Thuyen Nguyen wrote:I think I understand now. Film refers to, or is a synonym, of movie; and filmic is a synonym for cineamatic. My preference would be for the word cinematic.
There's really no official vocabulary for this. People use the words interchangeably.
Re film-like quality/film look/filmic/cinematic:
In a previous career, I worked on the technical end of digital film emulation. Making digital video look like film primarily for digital exhibition. Some of the things I learned:
Abolute essentials:
24p
35mm Academy sensor size for appropriate depth of field (hint: 5D/FF/VistaVision is too big.)
Spinning mirror/global shutter
Wide dynamic range
Emulation of dye-based imaging
Desireable extras:
film-like grain
no edge enhancement
variable register blurring
Some notes:
Spinning mirror/global shutter: to avoid the electronic "jello-cam" of digital video, either an electronic global shutter or a mechanical spinning mirror shutter is needed. The
Arri Alexa Studio Camera has a mechanical spinning mirror shutter, and produces outstanding digital imagery.
I wish BMD would provide a spinning-mirror solution for the Cinema Cameras as well as the Ursas. The jello-cam is one of the few drawbacks to those excellent cameras.
Emulation of dye-based imaging: As Art Adams wrote about online, the color science of film is very different from video. Film is actually a transparent substrate for carrying dyes that light is projected through. Dyes are by their nature subtractive colors; that is, the more dye you add, the darker the image gets. Digital video is made from tiny dots of colored light (pixels) that are additive by nature. The more color you add, the brighter the image gets.
Because of this, dye-based film images have a particular color characteristic. They are incapable of reproducing highly luminant, highly saturated colors. It works like this: to get maximum saturation, you need maximum dye density on the substrate. However, this blocks a lot of light, so you end up with a saturated image that is not brightly illuminated. To make the image more luminant, there must be less dye so the light will pass through. Which results in a highly luminant image with lowered saturation.
This, by the way, is the reason that old-school DPs meter their blue screens to 18% grey. That's the sweet spot for many film stocks to have maximum blue density. Any brighter, and the screen would show less blue on film.
Digital video, on the other hand, can make a highly luminant, highly saturated image easily. The result is often called "harsh" or "digital looking."
To create a film-like look, it's necessary to emulate the dye-based imaging process by reducing saturation in the highlights. The Alexa does that as part of its color science. It's not an accident that one of the designers of the Alexa used to work in color science for Kodak Film.
Film-Like Grain: One of the hugh differences between film and video is that film is grain. Film is an inherently analog technology, which builds each image from a cloud of crystals. Each frame has a completely different and unique pattern of crystals. At 24 fps, our brains reduce these unique mosaics into a continuous moving picture, with some flickering grain mixed in. Digital video, on the other hand, records every image in a rigid, perfect, unmoving grid. It's the difference between a violin and a digital synthesizer.
Fortunately, our eyes can be fooled by superimposing a grain pattern over digital footage with a transfer mode. The grain softens the appearance of the grid, and gives an illusion of an analog appearance.
No Edge Enhancement: Digital Video cameras have built-in "sharpening" or "edge enhancement." These amount to built in "unsharp mask" functions, which find contrasting colors and trace over them with with either a bright or dark line to give the illusion of being sharper. Turn that crap off if you want to look more filmic. You can always sharpen it by hand in Resolve.
Variable Register Blurring: Another difference between film and video is the focal plane. Digial sensors have a single plane, and modern lenses can focus on it with pin-sharpness. Color film has three negative layers, one for each color. By definition, a lens can't focus perfectly on all three at the same time. It's also impossible to focus with enough precision to favor one layer over the other. So every shot has slightly different focal bias, and you get slightly different blurring on each register.
This is not a dramatic effect, but you can feel the difference in the cinema. This speaks to the "harshness" and "overly sharp" criticisms of digital video. Look at a freeze frame of THE GODFATHER or THE DARK KNIGHT on BluRay -- film is not that sharp, and there's some color haloing. You can add these in post to your digital productions, and it makes it more like film.
This is also one of the reasons I think cheaper glass is fine for digital video. It softens up the image without a lot of post processing.
To sum up, emulating film look is like getting your brand new guitar and digital amp to sound like a vintage Les Paul overdriving a Mesa Boogie amp -- it's an artistic choice. It's also a choice that many in the audience love. In the same way, it will never be identical to the original, but with some work, it can be close enough to produce the good feelings.