Quality

Video vs Film - Cost

Image Quality

While cost plays a major role in the use of video vs. film, the most major bone of contention comes from the way each medium captures and displays imagery. Because film simply captures light waves its creating lines of depth and color, so it looks smooth and soft when projected, even at large sizes.

Digital video has a native resolution and is made up of pixels, so it’s sharper than film and it has more of a rigid appearance. When you increase or decrease the resolution of any digital file you start to see interpolation, which is when the computer mathematically re-interprets the pixels in an image and either adds new ones to make up for a larger size, or takes them away when the resolution becomes smaller.

Since a pixel (which, by the way, is short for ‘picture element’) is essentially a tiny square containing a single color, an increase an image’s output size without actually changing the number of pixels it contains will result in pixelation – your eye will more easily recognize the presence of pixels in the image.