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Video vs. Film
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If you have an option whether to watch a film on a TV set or to go to the movie theater, choose that second one. Let me tell you why from technical point of view. Besides rational reasons there are also some technical reasons that can have impact on the way you accept the image.
Film has a better quality image than the TV screen. By the quality I mean resolution of the picture - TV has visible 480 scanned lines by 640 pixels that create a picture. The film image is created on millions of parts of the special emulsion. So, the TV viewer actually doesn’t get a real full image. The TV set gives only some samples of the image called pixels that create the picture on our TV screen. Film, at least, gives us much more of these samples. So, the film image is more realistic.
Another thing, the capability of the contrast ratio of television tube is 30 to 1. It means that the brightest part of the screen can be only 30 times brighter than the darkest. The contrast ratio of the film is about 100:1. So, on film we have more than three times wider range of bright and dark values. It is very easy noticeable. Let’s take well known example. In "The Godfather" many scenes took place in a dark. In real life, even with very little illumination, we see the objects. So, if in the movie scene there is a man sitting next to the fire place in the movie theater we see the fire, the wood in the fire, graduate shadows on man’s face and a little bit of the background. With the same scene on TV, we will not probably see so many details. We will recognize the man and the fire, but the shadow on the man’s face will darken more abruptly. The TV set, in general, shows us darkness and brightness with much less values of the middle, gray values. If you see a night scene on TV, in the movie theater you will see the same scene with much more going on in it.
Of course we can say that nowadays we have digital video that provides really good quality image, sometimes very similar to film. We can also say that there are many features that are shot on digital video like soap operas and some TV shows. We can also say that a lot of motion pictures are shown on TV as well. But, that does not matter because the film-image quality will not go beyond of the screen quality of your monitor at home. The TV monitor has a worse quality than the film projector, because of the contrast and resolution values that I mentioned above.
I do not agree that video tape should not exist at all. Steven Poster who is the member of American Society of Cinematographers says that "There are productions that are best done on tape and there are productions best done on film. News and sports, special events like variety shows and concerts, news-based and contemporary documentaries, industrials and educational programs are best done on tape."
"Film, however, is best for any storytelling or narrative production." (Poster, Steven, ASC). There some reasons why it is like that.
Storytelling is like a book when you read you use your imagination to see that story in your mind. According to Poster, when we watch a movie we use the imagination as opposed to the video. "Film is shot at 24 frames per second. At that speed, there is a certain amount of blur in the images. There is also a brief time between, when there is no image at all" (Steve Poster, American Cinematographer Video Manual, 350). It makes the audience use their imagination to fill that missing information, adds Poster. The film image usually force our mind to imagine even more than we see on the screen. Video is quite different. During watching the TV screen our mind does not have time for imagination like during watching the film. There is scientific explanation why.
The TV set shows 60 interlaced images per second and it has a special purpose why. "Douglas Trumbull did psychological and physiological tests on all kind of audience and determined that 60 images a second is the maximum visual information that can be transmitted through the optic nerve to the brain."( 350).No blank spots where our brain has time to imagine something besides. We can close our eyes and see nothing or we can watch the television screen with no imagination or mind interpretation. What we see on TV our brain accepts as a complete image with no room for our brain interpretation. "When we see video images we’re getting a direct implant of images; we are not having to use our imagination to fill in the blanks." (Steve Poster, ASC). Our eyes don’t see the difference of transmitting information between film and video because of the vision perception. However, we feel the difference in our brain or our brain sees the difference. Probably you have noticed that what you have just seen on TV you accepted fully as it is. Unless you turn off the TV set and think about it. The opinion that TV manipulates our thoughts is proved by science. Not only journalists have a big part in it, but also technicians.
Do you want to stay at home to watch a movie and have no conclusions or thoughts about it and for instance think that all women on any beach look like "Baywatch" actress; or rather is it better to go to the movie theater and use some of your imagination? If we want to live an image from a media as it is we should depend on TV sets, but if we want to live the image in our head with our mind interpretation it is better to watch film format.
Works Cited
Poster, Steven "American Cinematographer Video Manual" The ASC Press Hollywood, California, 1994
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