At The Audi Pavilion Salons: Cinematography in the digital age

Cinematographers Rob Toth and Vilmos Zsigmond eagerly discussed the finer points of digital and analog film at The Audi Pavilion Salon on Saturday morning. Their insights drew a crowd that was half film-geek and half casual-filmgoer, but all leaned in to catch every word.

Toth, who's an AFI Alumnus and director of photography on PSYCHO HILLBILLY CABIN MASSACRE! comes from a school comfortable with HD filmmaking. Zsigmond, well-known for his work on The Long Goodbye and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, has a master's knowledge of film.

The two dived into the particulars of each format. Toth, who remembers film editing in school, complained that one of the big problems was "spending hours trying to synch the sound with the pictures and editing the film. It took hours, and I ended up with bloody fingers."

On the other hand, Zsigmond has an appreciation for the technological benefits that HD presents.

"Today it's so easy to make the blacks blacker and the colors brighter. You just turn a knob and it's done. I fell in love with [digital]".

Toth made witty comments on how digital filmmaking has changed the art of the cinematographer. As far as he's concerned, there are plusses and minuses.

"There's a lot les time spent on finessing lighting. The director sees it onscreen and wants to shoot immediately. But it's a flat boring image. I'm sitting there saying, wait, can I set it up and make it look nice first? ...

"Now it's easier to do it in post.... When I shoot HD I still use the light meter, and when they see that they think I'm actually working and making it look right," he cracked. "But really, if you skip over that step, you're going to change the story."

Zsigmond said that during his travels - he fled Hungary in 1956 with Lazlo Kovacs - he's seen the quality of lighting drop, especially in Eastern Europe and Africa.

" I don't see the artistry of lighting. Most of the schools just teach digital. Very few times do they use film. ... When you shoot digital you don't care so much about the lighting," he said.

"They don't think about how they want to preserve and archive that image in five years. That costs money and you'll find that digital filmmaking costs just as much as film. DVD preservation doesn't last more than 5 years."

Both Toth and Zsigmond agreed that, if a movie is shot on film, digital projectors don't affect the quality. The trade-offs come in the cost of replacing analog technology and upgrading digital equipment every few years.

"I do think the digital projectors are slightly sharper," said Toth. "But the thing is, that the film projectors are still running after 30-40 years. There's no need to replace them."

Zsigmond said that given the choice, he'd still prefer to shoot Close Encounters on stock, especially when it comes to special effects.

"It would be easier to do, and it's faster. But the quality of the effects aren't as good as on film. ... You don't have the human element in digital special effects."

So which is better, digital or film? It's hard to say, but new technology always seems to replace old, whether it's better or not. But Toth does mourn one aspect of shooting stock.

If you shoot film, you're kind of like a magician, Nobody knows what your doing. With digital, you have this screen where anybody, from directors to craft services people can come over and make a comment on it."