Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Did Anime Use 16mm Instead Of 35mm Film?
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StudioToledo
 Posts: 847 Location: Toledo, U.S.A. |
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Those formats were also a product on an era when cinemas were trying to reclaim the loss of customers thanks to television as well. 16mm used to be very, very common when I was still in grade school in the 80's. Every film had to be on a projector and the teacher usually did her best to operate the Singer Graflex models my school used whenever we had a film to watch. I sorta miss that honestly. TV stations would use 16mm or news gathering up to the early 80's before portable video cameras, VTR's and other equipment replaced it. Check out any YouTube video of a local news program pre-1980 and you'll see what I mean. Of couse using film to distribute certain TV shows, cartoons and movies continued to be a thing into the early 90's. They would be run of of machines like this baby, often featuring prisms to switch between film and slide projectors at a moments notice. 
A lot of times, when they would run certain films, problems like this could occur... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHl5mnBWv8w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJIE1tpuVhM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_NDz75cNBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxrfRHuZ0JA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3R6qyqG3Fs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCZLhZofcVU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7jbKicwXr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA3o2d6-_bg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM5-uG1bvK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vb3GJwsvd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YHbLBUQbn0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq_784kiTRY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w6Ka6eVqvw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7riudUqqd1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-iV3XmtGfg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY6H3SXKw6o All you young whipper snappers missed out! 
One thing about Japanese TV I only ever noticed thinking back to the massive tape collection I traded or over the years was how often it appeared they never got the memo on proper video post-production the way American programs had already caught onto by the mid 80's. Seemed like plenty of Japanese stations were content to simply run prints as-is and bicycle those prints across the country for stations to run at a later date, such practice had already been dead in the states by the time satellite communication made it unnecessary or even the smallest of market stations to run things days to a week after its initial broadcast. It didn't seem like they started to get into the swing of it until the mid 90's, and even by then, the quality still left a lot to be desired. Anyone who has seen many classic shows released on home video in those days can recall the substandard transfers used on many programs. The sort of soft resolution combined with image lag often was hard to mentally remove from our eyes back then, but we had to! These days I'm lucky when any show gets the digital HD transfer treatment cause I know this'll be nothing like I've seen before.
That's true. The Bell+Howell models were often the top choice by the military or their rugged design, while the Bolex became the pick of university film classes for decades. 
Again, going back to how film schools and university programs often used 16mm as part of their training of many future cinematographers, directors and others in the field. I suppose it's not as common these days, but it's been 20 years since I've got to edit this stinker at my college I couldn't get a passing grade on, enjoy! https://vimeo.com/14855650
Prior to the switch to digital ink & paint, the method was to basically shoot the finished cels under the camera, process the film, edit the darn thing and run off a finished print to a TV network by the time it was meant to air. Before the 1980's, this was standard before the ease of video mastering and editing starting to become the trend, as many studios opted to run the negative once through transfer and handle the rest in video post. This shift started during the early to mid 80's and it was pretty noticeable how one show could still be run via film chain projector while another on tape. Replacing filmed credits with ones typed out on a chyron (or character generator/titler) along with added video transitions like fades, wipes or dissolves also replaced the tireless need to handle those optically. Once computer programs such as Toonz, Animo and others started to show up, it became much easier to simply scan in the finished drawings into a computer, including the backgrounds and simply color it with all the necessary timing/camera work already figured out digitally. All you needed was to output the thing on tape or some other master source and that was it. As I said earlier, Japanese studios seemed a little slow to play catch-up to us on this regard, opting to continue with film for a little while longer while American counterparts had already started adapting to a digital workflow. I suppose by the early 2000's we were pretty much on the same page from then on before HD started to be an issue.
I would think it would just be the opening/ending credits that were. Interesting if that was the case otherwise (depending on which teams were animating these episodes). They would certainly have to do "16mm blowdowns" of those episodes in order to maintain consistency when distributing the series globally. For anyone that wonders, a "blowdown" is simply making a 16mm copy from a 35mm source by blowing the picture down to fit it optically. This method of course was pretty standard for any TV show or movie filmed in 35mm if 16mm reduction prints were to be made for television or non-theatrical presentations.
A lot of those early Takahashi programs were on 16mm, and I'm glad that shows like Ranma 1/2 are getting the treatment they sorely deserve for so long.[/img][/url] |
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jymmy
 Posts: 1244 |
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720p is most common, not 960p. Since last I checked, Kyoto Animation hasn't produced any TV anime in Full HD. Their opening and endings since Hyouka have been, but the anime themselves are only most of that: see here. J.C. Staff has produced shows in Full HD before. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 951 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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Disk space may be cheap, but it's not that cheap. Video in 1080p at Blu-ray quality is big, and that's just the finished product. For a 25-odd minute episode, countless intermediary files get generated in production, and they're all bigger than you think. You might not think working at 900p-ish versus 1080p saves much disk space, but file sizes go up at an alarming rate when increasing resolution. |
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Shiroi Hane
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 7584 Location: Wales |
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Kiddy GiRL-and was scanned at 144dpi at 1620x950 which, less margins, gave them a working frame size of 1440x806.
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partially
Posts: 702 Location: Oz |
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Yes the files are big. But I highly doubt any company keeps intermediary files after a master is made. That would be a hellish waste of space. Meaning that although the working space needs to be quite massive during production, at the same time it is fixed. And will be reusable for each new project. And given most companies only seem to do one project at a time, that means the working space is cleared for every project. And I would argue that it is that cheap. Consumer platter drives now have capacities up to 10TB per drive for <$500. And that is simply what is easily available for the average consumer. That said I don't know all the in's and out's. I am simply stating how I see it as an outside observer. |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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How do you know this? Are there sites which report on the resolutions of various anime? Any in English? |
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relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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Curious as well, because I have yet to see anything on it. Is it possible to tell by looking at individual frames or something? |
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Lord Starfish
Posts: 168 |
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The FUNi season sets are so heavily overfiltered (and based off multigenerational prints that were presumably 16mm even for those few episodes) that there's no real difference at all there, actually. But on the Dragon Boxes, and especially the Blu-rays of Kai, there's just a portion of several episodes that looks way sharper than the rest of it. The episodes in question are on Part 3, or Season 2 in their later 26-episode sets, and I feel like even with compressed, downscaled-to-720p jpeg screenshots, the difference is quite noticable. (Compare the various closeups of the Ginyus with the shot of Goku in the healing tank or Piccolo.) |
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maximilianjenus
Posts: 2920 |
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that screenshot is full HD |
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PurpleWarrior13
 Posts: 2037 |
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They definitely look very sharp, although I heard Kai was also digitally recolored, so I'm not sure how accurate they would be to the original source, probably not much more than FUNi's DBZ Season sets. I looked at screenshots from other Kai sets, and there's definitely a mix of softer and sharper focus throughout. I would love to see the Dragon Box comparisons. All the movies were shot on 35mm, and I think they would be a good reference to compare. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
Posts: 951 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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Well, there's a couple of things to bear in mind. First is that the production process doesn't involve doing one episode from start to finish, doing the final render and then cleaning up all the bits used in the process; different stages of several episodes are worked on at once, and people aren't going to be too hasty in deleting intermediary files, since things are typically being tweaked until the very end and bits might need to be re-used in future episodes. Then there's the fact that it's not just a single machine the work's being done on; some amount of storage needs to be distributed amongst the various workstations. And for the kind of thrashing serious video work is going to do to a hard drive, a consumer grade drive will not cut it. And even if they're only producing one show of their own at the time, studios are basically all doing various subcontracting bits for each other constantly, so there will be materials relating to other shows around too. |
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nargun
Posts: 931 |
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Also, of course: every byte that's stored has to be loaded, saved, and processed: double the resolution means four times the processing time.
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1802 Location: South America |
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Well the cost per byte of storage is going down. Maybe 10 years ago when production shifted to 720 points (I recall that my favorite anime series, Haibane Renmei was shot on 480 points resolution back in 2002) that was justified but now it's 2017. I would guess now 1080 resolution would be easier to handle than in 2007.
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jymmy
Posts: 1244 |
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1032 is a smaller number than 1080. |
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13627 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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For those with the technical know how, please answer this: say a movie is 120 minutes with a 15 mm, why might a 30 mm make it 130 minutes? Does the bigger size mean frames are being produced quicker?
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