Cost

 Video vs Film - Cost

Film is Expensive – Video is Not

Whereas film needs to be developed and have light shone through it in order to be projected, video is captured on magnetic tape and scanned back over a playhead. Whether the tape itself is analog or digital, the process of taping is fundamentally a digital thing, which means it can only reach a certain resolution before it starts to degrade in quality. Film, on the other hand, can become as large as the distance from projector to screen (determined somewhat by the strength of the projector) allows.

The average indie filmmaker doesn’t use film because, well, it costs a lot of money. If you’re old enough you may remember the days before digital cameras became commonplace and you used to have to load rolls of 35mm film into your camera to take pictures. When the roll was done, you’d have to wind it back into its casing, take it out and get it developed.

Nowadays it seems like a foreign concept to have to wait to look at your pictures, doesn’t it? A roll of camera film containing 24 or 36 exposures used to cost around $3-5 to buy and another $3-5 to develop.

Now stop. Think about that for a second; think about a roll of 24 pictures of film costing even $2.

Using a film camera, 24 frames of film is one second of screen time. One. Second. Multiply $2 by 60, and then by 90. That’s to say, if you roll camera and cut camera at the exact instant you start and end your scene, do only one take of each shot, and film a full-length 90-minute movie, that film alone at $2 a second costs you $10,800. So in a monetary sense, the difference between film and video is huge.

You probably don’t have that much money to spend on even 90 minutes of film, let alone the amount of film it would actually take after you cut the outtakes, pre-roll, post-roll, and any deleted scenes or B-roll footage. If you do have that kind of cash, you’re either incredibly rich, crazy, or you have investors who believe very strongly in your directing skills. So let’s go with you using video instead of film.