John Menick

An excerpt from from Digital Content Producer’s article on the tapeless HD workflow of David Fincher‘s upcoming Zodiac:

“There is the danger, of course, of technology getting obsolete, but we’re better off, certainly, than movies done many years ago because, at the end of the day, we are creating so many high-quality masters,” Mavromates says. “We will have about six original digital negatives for this movie, the original data, different HD versions, a film master, and all those HD DVDs out there. They’ll be able to re-master this movie some day, if they want to — they won’t have to piece it all together from scratch. To me, this is the future of how movies will be made. Digital cinematography is still in its adolescence, and it will mature very quickly, so our workflow will only improve along with it.”

That is certainly Fincher’s firm conviction.

“We could lose data some day, but let’s be honest — that’s always been the case with film, as well,” Fincher says. “Somebody find me a good print of Lawrence of Arabia, or a decent restored print of Rear Window. Everyone says we won’t have the resolution of 35mm, but the truth is, 35mm is maybe 4K, and that’s before they do things to it. You have all this color space with film, but you don’t ever use all that color space. As soon as you drop an orange filter over [the lens], you have suddenly limited your blue and green color space, for instance. And by the time you dupe it to inter-positive, then to inter-negative, and go to three dupe negs or six dupe negs, and make 3,000 release prints, then you are looking at something, in most cases, just over 1K. So I think it’s silly to get attached to [film] like that.”