Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Adventures in Super8

Recently, I bought this super8 camera from a junk shop. It seems to work- I put in four AA batteries and the motor runs. There was some trouble with the focus; but Claire's Uncle- a cinematographer- told us how to fix it. I'll let you know how it goes.
-Rufus (using Claire's computer)

2 comments:

Holly said...

I have a question, and will say up front, it's OK if the answer is something like "I don't really know," "it's hard to explain," or "it's like vinyl records."

Why is a Super8 better than a basic digital video recording device?

Rufus said...

It is indeed hard to explain, but film images are richer and deeper looking, at least to me. I found a thing on the net where they shot a story in both super8- transfered to a disk and dubbed- and on digital video, so that it went back and forth between the two, and it made it easier to see. But there's a depth to film, even in 8mm, that isn't there in digital yet.

I was actually talking about this with Claire's Uncle Roger, and the best I could say was that digital looks like cable access television to me. He said that there are very high-end digital cameras that can now replicate the look of film, which seems a bit pointless. And they're also way out of my price range. He prefers digital for the easy editing, but he says that a lot of camera people prefer film- and they usually call it a 'richer' or a 'deeper' look.

I wish I could be more specific though.