Unfortunately, RGB in Hollywood has shuttered its doors and is no
longer processing motion picture film in still form. While they were
open, it was a great service: they loaded motion picture film onto
still 35mm cartridges and also processed it. For me it was the
easiest and best way to shoot on 500 ASA Tungsten based film. You
could shoot on the same film as Hollywood cinematographers!
But again, they shut down for good a few months ago.
Digital motion picture cameras that can shoot at a quality that is
equivalent to RAW are still a bit of a ways off. One of the leading
digital motion picture cameras is the Thomson Viper, which shoots at
1920x1080 resolution. The more common Sony F900 and F950 (used to
film Star Wars: Episode II & III) shoot at only 1920x764(!) since the
image is cropped to produce a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. There's simply
not the equipment yet that is compact enough, durable and with enough
speed and memory that can process high resolution RAW imagery and
store it at the rate of 24 frames per second. On a film like
Collateral, the Thomson Viper had to be tethered to a remote
recording deck and even then the image was compressed.
There's a digital cinema camera called the Dalsa Origin, which shoots
what I believe is uncompressed at 4096x2048 pixels, but the camera is
pretty unwieldy and not in popular use: http://www.dalsa.com/dc/
origin/dc_sensor.asp It does represent the future however. 12 stops
of linear exposure latitude and it uses what they call is the "best
CCD in the world."
The recent film "The Corpse Bride" was shot with the Canon EOS-1D
Mark II. But of course they could use still cameras because they
were shooting stop motion. Those images were captured RAW at full
resolution, 3504x2336 and eventually processed and compressed to 2K
before "filmout" to the exhibition print stock.
It's not happening now, but yes: it's just a matter of time before it
is commonplace for live action cinematographers to be working RAW at
the kind of resolution that can be achieved on dSLRs.
