[...] The great film-versus-video debate has been done to death in the last couple of
years, so don't worry-you're not going to read any pithy arguments here about
how Super8 film has none of the inherent glitches or drop-out that all consumer
video formats suffer from, etc. We've heard it all before and we all know there are
many reasons why film is superior to tape. With that said, though, I'll give you my
take on why 8mm film seems to be coming out on top in the small format wars.
To talk aesthetics for a moment, I believe that most visual artists would agree
with the premise that beauty can be found in everything around us-in nature,
people, industry, culture, even in the horrors of war. After years of observation I
believe that Super8 is a unique small-format medium that gives
cinematographers a special tool to frame and capture that beauty and then represent
it for others to appreciate. Video cameras merely record an event where
something beautiful took place, but the event is rarely captured in a form that
enables others to appreciate the true essence of what the human eye saw to be
beautiful.In my time as a Super8 camera operator I've become convinced that the
result of shooting film as opposed to video has a lot to do with the way in which
each film frame is captured. With film, of course, light burns a frozen moment of
time into the silver halide crystals embedded within the emulsion. There's a purity
to that process. Compare this to a CCD video chip splitting light into pixels and
compressing it through a maze of wires, and this, for me, is reason enough why
video always seems flat and lifeless when compared to the rich organic quality of
Super8 film.
This philosophy explains why video is such an ideal format for newsgathering
and current affairs programs, where raw immediacy and realism demand a clean,
flat window on the world.
From: "Small Gauge for the Digital Age" (pro8mm.com, Date ?, Author ?)
Source:
http://www.pro8mm.com/pro8_pdfs/Articles/smallgauge.pdf
