FelikZ wrote:If I got it right, desqueezing digital image from modern sensors will lose details while desqueezing light coming from a physical film stock will maintain more information? Like, there is no pixels on a film stock - so you can potentially recover some information, does it makes sense?
The anamorphic process is the same whether you're shooting with film or digital. Film can have more detail if it's a big enough format, but these days the resolving power of digital is surprisingly close to that of film -- in fact I'd say that it's now surpassed film, based on the scans I've done of my 35mm and 4x5 slides.
Most of the time, if a production is using an Alexa with an open gate, it's actually to shoot anamorphic. Shooting open gate rather than in a cinematic aspect ratio gives you more vertical resolution, which makes for a nicer looking de-squeezed image.
The distortion that you get from anamorphic is essentially built into the shot by the lens. You can shoot 4x3 aspect (or crop to it if the camera doesn't have that as a built in preset) on your Pocket 6K or 4.6K camera, get an approximately 4K image, then de-squeeze it in Resolve and get a theater quality image out of it, provided that what the lens is seeing deserves it (i.e. lighting, composition, production design, makeup, etc).
Keep in mind that a lot of films are shot on Alexas using anamorphic lenses an open gate... and that's a whopping 3.8K. LESS resolution than 35mm film in an Academy frame, and yet it looks great projected on a 40 foot screen. So you have nothing to worry about technically speaking, all you need to do is get familiar with the anamorphic distortion, learn how it affects the image, and learn to use it to your advantage.
Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing is approximately 142% due to style and preference. Roger Deakins for example prefers to shoot with spherical lenses, even though shooting anamorphic would clearly be a viable option for any production that can afford someone of his caliber, yet he continues to choose not to.
I'd guess that if you chatted with audiences who aren't filmmakers, you'd find that almost all of them wouldn't notice the difference between films shot in anamorphic vs spherical Super35 unless you specifically brought it up or showed them on 4x3 TVs with letterboxes to draw their attention to the aspect ratio.
I've only had one opportunity to shoot in anamorphic, and honestly I found that I liked it, but then I started out as an old school landscape photographer and if I'd had the budget I'd have gotten myself a 6x17 panocam for panoramic shots rather than relying on stitching.