[Jeff @ Feb 6th 2007 8:54AM]

"Most people I know are doing small movies digitally and then editing them on a Mac."

Yeah, and most of those films have the same generic look.

You are right that this is how most amateurs and small independents are working these days. But most amateurs and small independents are not very good filmmakers, and they probably wouldn't know the difference in look between film and video if they had an A/B comparison right in front of them.

There's a niche even in professional filmmaking for the Super 8 format. No, it's not like feature films are ever shot on Super 8, but a lot of music videos and avant-garde pieces are (even some major ones - many of Depeche Mode's Anton Corbin videos were shot on Super 8, for example, as were a couple of Madonna's fairly recent videos). You can sort of replicate that with computer effects these days, but it doesn't really look right, any more than the Photoshop "film grain" filter looks like real film for still photos.

Super 8's never going to regain the kind of popularity it had before the days of the camcorder, but I can't foresee a day when it doesn't fill that same pro niche, unless it's a forced obsolescence (this does happen in the film world, as there are only a couple of suppliers of both film stock and processing and if they decide to stop supplying something, well, that's pretty much it).