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Digital Film

Digital film, also called digital internegative, is capable of amazing picture quality -- horizontal resolution of 2,000 pixels or better. Motion picture studios demand such quality when digitally scanning film that will later be converted back to film for cinema master prints.

For conversion to digital film each frame of 35mm movie film is scanned at 2k resolution and numbered sequentially. The standard for 65mm is 4k. There are about 150,000 frames in a typical 100-minute feature film (24fps). With each 2k frame at 12mb, a complete feature digital film occupies 2TB of disk space!

Digital film not only has extremely high resolution, it has extra color depth too. There can be confusion when discussing color depth because the convention in the computer industry is to rate depth per pixel, but in the motion picture industry depth is rated per channel. Whether you say a computer monitor is 24-bit RGB or 8-bit per channel that's the same thing. In the film industry, monitors are referred to as 8-bit (per channel) devices. Motion picture film has greater color fidelity than a monitor. The norm in digital film is 10-bit log or 16-bit linear.


Questions to rower@movieeditor.com
Created October 31, 2003. Updated October 31, 2003.