Vinyl Records See a Comeback During Music's Digital Age

I think that film as well as vynl may be on the way back too! Did you see the new StarWars movie? it was shot on film! http://petapixel.com/2015/12/16/star-wars-the-force-awakens-was-shot-on-film-and-kodak-may-be-profitable-in-2016/

I am an IATSE 600 camera operator in the industry, so I can speak on this. There will not a huge resurgence of film media in the motion picture industry. The reason, is a producers budget. Now that more and more productions have moved to digital media, it is extremely expensive to do a feature in celluloid. Some have mentioned Star Wars. Yes the ultra high budget stuff may still be done with actual film on a Panaflex or Arriflex cameras. I can tell you from being on the inside even some of those productions some of the 2nd unit and splinter unit stuff may be still accomplished on digital and transferred to film in post. In fact In Star Wars they used drone shots using Arri Mini or Red Dragon cameras. There are not a lot of drones that are legal to fly heavier then 55 pounds in the US so these systems are limited as a film camera by it self is damn near 50 pounds.

Now that more productions are moving away from film it is becoming increasingly more expensive to produce film as there are not many houses that do it any more. The cost of everything in film from the film it self to the post processing is way more than it was ten years ago. So in order to process it now cost 5 times what it did before. I have worked with DP's who are film die hard's but have realized that whether we like it or not, the digital revolution is here. The thing is that for medium and low budget (Low budget means 8 million Dollars) they can't afford film. So there are two competing interests. One is that access to digital cameras like Red's Black Magics and Arri's Sony F65's are becoming cheaper. The processing of digital is 3 to 5 magnitudes less. I can shoot a whole feature on digital media for the price of one day on set with an Arriflex. With digital my only equipment expense is the camera and the hard drives. And that expense is fixed. Once I dump the footage I now can reuse that drive. With film as soon as the words "camera speed" are sounded, that's money going through that camera at 24 frames per second. Every take is hundreds of dollars of film going through the system. Director's, Actors, and Directors of Photography will tell you it's all about the art. But the producers will tell you its all about the money. And in this industry the producer is the money and he wins! The only productions that will be done with actual film will only be the real high budget staples like Star Wars and any production that the producers believe will have a high turn around.

Edit: I left out one other crucial thing. And that is the movie house you go to. Movie houses with the capability of even showing a print reel are damn near extinct. As 90% of the movies houses like Cinemark, UA, and Kirkorian for example are all digital with the exceptions of maybe having a projector in one screen room in major cities like New York or LA. Hateful 8 was done on a 70mm print and they did a special edition showing in various cities across the US where they trucked in a projector to local theaters. Unfortunately H8ful 8 was not a money maker and that will have a big impact in future funding for film wanting to use that media.

So there you have it.

Film and vinyl are both obsolete. We can reproduce them both -- even the imperfections if you want -- with digital means in the same or better quality.

People like them both for the nostalgia factor, that's pretty much it.