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Topic: Interstellar locations running in 70MM
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 10-05-2014 03:04 PM
Because everyone would then need new plates and lenses, which would be another obstacle.
On the mag front, John Pytlak told me at an AMIA conference many years ago that the production of the chemical needed to bind the oxide layer to the polyester film surface creates seriously gnarly greenhouse gases, and was in the process of being outlawed worldwide for everything except applications that were vital to human life (so basically, you would still be allowed to use it to make vital medicines that couldn't be made any other way, but not for "non-essential" applications like making cool prints of movies). At that time he believed that there was still one facility in Mexico that offered mag striping of 70mm print stock, but anticipated that they would be stopping very shortly.
If that's correct, then we will never be seeing any new mag prints again, sadly, which makes it all the more important that we take good care of the ones that are left.
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Brad Miller
Administrator
Posts: 17775
From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall)
Registered: May 99
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posted 10-05-2014 04:06 PM
Bobby, I don't ever see that fantasy happening, but let's just say for a moment that it did. I think it would be easy to acquire the rights to produce Century JJs (which hopefully would be the model of projector that would be resurrected). There wouldn't even be a need to build the penthouse for it. Just have the 35mm optical soundhead as normal and the 35/70 JJ head as normal and skip the penthouse all together. On top is a standard dts70 reader.
At that point with the timecode track being on the print, dts could make a player that could play uncompressed sound, or even some form of object based sound (Atmos). No mag would be needed (which would also help keep costs down).
Unfortunately that doesn't solve the platter problem or lamphouse problem. Sure Christie could probably start making AW3s again without too much trouble (they could always farm most of it out) and they could probably even adapt their current digital lamphouse/integrator rod/etc setup in their digital machines to make a phenomenal lamphouse (or go straight to laser), but they would never break even, so it will never happen.
Heck even setting up a shop to make projectors again...they would never make break even because they would never sell enough.
But then there is also the need to have splicers, RP91 test loops, rewind benches and other such items that are no longer made. The only thing film-wise that is still being made is analog and basement readers (Kelmar, BACP, Component Engineering) and reels from Goldberg.
Basically I think it's nothing more than a fantasy dream that will never happen. The studios don't really want film to return. I think they are just trying to keep their most valuable directors happy so they will make them more millions.
And like Steve Guttag said, "theaters that sucked at film will suck at digital". With the craft now pretty much killed, how many theaters these days that didn't suck at film before will suck at film now? My guess is damn near all of them.
Film-Tech is however making Century aperture plates now if anyone needs them. Somebody had to step up and do it.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 10-06-2014 12:06 PM
quote: Bobby Henderson
I have a hard time imagining the chore and cost involved in having to archive a lot of movie masters stored on digital media in movie studios.
For a long time now, people have been making Millennium bug style, "We're all doomed" prophecies about digital media archiving. They are based mainly on the (correct) belief that no reliable "store and ignore" digital carrier exists, and that therefore the need either to keep assets permanently online (e.g. in a RAID) or to commit to continual migration of offline media makes digital archiving an order of magnitude more difficult and expensive than putting films in a cold and dry vault (IMHO, incorrect).
A recent study has concluded that around 85% of the silent features made in the US have been lost, many of them because they were stored and ignored (and thus rotted). It's true that if you put nitrate and acetate films in a cold and dry vault they will last for centuries, but cold and dry vaults cost a lot of money to build and operate. The world's film storage capacity is finite, and someone (either studios or mainly government-run, non profit archives) will have to pay to increase it. Because most of that cost is in real estate and electricity, it's not going to come down very much from here on in. Film archiving is now a mature technology.
The cost per TB of digital storage, on the other hand, is coming down. True to Moore's law, the money that would have bought you a 2TB drive 1-2 years ago will buy you 4TB now. New solid state storage technologies are coming onto the market and being enhanced to greater reliability and capacity. Because data storage has a load more uses than media archiving, media archiving can benefit from the economies of scale and the R & D investment made by other industries for other applications.
Google, Apple and all the mega-cloud operators are storing and making accessible petabytes of data reliably and commercially (OK, the "reliably" bit is debatable if you're a celeb, in the habit of videoing yourself naked and uploading the result to iCloud, but you get the point). I'm sorry, but when a film purist who has worked in a cloistered, taxpayer-funded museum for all of his or her life pronounces that data archiving can never achieve the same reliability as a film vault, s/he is demonstrating that they have not been looking at what has been going on out in the real world over the last decade or so.
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Brad Miller
Administrator
Posts: 17775
From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall)
Registered: May 99
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posted 10-06-2014 02:15 PM
quote: Mitchell Dvoskin
I have to wonder how many of the locations listed on the Interstellar web site as running film 5/70 or 35mm are actually going to run film.
I'm going to do my best Manny impersonation here.
I have a feeling Paramount is going to get scammed a bit with this.
Scenario #1
Theater says "yeah we have 35mm...give it to us 2 days early". Doesn't matter if they have a projectionist, or if their 35mm system is working or even if they have a 35mm projector in the building. They play digital instead, never even intending on running the film print knowing this little scam will work.
Scenario #2
Theater says "yeah we have 35mm...give it to us 2 days early". They have a 35mm system, projectionist, everything needed right down to splicing tape and they have dutifully checked it. When they are prepping the film something breaks and there is no way to run it on film. They play digital instead.
Scenario #3
Theater says "yeah we have 35mm...give it to us 2 days early". They dutifully play it on film and somewhere into the run they lay a nasty scratch down the middle of the entire print. At that point they decide the digital presentation is better than the damaged film presentation and they switch to digital.
Scenario #4
Theater says "yeah we have 35mm...give it to us 2 days early". They dutifully play it on film through the weekend, then when Monday rolls around they say it isn't worth their payroll to keep that projectionist, so they run digital on the weekdays and maybe/maybe not fire up the film the following weekend.
The point is as long as the keys are unlocked, which they will be because the rest of the world will be screaming for them to be unlocked so they can "QC", there is nothing to prevent theaters from just running the digital anyway.
Even if Paramount decides not to provide a key for those advance 2 days, what's to stop the theaters from switching to digital on Thursday night like the rest of the world?
And will there be any theaters that start running shows publicly once their keys are activated since the competition is running it?
And we all know the excuse even as early as Tuesday night will be "oh our intermittent died and we've already sold out every show...you HAVE to give us a key or we have to refund thousands of tickets!" And we know Paramount will do it to save the shows.
Am I wrong? ![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 10-06-2014 03:19 PM
quote: Brad Miller
The point is as long as the keys are unlocked, which they will be because the rest of the world will be screaming for them to be unlocked so they can "QC", there is nothing to prevent theaters from just running the digital anyway.
On the major new studio releases we've been playing recently, we've normally been given a separate key, with a two-hour window only, for testing. And even then, you usually only get that if you ask for it. The main KDM opens an hour or two before your first scheduled screening, or, if the studio is feeling generous, from 8am on the showdate.
I suspect it's quite likely that the KDMs for this movie will not be open during the "film only" days if that's the deal that Nolan has struck. Though if any of your scenarios 1 though 3 come to pass, venues will be meowing and hissing like crazy for their DCPs to be unlocked early.
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