How Technology & Tradition Combine to Make Modern Movies

This is part three of a three-part series about the movie industry’s switch to digital cameras and what is lost, and gained, in the process. Part one, on the traditional approach to filming movies and the birth of digital, ran on Wednesday; part two, explaining why digital images look different from filmed images, ran yesterday.

As digital technology continued its immeasurable improvements at the end of the last century and this beginning of this one, even the most fervent opponents of the newer formats came to recognize that digital images began to capture details that the human eye, and the film camera, could not see. Furthermore, the new formats have posed aesthetic challenges that some filmmakers have eagerly embraced. Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 international art-house hit The Celebration (made according