WITH THE ADVENT OF DV AND HDTV, IS FILM DEAD?
No – film is more important than ever. HiDef is just a trade name. For the smaller production company, building and maintaining a library is crucial to fiscal survival and success, so the best possible origination and archival formats must be employed so future data-mining will provide future profits. Without getting too technical, 35mm motion picture film has better resolution, over and under exposure response, and as a photochemical medium in inherently more stable over time than magnetic media. In addition, the history of electronic media shows the futility of archiving video. In the last 25 years there have been over twenty different formats in the NTSC standard alone. There are currently eighteen competing HiDef standards. It’s beginning to appear that post-production will soon be accomplished totally in the digital realm, completely independently of format. This will bring its own software and hardware related archival and retrieval problems. If you want to archive electronic med
