Physical diference between film and digital

[theosolnik]

Well, everybody here agrees that film is much better than video. It?s a unique texture and etc... But I was discussing with some engineers that love technology, and they say that actually there is no diference between film and video. All kinds og image are made of dots, more dots give more resolution, less dots gives worse resolution.
But it is not same, I see a very big diference between something shot in film and scanned to video and something originally shot in video.
But what is the real diference?

[eddie]

Chemicals and Components.
Analog and Digital.
Photons and electrons.
If you really want to know the difference find out what DIGITAL actually means. Then look up PHOTOGRAPHY. And compare them.
Digital doesnt just mean 'something to do with a computer' it means broken up, split into discrete 'moments' or parts. Analogue means continuous.
Compare a digital watch to an analog watch.
Nature is more analog than it is digital,
(thought processes, natural selection, environmental dependancies....)
However mankind has found that digital technology is better at mastering nature than Analogue technology.
That doesnt actually mean it IS closer to it.

[stop_thief]

but, eddie, out of curiosity (I unfortunately have not been able to work with film and wish I had the money), what makes film analog neccessarily? Isn't it still splitting up nature into discrete parts however minute they may be?

Or is the point that film deals with light, whose components are almost immpossible to measure, while digital divides into more humanly feasible sections?

[miker]

Both film and video deal with light, else how would you see anything?

There are TONNES of posts about the technical merits of film vs video, I suggest doing a search on this board, or maybe that trove of information the internet.

In my opinion it's not just the media that can make things look better. Consider truly cinematic scenes vs a scene from a soap opera on TV.

Treat video as a cinematic medium and you *will* get cinematic results. Just be sure to use progressive scan ;-)

[eddie]

I agree. If you treat video seriously you
get a serious result.
stop_theif - yeah film is discrete. Its 24 frames per second. Time broken up into small moments, a strobe of images that your brain conjours into continuity. But Im thinking here more of the picture itself.

[eddie]

no no no, they both deal with light. They both deal somewhat differently with light.
My point is that the photographic process is a chemical one, developing light sensitive paper/plastic is gradual process, it is subtle and more organic. Video is much more hard edged. This is hard to explain without sounding like a twat, and I guess the bottom line is use what you feel comfortable with, but video is colder than film for these reasons. Im sure that no one would disagree with that. However this is all pretty academic, for a low budget shoot, video is perfect. The above are all arty subtleties that come across in different ways when studying the images.
Cinematography is I think more than this though, because its about juxtaposed images, its a sequence of images, not just one, so there are more processes involved in the enjoyment of the film, than just what the picture quality is like.
I hope this is clear(ish). I get sad when mysterious qualitys (such as film textures and colours....edit pacing and metaphors) get ignored or dismissed in preferance to a big flashy celebrity smile or special effect.
Sorry Im feeling arty and pretentious today.....