Do filmmakers use new or old cameras when doing an old look?

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Zamolxes

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I was watching a music video for Young and Beautiful by Lana Del Rey and at first I thought it's an old song from the late 70s. The clip is made on purpose to look old and since I didn't really knew who Lana was, I asumed it was an old song. But I was quite surprised to find out it's actually made in 2013.

Now I am looking back at it and noticing the color blending, the washed out colors and the sharp contrast that old videos have, so I am curios, do filmmakers use new cameras and post proces everything, or do they use a combination of old technology and modern post processing?

Here is the video (i hope it won't be marked as spam):

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Kevin_Cogneto

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It depends. The movie Grindhouse is the perfect example of the two ways to do it: for Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez shot the movie digitally and faked the beat-up-old-film look on a computer in post production, whereas for Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino shot it with an older film stock and then intentionally damaged and degraded the physical film. Either way can be done well or done badly, but there's really no way of knowing in this case. If I had to place a bet, I'd say this video was shot digitally and made to look old in a computer, but I wouldn't be that surprised if the opposite was true.

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Aetheldod

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#3  Edited By Aetheldod

Postprocessing mainly , there is no good reason to use an old film camera because well film is expensive as is , and to use a film of older stock would be much more expensive (a combination of specialty and unavailability of such film stock). Also after watching the video they use old type of lighting techniques (or in the business photgraphy) all that adds up to make it look like it was made with old tech.

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Nasar7

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Yep, mostly done with digital and made to look old through post processing. Sometimes you can tell bc the "fake" old stuff looks too clean compared to actual film, despite all the tricks.