A compromise was reached whereby distributors pay an additional levy to cinemas when they screen a film digitally, called the Virtual Print Fee. It was much quicker, cheaper and more secure to move a hard drive containing video files than huge cans of physical 35mm stock.ĭistributors were keen to use the technology as soon as it was available but cinemas resisted as they were the ones who had to shell out for the new projectors. Theatrical releaseĪnother area which benefited greatly from the shift to digital was exhibition.
One thing to bear in mind is that the dates relate to the festival year, so a film submitting to the 2015 festival could have been shot in 2014, or even the tailend of 2013.įor more details, here is the full Raindance piece: Full costs and income of the Raindance Film Festival. Digital overtook film for features in 2010 and a year later for shorts, but tape remained on top, right up to 2015. In the early 2000s, the most common tape formats were in standard definition (MiniDV and DigiBeta) but they were soon joined by high definition counterparts (such as HDV and HDCam). Many independent productions are extremely strapped for cash and so opt for the cheaper option of shooting on tape. However, last year I was given access to the submission history of the Raindance Film Festival (2002-15) and so I have returned to that dataset to look at the formats used by filmmakers submitting to the festival.Īs you can see below, it’s not as simple as ‘film or digital’.
This means that it’s not possible to definitively say when the majority of independent filmmakers moved to digital. They are often made by early filmmakers for little money and the vast majority don’t get shown at festivals or to the public. I have looked at this topic in more detail in the past: Film vs digital – What is Hollywood shooting on? Digital cameras among independent shorts and featuresīy their very nature, independent shorts and features are harder to track than big budget Hollywood fare. Their first digital camera was the Arri D20 (introduced in 2005), followed by the D21 (in 2008) but it was their Alexa which became by far and away the most commonly-used camera among the largest Hollywood productions. Arri was founded in 1917 and quickly became one of a handful of manufacturers of cameras and lenses used by Hollywood productions. Hollywood started to capture films digitally in the 2000s but it wasn’t until 2013 that digitally shot films were more common than celluloid productions among the top 100 grossing films.Īlthough we are moving to entirely new formats, many of the companies that dominated the film camera market back then are still major players. When most people talk about films ‘going digital’ they are referring to the move from shooting movies on celluloid film (typically 35mm stock) to digital cameras which capture footage as digital films on a hard drive. If you have knowledge or data on anything I’m missing, please get in touch and I’ll add it to the piece. For some aspects, I have lots of data, while others are a little scant. So this week I thought I would take you through a quick tour of when and how various aspects of the film industry moved to digital technology. I didn’t include the move to digital as a trend because it’s not one single thing, with each corner of the industry transitioning at a different pace. One of the topics raised by a few people was the move from analog to digital processes. It got a great response and I was heartened to see such interesting, lively debate about it. Last week, I looked at six trends for how the film business is changing.