow that lets me be more creative. It's the same reason why buying a graphics tablet helped me re-discover my love of hand-drawn/painted art. I know many artists who still find drawing on paper to be a more rewarding workflow and to each his/her own. I just think we should realize how fortunate we are that modern tools have allow us to have such varied and flexible workflows.

so this has been a source of alot of debate over the years and you really cannot do it justice with youtube compression on here, i'd encourage everyone to view it in the original source linked in the description here basically, even with this display prep demo shot on 35mm vs alexa (which is known to have the most "filmic" sensors), you can tell the difference if you have a trained eye, but steve is right to an extent that most audiences will not be able to tell the difference. They are extremely subtle but the skin tone reproduction on film is simply unmatched no matter what holy shitfuck digital sensor you use, the gradual blending and the rolloff in the density of the colors feels incredibly natural on film while less so on digital. Also when these images are blown up on a theater screen guaranteed it will look different

left is film, image is trembling and the light is worse

Can you make the filter more a bit cinematic

which one is film and which one is digital

Man I love Steve Yedlin. In a world where everyone is constantly presenting their biases as facts, he bases his opinions on what actually makes a physical difference and what doesn’t at that.

Based on what I've just seen, the pb is that film feels more 3D to me. Everything else, I can role with.

Why are both versions exhibiting gate weave? Digital should be absolutely steady. On my computer screen the split screen comparisons look the same in detail and color. Most of the ways anyone will see motion pictures now will be digital. Film is redundant. The 'Look' that everyone goes on about is ENTIRELY due to film's poor resolution of motion at 24fps. EVERY display method massages this to reduce flicker (projecting every frame twice optically or scanning with complex 'pulldown' methods for video) whereas digital motion cameras do not need any of this nonsense. In the early days of non linear editing, AVID etc, a trick to reduce storage and computer processing demands was to drop every other field and display video as if it were at 24/25 fps. Startlingly it looked immediately like it was shot on film. Similarly running a film through a Steenbeck at fast speed gave the impression that the screen was a TV tube rather than a back projection device. The other factor is that to get the film clips into a state to even make this video, they would have to be digitised using a telecine! I cannot understand why everyone goes on about the incredibly tiny difference (if any) of the way the image is resolved and yet ignore the glaringly obvious difference in motion resolution. You may like the stuttering flicker of film complete with its backwards rotating wagon wheels, but come on, digital is far superior and will be even more so in the future with cameras being able to record metadata, slow motion and very very long takes or being so small and lighr that can get POVs that a large camera cannot.. The latest natural history programs in the Attenborough series have shots that would be impossible on film and look stunning.

Both have this horrible Orange and Teal look. When will this madness stop? Hollywood uses it ad nauseam and I can't see it anymore. People look like plastic puppets and blood looks purple.

I feel like i just watched a scene from a Movie where the Scientist character explains the Secret he's been hiding from the Goverment or something haha... This is absolutely BRILLIANT and i'm so thankful a video comparison like this exists. Thank you Steven Yedlin; may you never read this, you are a Genius, and My Favorite Cinematographer of the current Era, i can see and FEEL how this techniques were applied to KNIVES OUT as it was entirety shot on digitally and did NOT look any less filmic or 'cinematic' as if it was shot on film stock. Bravo 🙌✨🎥

My budget computer monitor makes everything look bad. Video compression also makes everything look bad. It's a lossless vs lossy problem. Need a massive hardware upgrade to bring quality to the public.

He is right. It also doesn't mean you can use the tools the same way as you would use film. Each tool requires a radically different approach.

The "look", it's actually the cinematographer's look to me. To me one of the best shot movies lately is The Revenant. All digital, not even trying to look like real film, and is gorgeous, a real work of art. It came in the same year as The Hateful 8, shot on film, another great work from R. Richardson, but cinematography is so much more than choosing sensors or film stock

Which one is 35mm are we suppose to guess?

Which was which? They aren’t labeled

But you didn't have the film image as a reference to start with this exact colour match wouldn't be possible. If you shot the same angles but asked the colour grader to make the digital one look like film WITHOUT having the film version as reference there would be so much difference. This is basically frame fucking while grading till it's matched. I love both formats. This debate is silly. There will always be a difference. Shooting on film makes you work differently, only those who have experienced this will understand. xxxxxx

Damn, just saw the crew credits of this camera test. RIP Halyna Hutchins.

As of 2023 there's still some differences in the texture of the grain, where in the dynamic range the grain sits, and where the bulk of usable dynamic range is. But! It's far beyond the point where ticket sales or streaming viewership will vary. However at this moment 65mm and IMAX are a little bit beyond the total image quality available to digital cinematographers, but since we now have 12k digital the future looks bright.

The most incredible thing is that his display preparation is always exactly the same. Effectively his lut (et al) is the MOST accurate of all film print emulations.

Is there anyway you could share these digital film emulation as power grades, would absolutely love to deconstruct and have a look at how you got such an accurate representation?

Let’s say Steve is correct. Let’s say you could develop a custom algorithm/pipeline using some complex math to prep digitally acquired images for a photochemical “look”. Im not sure who Steve made this video for. Certainly not for the consumer, who could never afford a professional post house to make them custom algorithms to match film attributes like grain, gate weave, halation, focus blur etc. And certainly not for DP’s who work in Hollywood with major budgets. Please tell me why a DP with a 200 million dollar budget would learn or pay for someone to develop a complex mathematical program/algorithm/machine learning to match an Alexa 65 to a Film Camera? Wouldn’t it be easier to just outright use the film camera instead of trying to emulate it if they really wanted the “film look”? This makes no sense.

I love the look of film. Always have If I were a director, it would be a no brainer what i’d use

Great game keep up the good work

Strange comparison. Arii is very filmlike. Compare it to the videoish Sony camera.

In my opinion this contribution is more about the aesthetic & philosophical aspects of what the medium can do/ mean. However, I think it is very difficult to filter out the digital or to make film digital. It is hard to find a certain look / define a character / or a soul of the medium. As far as I know, I think the digital is still far from nicely developed. Only more developed (as far as my knowledge reachs) digital cameras are beginning to understand the medium. That is why it is also challenging to find and capture a good character or an image with it. I believe more has to be thought over before something is put on the market, and I am happy this video for me shows. So, thank you.

I think I can tell which one is film because of the halation on the film emulsion, which digital sensors don't exhibit (as strongly). It is more apparent on 16mm film and outright stylized on 8mm due to the spread of the light being more or less constant in distance related to the brightness difference of the adjacent areas. For example, at 5:20 you can see an orange/red glow around in the kitchen light most pointed at the camera in 0122323 which is not nearly as present in 0768455. The effect occurs naturally on digital sensors for a different reason, and can be simulated quite easily in post-production, so if the colorist has taken that into consideration, they might have fooled me. The Arri Alexa captures motion almost exactly the same as film, and the colors are the closest I've seen from any other camera. I think most digital sensors have the most trouble capturing the red channel in a way that film does, given the "boost" film gets from halation, and this is why skin tones in films before the 1990s had a bias towards magenta, giving faces a "rosy" glow.

This experimentation is very interesting and I respect all the time and effort put into it, but it is not an evidence that you can emulate all film stocks with digital cameras. Steve Yedlin used the Kodak Vision 3 stock, which is the film that look the most like digital. I think that would be more interesting to try to emulate older film stocks like all the Eastman, Eastman EXR or Vision1 printed into 5384 for exemple. To me that's those film stocks that really stand appart and shine. Movies like Jackie Brown, Pulp Fiction, Alien, Star Wars IV, V & VI, Terminator 2, Full Metal Jacket, 2001, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Back to the Future, Titanic, Jurassic Park, The Darjeeling Limited, Apocalypse Now, The X-Files, LOST, and the list goes on....... They have a look that cannot be reproduce today (even with the modern motion picture film Vision3), contrasty, saturated, well seperated tones and colors, very bright look but very natural and smooth and deep blacks. I miss these characteristics a lot. If you don't know what I'm talking about you can watch Jackie Brown and the first scene of Star Wars IV with C3PO and R2D2 in the white spaceship interrior. I hope that one day we will be able to reproduce that, or that kodak will release a new film more like the older ones, but I'm not very optimistic. That being said, I love digital cameras and how they look as well, but not for this kind of aesthetic and more for a look that older film stocks couldn't create.

I can see clear differences between the two shots. To say the differences don't matter is complete bull.

42 year old man (at the time of this video) sounds like a 20 year old dweeb

Emulating film is almost the same as emulating tape in the audio world. You can get a song to sound _pretty much_ exactly like it was recorded on tape and analogue gear -- it's just a lot of effort and is _usually_ just a tiny bit "off" from the real thing. All my favorite looking movies are shot on film. However, I am open to the possibility that may be just down to the approach of shooting on film and not the medium itself. I recognize that the gap between the mediums is getting smaller all the time. However, I still think digital cameras have a few years before they can completely emulate film -- even if the specs or tech nerds say otherwise. In my experience, I can almost always spot a movie shot on 35mm -- even if tests like this make it very difficult to spot the differences.

My GeForce says I need a supported title. any work around?

Makes the Game look more intens and natural while not changing to much of the original art style. Well done Sir and thanks for sharing with us!

I think that for _movies,_ the difference is negligible and often not discernable unless it's paused on a single frame. There's simply too much happening on frame for the eye to ever conceivably pick up on. _However,_ for still photographs, I do think that there _is_ a "look" that is different. I don't know if it's the randomness of the grain that acts as sort of an "inherent anti-aliasing process" to make the image blend more organically, both on the edges of different things and just generally to blur things together, or if there's something else about it that's at play, here, but there is a difference. Of course, a crappy point and click film camera from the 90's will always have a bit of an edge with anyone old enough to remember actually using them, just because the crappy film photograph it spits out will fill most people with nostalgia for a time when _all_ photographs were somehow washed out from the overexposure that the little built-in flashbulb caused while simultaneously still being very poorly lit overall, had a lump of black with a skin-colored halo in the corner from where your finger covered part of the lens, and had your grandma grinning while staring back at you through the photo with glowing red eyes on loan from lucifer. Digital cameras will probably never cause this reaction in people unless some sort of completely different technology comes along to make the fundamental, core idea behind them obsolete.*** But if you take a photograph, side by side, with equivalent level equipment, then I think that there is a noticeable difference. However, once you get up into the crazy high resolutions/ film formats I think the difference goes away by a lot. For instance, a 16k digital image next to a film photograph on, IDK, some kind of stupidly large sheet film format, is going to have so much detail packed into the final image that you're never going to be able to tell the difference on any sort of print or display of reasonable size; you would have to either zoom in a lot or blow up the photo to an absurd size to really be able to see any distance, and this isn't really how most people look at their photographs. But for the low to average and even sometimes professional level photography, I think there's a difference. On the low end, I think that a crappy film camera just looks better than the blocky, weird mess that a crap digital camera will give you. On the average range and up, I think that the difference becomes more subjective. Also, if you're looking at just about any image on just a smartphone screen and not on a print or a decently-sized monitor, then the difference becomes mental. I don't care what anyone says, and I don't care if their phone has a 512k screen on it, you can't see the fucking difference. You just can't, it's way too small for those kinds of details to be even remotely visible when viewing them without zooming in. Oh, one other thing. Part of the difference that I think a lot of people mistake for inherent qualities is post-processing. Basically all smartphones do some sort of post-processing to convert your picture from RAW camera data into common image formats (almost always a jpeg). They do this on the fly as speeds that are honestly amazing. The big smartphone brands with repuations for good cameras pretty much all use some pretty advanced AI/ machine learning (or machine-leanring derived) processes to clean up your photos, and this post-processing is actually what makes the difference between a high-end phone camera and a shit one (and not the actual camera hardware... to a point). But these algorithms make decisions and clean up photos for you that are _fucking sorcery,_ as far as I'm concerned. I can't find the pictures anymore, mostly because I think the keywords are just un-searchable (AI, image, fail, mistake, etc...) and I don't remember the specifics, but there used to be a ton of articles out these describing the early failures of these algorithms when the kinks were still getting ironed out. They would do bonkers shit like add extra teeth inside of your teeth, replace your nostrils with mouths, and all kinds of other nightmare fuel stuff. It was rare, but when it did happen it always made for good tech news clickbait. But these algorithms didn't go away, they just got so good that they're invisible now. And I think all this digital post-processing that comes from the most common types of camera that most people use (in your phone) is part of what makes what most people think of as a "digital photo" feel so artificial. It's because _they are artificial._ They're images that are constructed by sophistocated algorithms that run invisibly on your phone between the camera sensor and your screen when you tap the little circle. But there is a big difference between a photo taken on your phone and one taken by a dedicated digital camera that can dump raw photo data for manual processing with a photo editor. Most people won't notice, wont care, and so wont bother, but I do think that there is something to the feeling of artificiality that can be felt from photos taken with a cell phone (because they're basically what Google, Samsung, Apple, etc... think your photo _should be_ based on the sensor inputs :P ) ***Well, OK, _maybe_ the horrible little cameras on early "feature phones" (you know, back when they were still called "camera phones" because having a camera on your cell phone _was not a given)_ might do this a bit, because there is a specificly terrible look to those phones that can't be easily brought back. You _can_ replicate it now, but it requires a bit of fiddling with the compression. Megapixels aren't everything, and a lot of what made older pictures so bad has a lot more to do with the fact that the algorithms for compressing photos down enough to send via text message/ MMS (or even just to store on the much smaller flash memory of the day) were way, way, _waaaay_ worse than what we have now. They were less efficient and worse quality than even the cheapest prepaid android on the shelf at the Dollar General, which is also why old youtube videos from the late 00's that are only available in 240p or 360p look so much worse than ones uploaded yesterday. The algorithms are just much, much better at squeezing more useful information into an image file without destroying important details. So, IDK, _maybe_ someone will get nostalgic for photos that look like they were taken with the same model of phone that was used to send you your first nude mirror shot; it's not outside the realm of possibility and people have become nostalgic for _far_ stupider shit.

Looks great! I like the deadening of the tones. It adds to the atmosphere

...but what you unfortunately can't get rid of is the chrome aberration, it's really annoying.

Wow, much better with this, ty

and this was more than 5 years ago...

I am seeing this with a lot of compression artifacts. I would need a 4k version of this to really see how good any of it looks on my editing screen.

best alternative to reshade. Nobody knows if the new anti cheat will ban you for reshade

i think i prefer film because a lot of the time digital looks very bad. compare tv shows like 24 to jack ryan and how cheap jack ryan looks.

Film will always have a much better texture. It looked best in the mid 90s.

Thank you

4:05 You may only be one person to the world but you may be the world to one person.

I prefer digital just because of the post production workflow. Sue me.

Wow, Halyna Hutchins helped out with this video. Rest In Peace…

I don’t understand why some crap about grading etc. gets millions of views and something like this is on mere thousands