The EDCF Guide to Digital Cinema Production

1Why Digital?

Introduction

Lasse Svanberg

The cinema – storytelling in a flow of consecutive images which meet in secret, poetic understanding – is an ancient artform, the celluloid film strip just its latest technical phase. Latest, not last. We will soon be filming without film and without tapes.

(Swedish film critic Bengt Idestam-Almquist, When Cinema Came to Sweden, published 1959)

This quotation is 45 years old, published at a time when the first 2 inch VTRs were introduced, revolutionizing the way television was made and transmitted. Yet – with incredible foresight – these few lines describe exactly where we are today. More and more feature films are being shot not on film, but on digital video media. At the same time videotape is beginning ...