Limitations
Footage that has been shot with the knowledge that it will be subsequently electronically filmized is usually shot in a very different way, with film-style lighting and framing. Regardless, there have been several attempts to process ordinary videotape to look like film, usually with little success. Notable examples include Red Dwarf Remastered - digitally remastered versions of the first three series of Red Dwarf. As well as being filmized, the episodes had been cropped to widescreen and had all their special effects remade.
BBC hospital drama-soap Casualty also flirted briefly with the filmizing process in the mid-1990s, but it was quickly dropped after viewer complaints that the show "looked wrong." The same happened with Emmerdale where it was used for 7 episodes in October 2002 before being quietly dropped.
Ironically, the fantasy series Neverwhere was a video-based production which suffered as a result of having been shot and lit with filmization in mind. The decision to filmize was later reversed, resulting in a negative response to the film-style lighting which came across poorly on the unprocessed video footage.
Filmizing success stories include The League of Gentlemen, Spaced, The Office and Heartbeat, all of which can fool most people into believing they were shot on film. On 25 November 2007 an episode of Heartbeat was broadcast without filmizing and the show's producers later admitted this was a post-production error. This error caused alarm amongst the show's fans amidst fears that a permanent switch to video was being made indicating the success of the filmizing technique on this production.
The Fox show Arrested Development used an elaborate post-production process to adjust colors and brightness levels to match those of film stock.
The 1970s BBC TV show Porridge provides a stark example of the visual differences between film and videotape. The show employed videotape for scenes inside Fletcher's cell, whereas film was used for scenes outside of the cell. The difference in lighting style and frame rate is very noticeable. Many British television series from the 1960s through the 1980s used videotape for interior scenes and film for exterior shots due to equipment limitations. This was parodied in the 'Society for Putting Things on top of Other Things' sketch in Monty Python's Flying Circus (Series 2, Episode 5).
Read more about this topic: Filmizing
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