Better Film For Better Looking Movies ... and Better Looking TV, Too

Innovation in Technology and Design Extends Range of New Motion Film

People still spend their hard-earned money to go to the movies because the experience is so great - the sound, the story come to life, and big, vivid pictures. Movies just look great. Even the big-screen televisions costing thousands of dollars don't give the same look as the big-screen theater. Now the movies, along with television programs and commercials originated on a new film from Kodak, can look even better.

Kodak scientists and engineers teamed to develop the new Kodak Vision2 500T color negative 5218 film, a breakthrough in motion imaging technology. Their Vision2 film design combines major technological innovations with innovative design to provide a new type of paint for the cinematographers' palettes and a better starting place for both optical and digital post-production.

Getting Two for One

It's a truth as old as silver-halide technology: the light-sensitive film "grains" gather light in proportion to their surface area. For every photon of light, an electron is released to form the latent image. So faster film speed has necessitated larger grains.

To gather light more efficiently, Kodak scientists developed tabular grain, or T-GrainÒ, emulsion technology in the 80s. It provided a substantial improvement throughout Kodak's lineup of films. And many thought it was the last big breakthrough in film technologies.

In 2000, though, Kodak scientists patented a new technology, which effectively doubled the efficiency of each grain. Where T-Grain emulsion technology made more efficient use of the light-capturing surface by flattening the silver-halide grain, the 2-electron sensitization doubles the efficiency of each grain by converting the captured photon into two electrons.

Building on Breakthroughs

To design the new film, the development team began with a system characterization study. They listened to cinematographers' feedback and assessed the performance of our current products, assessing such characteristics as color reproduction, contrast, photographic speed, telecine transfers, and optical printing performance. Once they had accumulated the desired aims, they worked from knowledge of the imaging characteristics of our current films to set the aims for the Vision2 film. Maintaining the best qualities of the original Vision system, they set about achieving longer linear latitude, improved image structure, increased shadow detail, and more natural rendering of colors and flesh tones.

To most of us, high-speed films mean bigger, more visible grain in our prints. Projected onto a large screen, grain compromises quality even more. So the benefits of speed are clear: improved ability to capture scene detail in low-light conditions or increased depth of field. To create a high-speed color negative camera origination film without these image quality-speed tradeoffs required Kodak scientists deliver a number of breakthrough technologies.

The development team began by incorporating advanced T-Grain emulsion technology into all three-color records. As motion picture camera origination films are traditionally tungsten-balanced, the blue layer has to be the fastest. Typically, film designers have used conventional (3D) emulsions to get accurate speed in this layer, but these emulsions result in obvious granularity. The designers achieved the true speed needed for EI500, but with vastly improved granularity and less noise in the blue color record. In the red- and green-sensitive layers, the enhanced efficiency of the new tabular grains also reduced granularity. The ability of these new T-Grain emulsions to capture and process photons more efficiently allows for more photographic speed with reduced crystal sizes.

The design team also incorporated Kodak's patented two-electron sensitization technology. This technology involves a fragment-able electron-donor compound designed to work with the sensitizing dyes to create the potential for two electrons from a single incident photon. Doubling the number electrons enhances the speed performance of the film and contributes to the stabilization of the latent image. The result is more detail in low-light scenes and extended depth of field.

Further down the imaging chain, advanced development accelerators and more effective couplers improve the color dye formation process. Once a latent image has been recorded, it is amplified by the chemistry in a negative developer bath to form the color dye image. Advanced development accelerators allow the latent image sites on the exposed silver halide crystals to be detected more easily by the developer. Once the latent image site has been amplified, the oxidized developer reacts with couplers in the film to produce the dye record of the image. The use of these couplers improves the yield of dye formation by producing more dye density per quantity of developed silver. These technologies optimize the silver and coupler loads in a color record so that optical scattering can be accounted for, and consistent sharpness can be maintained.

While Vision film stocks were developed with the green-sensitive record having three distinct dye-forming layers, the Vision2 films have extended this concept to the red-sensitive record as well. This coating structure allows more freedom in designing linear tone scales and consistent color reproduction, while keeping grain to a minimum over a wider exposure range.

The combination of these technologies results in a high-speed film stock with significantly improved image structure. Along with lower granularity, the tone scale of the film has been reshaped. Improving the linearity of the mid-scale section of the sensitometric curve not only improves the neutrality of the image but also offers an optimum starting point for traditional optical and newer digital-based post-production processes.

As more origination films are scanned to create digital effects, the improvements in Vision2 film set higher standards for origination, offer greater efficiencies, and extend the utility of motion picture origination films into digital cinema.

The output is only as good as the raw material that goes into post-production. The Vision2 film allows the cinematographer to capture more of that "raw material." And that means the movies we see will look even better. And so will television programming and commercials.