|  IP: Logged

Why pay the money to make film prints when there are next to no theaters to show it? Most porn is "direct to video" --made for TV only viewing (where everyone can sneak a peak at that raunchy stuff without risking being seen in public walking into a porn palace with the raincoat crowd).

With porn being a TV-only medium, the use between film and videotape becomes a simple balance of visual style versus budget. It is a lot cheaper to shoot some hardcore crap on a 3CCD MiniDV camera than go rent a bunch of film gear.

I'm not sure about the numbers, but I think the last figure I saw claimed North America had about 30,000 commercial movie theater screens. That is a large, installed market with enough influence to keep directors and cinematographers shooting on film.

Then look at regular broadcast television. Most TV series are shot on film rather than videotaped (particularly the serious dramas and action oriented series). The vast majority of large national TV ad campaigns have their commericals filmed rather than taped. Why? Film just looks better. It doesn't have that dry, pasty 6 o'clock news / soap opera / infomercial look to it.

To address the vinyl LP versus CD analogy about digital videotape versus film, there is a big difference in the analogy. While quality differences between LP and CD are argumentative (I think CD definitely sounds better, but LPs had much better artwork), there is no argument that digital videotape just doesn't capture anywhere near as good a quality image as 35mm film. Video isn't nearly as sharp and it does not have the color character of film either. And over-hyped digital projection systems like DLP carry bareful half the detail of a standard 1080i HDTV image, and far less detail than film.

 |  IP: Logged

Well, not to be a jerk, but if everyone who's supposed to be following these procedures treats the process as a joke, then who's fault is it if their presentation isn't as good as it could be? I mean, at some point the individuals have to take some responsibility for this stuff and treat it seriously instead of a corporate joke. Or maybe I'm just naive.

[Disclaimer: The above observation comes from someone who's never worked in a booth. ]

 |  IP: Logged

I didn't mind the paperwork and the corporate statements. I took them seriously and I thought they were a good thing; and there were a few others at that location who believed in the AMC Vision and Mission Statement. Unfortunately, I think we were in the minority. Our cinema was an 8-plex and I think they keep it open because it is a good training theatre for managers. We saw them come in green and leave as "experts." The point is that we weren't one of the gigaplexes where everyone is a number. We were small enough where the employees were very much a family...and we knew quite a number of our patrons, too.

Having actually been there, I wouldn't blame the employees for regarding policies as "corporate jokes" because the management is allowed to override those well-intentioned policies. I was there and I saw it day in/day out.

It's a sad statement when an operation runs most smoothly when the manager isn't around.

They sure did chase that APSH*...are they still doing that?

~Manny (the only one you need.)

*APSH = "Attendance Per Staff Hour." Theoretically, an AMC Theatre is most efficient when there is 1 staff hour for every 19 guests. Something like that.

While I will agree that there is a perception in the marketplace that audio CDs are too expensive, the economic fact is that they are cheaper than vinyl was, if you calculate inflation.

I also don't buy your argument that the only reason audio CDs sold was because of the change in return policies on vinyl. I think that it is much more likely that when the record companies knew that vinyl wasn't selling anymore, they declared the vinyl versions out-of-print, which automatically made them non-returnable after a particular time period, usually several months.

Also, it is unrealistic to calculate that the price of CDs should be cheaper than vinyl solely because of manufacturing costs. Artist's advances and marketing costs have skyrocketed since the introduction of CDs. The need to produce million dollar videos for MTV has also played a large role in increasing costs.

Around 1964, a typical pop mono LP listed for $3.99 and a pop stereo LP listed for $4.99 and was generally sold at discount for $3.66. When the industry moved to single inventory in 1965, album prices moved to $4.99/$3.66. Based on the inflation rate, CDs should now list for about $27.15 and sell for about $19.91 to be equivalent to the 1965 price of vinyl. At J&R in New York, new releases generally sell for $12 to $14 and midline CDs sell for $7-$11. Personally, I think that being able to buy Dylan's double-LP Blonde on Blonde or Miles Davis' Kind of Blue for $7 on CD is an amazing value. (That's not to say that the record companies aren't repulsive for lots of other reasons.)

Concerning digital cinema, while this might be heresy on this Board, I have to admit that while I was prepared to really hate it, in the few instances that I've seen it, I was surprisingly impressed. It definitely looked better in terms of image steadiness and screen brightness than most neighborhood theatres in my area.

Unfortunately, most moviegoers don't have the slightest inkling what makes for good presentation and unless the film stops, they don't complain. I have stormed out of theatres complaining about screen channels missing, no audio in the surrounds, hum, incredible distortion, the digital processor doing some really strange things, dimness, and out-of-focus images. I have always been alone.

I have been in NYC theatres where the audience has booed when the Dolby, DTS or SDDS trailers played and it wasn't because the trailer wasn't their format of choice. From the audience perspective, it was silly and not relevant. And the average moviegoer has no idea whether a film is playing in 1.85 or 2.39. I saw Metropolis today and I would hope the audience noticed that it looked different than modern film dimensions, since it played in 1.33 (or maybe 1.37), but who knows?

I do lurk at various DVD forums a lot and could not fail to notice the nice things kids say about digital cinema. Several had said that it's about time Hollywood had come out with a system that "blows film away". Are they sincere or were they brainwashed by Uncle Georgie when he fed them a lot of BS about how superior digital cinema is compared to film when he gave them a second "BS" dose of "STAR WARS spiked with digital videoagraphy. To these kids, Georgie boy could not do anything wrong eccept Jar Jar Binks. How sad!

-Claude

But the current systems are a joke, and I am not the only person who thinks so. I work at a rather prominent Silicon Valley company, and heard comments from some of my coworkers who saw Star Wars Episode II in DLP. You would think a bunch of tech-savvy engineers would be very hip on digital cinema, but after they actually saw it, they were stunned to find that it looked scarcely better than an average conference room LCD projector -- visible pixels and poor contrast!

If there were a digital cinema system available with 4K resolution, a 10,000:1 contrast range, and a color gamut as good or better than a dye-transfer print, I would say that would be fine. I would miss film, but I could live with it. Today's systems do not even come close to that ideal, and that's why I complain.

Something else: AMC certainly provided all of the tools you could want. From a purely mechanical standpoint, everything worked and was well maintained. There was nothing lacking from an equipment standpoint. I will always admit that.

Too bad the equipment alone was not enough to guarantee good presentation.

This was where I started to feel that maybe unions weren't as evil as I once thought they were. The idea of letting "anyone" run the booth was nuts.

-Claude

 |  IP: Logged

 |  IP: Logged