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Author Topic: BV Announces Cyan Track for "Mr. 3000" Gordon McLeod Film God Posts: 9532 From: Toronto Ontario Canada Registered: Jun 99 posted 07-18-2004 10:56 AM                     Except for one instance I have not had a call regarding an emergancy A chain issue since almost all the theatres I service are LED now where as before I was constantly getting calls re solar cells that had been damaged by a splice or a pile up or a excitor with a misaligned filament The LED technology is an improvement and is more cost effective in the longrun if one adds the service call issue into the equation Also to my knowledge there is no soundhead that cannot be converted to some form of red light Also in the scheme to things 1000.00 is not to much of an investment in this day and age. When cinemascope was introduced one had no choice but to buy anamorphic lens to show the product  |  IP: Logged Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 07-18-2004 10:58 AM                        Gordon--how would you convert a Western Electric Universal Base to LED? What about MP-30 portables? I'll shut up about the lack of conversion kits as soon as I find out how these two types of soundheads can be converted, as those are the ones that I have used which, to my knowledge, don't have conversion kits readily available.  |  IP: Logged Steve Kraus Film God Posts: 4094 From: Chicago, IL, USA Registered: May 2000 posted 07-18-2004 11:13 AM                    That's the downside when you make a change that obsoletes a line of equipment going back three quarters of a century. JP: Why is it necessary that the dye-only track be recorded in cyan only? Why can't it be in all three? Seems to me the red light will only be modulated in the cyan layer anyway so there ought not be any detriment by giving full 3 layer coverage. Except maybe that by giving full spectrum modulation the white light modulation would be down far less than 12dB than white light + IR and make the need of conversion less decisive.  |  IP: Logged Thomas Procyk Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1842 From: Royal Palm Beach, FL, USA Registered: Feb 2002 posted 07-18-2004 11:22 AM                     Everyone's comparing this like it's a "new innovation" that will improve the theater experience. CinemaScope was an improvement that the audience noticed -- a wider screen. This drew customers to the theater and helped pay for the technology. The audience notices digital sound, too, which draws people to your theater as opposed to the analog-only house down the street. Even investments in seating an aesthetics can draw customers, which help pay for the improvement. I fail to see how Cyan Tracks improve anything presentation-wise. Or at least improve things enough to where customers will say, "No! Let's go to Theater B because they have red-LED readers!" So the theater owners will simply be forced to "eat the cost" for the benefit of the studios. As for the environmental issue, companies like Kodak have been served with MANY various environmental infractions and fines in the past, and the fact that they suddenly care about saving water -- which, to my understanding is reclaimable through treatment -- makes me skeptical. Corporations care about the bottom line before they think about the environment. They are designed by law to think that way. So when they say they are "saving our water" as a resource, what they're really saying is they're "saving THEIR water BILL." It's all a sham. Theater owners are paying Kodak and other labs' and processors' water bills through the conversion. Now, wait until they start hollering about how film stock itself is harmful to the environment and announce they will only release titles in DLP for this fact. =TMP=  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 07-18-2004 11:41 AM                     The Carmike theater in my town is in the process to converting over to LED readers. So far two of their eight Simplex projectors have those Dolby BACP RSTR 2000 readers installed. But the theater has been receiving a lot of cyan track prints well before the conversion started. Needless to say, it is a good thing they have DTS on every screen!  |  IP: Logged Bill Enos Film God Posts: 2081 From: Richmond, Virginia, USA Registered: Apr 2000 posted 07-18-2004 12:22 PM                     Money spent on changing anything in film technology is money pissed away. The R & D and technology expenditures should be spent on making digital cinema more acceptable and more affordable if it is to displace film in the relatively near future. Red light readers are another change of doubious value that has been successfully foisted off on the industry as an improvement and at the expense of the theaters which will see no significant benefit. Alternately, why not eliminate the analog track altogether and use the space for a larger image? Think of the number of aperture plates, etc. that could be sold. The total conversion to digital sound would make more sense than this cyan analog track crap.  |  IP: Logged Gordon McLeod Film God Posts: 9532 From: Toronto Ontario Canada Registered: Jun 99 posted 07-18-2004 12:59 PM                     Jax lights and Lasers will fit the Universal Base and the MP30  |  IP: Logged Richard Fowler Film God Posts: 2392 From: Ft. Lauderdale, FL, USA Registered: Jun 2001 posted 07-18-2004 01:10 PM                     I Agree with Gordon regarding total operating cost of exciters vs. LED/Laser. An average exciter has 400 hours of good life and it is constantly changing during the life of the bulb....that is if the cinema owner is willing to pay for the maintinance. Exciters where acceptable for Dolby type A since the response was rarely was above 12.5KHZ....with reverse scan kits or laser and a good recorded print, 16KHZ is possible which Dolby SR type tracks can deliver. Kits can be made for virtually any decent cinema and portable projector in use today.......but I think the sprocket flutter from the Universal "antique" soundhead would be more pronounced if upgraded to "red light" set up.... they should try to get a tax write off from a museum for a relic in operating condition  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 07-18-2004 01:14 PM                     quote: Bill Enos Money spent on changing anything in film technology is money pissed away. That really depends on whose money is being spent and where the cost benefit is felt. Right now for "D-Cinema," you have this curiously stupid situation where movie studios would benefit the greatest from cost savings, yet they want the movie theaters to foot all the bill. This is not an intelligent situation at all in terms of factors like return-on-investment and negative cash flow. Also, changes in things like cyan tracks and converting existing projectors to use LED readers and do away with exciter lamps is pretty small potatoes compared to the ridiculously high cost of video projection. A standard 35mm film projector can be purchased for $30,000 or less, and the fundamental technology of it has changed very little in the past 60 or so years. Compare that to a video projection setup costing 5 to 10 times as much that becomes obsolete in a mere handful of years. Example: the standard 1280 X 1024 DLP systems most D-Cinema sites have are obsolete. You have to buy an entire new setup to go 2K. And then you'll have to do it again for 4K. Commercial theater circuits are not loaded with that kind of cash to spend at all. When it comes to dollar investment into things like "D-Cinema" the damned electronics companies can come up will ALL the research and development money themselves. After all, I doubt if Texas Instruments has any kind of profit sharing plan that includes commercial movie theater chains. The main (and unspoken) goal of D-Cinema development is the highly lucrative home consumer electronics and personal computing markets. That's where all these DLP, CMOS and LCOS chips are being targeted. Commercial movie theaters are a tiny niche compared to a much broader target market. quote: Bill Enos Alternately, why not eliminate the analog track altogether and use the space for a larger image? Think of the number of aperture plates, etc. that could be sold. The total conversion to digital sound would make more sense than this cyan analog track crap. Again, you have the issue of cost. It costs a lot more money to outfit an existing movie theater with a digital sound system than it does to install an LED reader system for an analog track. Also, many older, existing theaters are not built to handle the dynamics of digital sound. Unless the fader is turned down to a stupidly low level you'll get sound leakage from one auditorium to the next. Most theaters have to have walls built to contain digital surround sound for it to be a feasible investment. Finally, none of the existing digital sound formats (DTS, Dolby Digital and SDDS) are error proof. Even as reliable as DTS can be, it does fail from time to time (especially if you have a reader that gets thrown out of calibration). With that, the optical track must stay on the print as a failsafe. If the digital system fails, at least some audio will still be playing. If you have no backup to the digital system, then all the audience hears is silence and you get to hand out a whole lot of refunds.  |  IP: Logged Jack Ondracek Film God Posts: 2348 From: Port Orchard, WA, USA Registered: Oct 2002 posted 07-18-2004 01:14 PM                        Well, the problem with doing anything to film that forces use of digital (now there's a switch that our "third world countries" would love), is that to this day, nothing digital has yet to equal the long-term reliability of analog. The quality of digital sound isn't the argument. The fact is that with not much more than a light source and a pickup cell, you can yank acceptable sound off of film. The digital process is far too complicated for that kind of reliability. You still see DLP sites in larger markets backing their digital up with an analog print that by itself can rival what the DLP is putting out. Why isn't the industry grousing about having to provide dual-media to these exhibitors? Digital may well hit the mainstream industry at some point, but I don't think it's anywhere near enough that we should take a dump on film.... not just yet. The industry would seem to agree... at least for the moment. Regal signed a huge contract with Ballantyne/Strong to provide projectors. That stuff will be in the pipeline for years. If the digital sound processors had given up on film, there probably wouldn't be anything newer in the booth than CP65s, DA20s and the other companies equivelants. Curiously, Kodak continues to improve their films (thanks!!!!).  |  IP: Logged John Hawkinson Film God Posts: 2273 From: Cambridge, MA, USA Registered: Feb 2002 posted 07-18-2004 02:59 PM                     Steve Kraus: "Why is it necessary that the dye-only track be recorded in cyan only?" User interface--don't knock it! Operators need to be able to tell when they have cyan track. You'd have to be complete nincompoop ("Cyan track? That's the same a chartreuse, a funny yellow green color -- or was that absinthe? Anyhow, nope, don't have one of those!") to miss it. How many people do you think can easily ID high-magenta versus conventional? (Why would you want to record in all 3 dye layers? Preservation issues, so someone with advanced tools can read it in 30 years if it fades?) --jhawk  |  IP: Logged Steve Kraus Film God Posts: 4094 From: Chicago, IL, USA Registered: May 2000 posted 07-18-2004 04:57 PM                    Because I have a feeling the answer has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with forcing the conversion. Has anyone encountered a reel where it seemed like application was missing? How low was the sound (white light playback)? (I know I had a reel of Last of the Mohicans (1992) that had application on the right side of the screen but I don't recall anything about the sound so maybe it got applicated on both sides.) If full spectrum dyetrack was only down, say, 6dB it would be bad for them politically because people would just crank up the fader or preamp or both. My desire is not to encourage crappy playback but to retain a degree of backwards compatibility. User interface is trivial since you can sticker the reels as well as print in large lettering in the leader's soundtrack area. Like I said, keeping it cyan-only is a marketing/political decision to force people to convert.  |  IP: Logged Greg Routenburg Expert Film Handler Posts: 178 From: Toronto, ON, Canada Registered: May 2003 posted 07-19-2004 12:43 AM                     I think alot of other industries would find all this rediculous if they found out that we have gotten away with running the same technology for some 50 or 60+ years without ever having to do any major upgrades. Several hundred dollars per screen over that length of time is rediculously insignificant. If things are really that tight that we have a hard time justifying this conversion then I really have to question the business models that these people employ. Upgrading to maintain an industry standard level is common and the theatre industry really needs to take a cold shower if they think the should be exempt from the need to spend money on their equipment. It's the cost of doing business, plain and simple.  |  IP: Logged Carl Martin Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1424 From: Oakland, CA, USA Registered: Feb 2002 posted 07-19-2004 03:31 AM                        quote: Steve Kraus User interface is trivial since you can sticker the reels as well as print in large lettering in the leader's soundtrack area. what about trailers? i always keep the leaders but i don't know of anyone else who does that. not that the soundtrack area can accomodate large letters. usually when i'm scanning leaders for information like that it's in poorly reproduced handwriting. for backwards compatibility, would you then filter out the ir from the exciter? that would be more efficient than only passing the red light from the exciter. but still noisy, yes? carl  |  IP: Logged Gordon McLeod Film God Posts: 9532 From: Toronto Ontario Canada Registered: Jun 99 posted 07-19-2004 10:20 AM                     Cyan layer was chosen as the bst compromise the yellow layer is too diffuse to record good high frequency a silver track negates that effect and the magenta top layer is too easily damaged  |  IP: Logged

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