Film and Video

Film: term that encompasses individual motion pictures, that make up the film expierence. Light captured on indiviual frames, played back at high speeds to make the pictures seem as if they are moving seamlessly.

Video: From the latin, “I see” is the technology of electronicly manipulating still images from initial capture to final viewing.

The biggest difference between the two is quality. Film is an analog format, which means that there is an infinite amount of detail that you start off with. Visual images can be judged in 2 ways, one is the amount of detail in the image, the other is the dynamic range of the grey scale and color. The difference in resolution quality is judged by the over all size of the film that is used. The dynamic range of the color and grey scale is infinite only being effected by the quality of the light used in the projector and the quality of screen that is used. Video, whether analog or digital, has a finite amount of detail that is judged by native resolution i.e. NTSC video, 720p, 1080i which is broken down by pixels. The color and grey scale values are measured in bits. Because of the fact that video is a “compressed” visual format the information can be processed and interpreted to make the picture better or “more film like”. This is why projectors for home theaters cost much more than industrial projectors that are only designed to project power point presentations or similar sources. The “film effect” is very difficult to get on a digital projector and requires a video scaler to be incorporated to get the best result. This is also why some DVD players and TV’s look better than others, it is the electronics between the inputs and the picture that you see.

Surround Sound

Multi-channel audio is used in film and video to give the impression that sound is coming from all around the listener. This allows the recording engineers working on the movie sound track to add sounds of events in the film that may not be visible on the screen at the time of the event happening. This allows the viewer receive continuous spatial positioning queues during the film. Another useful aspect of surround sound is all dialogue is routed to the center channel speaker that improves dialogue recognition. 95% off all sound in modern, big budget movies is added after the movie is shot with most production audio being discarded. This means that the sound engineers that create all the sounds, from footsteps and fabric passes to explosions and special sound effects. The dialog must also be replaced to get the proper sound that is required to transmit the emotion of the movie. The fact that film sets are very noisy with many people running around doing different things makes it hard to capture production audio on the set. Since most of the sounds you hear are placed there by an engineer at a cost, the sounds them selves and where they are positioned in the surround recording are very important to the director and producer of the film as well as add to the enjoyment of watching the film.