when it was recorded out to film compared to contact-printed 35mm, but the 4K film-out looked closer to the contact print. my general impression was that there was resolution loss from the 2K D.I. I've done some D.I.'s using 4K scans of 35mm anamorphic versus 2K scans, filmed them out at 4K to 35mm, and projected them next to 35mm anamorphic contact-printed.
If anything, the Alexa shot was marginally finer-detailed but that was just a rough impression. and they looked rather similar in terms of fine detail (it was of a scene, not a chart). I saw a 4K test comparing 2.88K ArriRaw from the Alexa to a 6K scan of Super-35 250T Kodak negative, both shots finished at 4K and digitally projected at 4K on a large screen on the Sony lot. I think Kodak was the first to say that 35mm negative was 4K across, back when they developed the Cineon scanner and file format in the late 1980's, but again, the problem is that you have to differentiate between optimal scanning resolution and image detail, the first should be higher than the second….Take it with a grain of salt if you want, but Red has shot resolution tests of 35mm and said that the most amount of detail they ever saw resolved was maybe 3.5K (?) - I can't remember the exact figure, maybe it was 3.2K.
However, the film stock that was used in the study (Kodak Vision Color 2383 (which has been used in the following films ) has been superseded by Kodak Vision3 Color (from 2007- onwards), which captures higher perceivable resolution (this has been used in the following films: ).ĭavid Mullen A.S.C, an American cinematographer with the following credits to his name ( )- granted not triple A titles, but someone with knowledge and experience, has shared his findings: Here’s a link to the study ( ) and some discussion by a cinematographer in this post ( ) They determined that the maximum "perceivable resolution" (using the (MTF) Modulation Transfer Function process) that can be obtained from 35mm film is the equivalent of 2K resolution. The only scientific study (or at least the most well known study) that has been conducted on the subject of the maximum perceptible resolution that can be obtained from 35mm film stock, was performed by different groups of researchers in New York and Paris in 2003. I'm not technically well versed in this topic, but I found the following: The recent debate about the maximum resolution from 35mm film stock got me curious.