It’s now been long enough that film has really become either a boutique way of filmmaking or something we reflect back on as a past. From a feature film industry built on shooting on 35mm Film to now 90% digital this transition only took 5-10 years. There are a handful of directors that still will only shoot on film, however, due to the increasing costs of film development production houses are far less inclined to go down this path.
So why did it take so long to go from film to digital when digital mediums of recording video have been around a lot longer? The simple answer is that digital cameras couldn’t match the quality of film for a long time and then in 2007 the first Red camera came out, challenging many aspects of what film could produce but not yet digital.
This camera gave filmmakers around the world the opportunity to look outside the world of ‘film’ and some took to it quite quickly as the future and some to this day will still stand by film as the superior filming medium.
What did the Red camera introduce that many other cameras haven’t been capable of? The two main features were the dynamic range and the raw recording capabilities (more on raw recording here and more on dynamic range here). These were two elements that couldn’t be replicated until that point and once it was filmmakers have become more open to it and since the Red’s introduction we have now countless other cameras that boast digital cinema experiences that was only once possible on film.
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