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HD vs. 35mm film

Traditionally, 35mm film cameras have used offset optics to allow for soundtrack on the final print image - what is know as academy centring. This means that a 35mm film frame, when scanned at 2K via a film scanner for a 1.85 deliverable, has the following technical attributes:

Film frame resolution

Where as a 1920x1080 HD frame has the following technical attributes:

HD frame

From the above it can be seen that 1920x1080 HD frame is an good relative match for a 35mm film frame, with better horizontal and vertical resolution compared to a 2K 35mm academy film scan.

However, if a 35mm film project is planning on DI post-production the camera lenses can be re-centred to make use of the full film frame, using the DI process to re-size the image to 'fit' the full 2048 horizontal pixels into the final 1.85 academy area, with 1107 vertical lines.

But then again that is just 128 pixels and 27 lines bigger than the HD frame...

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