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This topic comprises 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
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Author
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Topic: Arclight LA Star Wars Disaster
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Manny Montes
Master Film Handler
Posts: 270
From: United States
Registered: Feb 2010
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posted 12-22-2015 03:35 PM
Of course you'll see the film purists trying to attack this as "film was better, etc" however I lost far more shows for film issues as compared to digital. In fact my lost digital shows have been due to physical issues (exploded bulb destroying reflector) and even then I only lost the show due to it taking too long to vacuum out all the pieces, replace reflector and bulb and get it back on screen (you'd be pushing into the next set). I've never lost more than one show in a day except once when we had a roof leak into a server which knocked it down for a few days, this would have been the same if the roof had leaked onto a film and damaged the print which would have to be shipped and rebuilt. All of the major providers have gotten great with shipping and courier speeds for digital parts that now you can expect them in a few hours and most servers have multi-drive redundancy anyway. The only issue I hate is corrupt hard drives, but that is easily fixed by borrowing from another local theater (or going to a satellite system), I've only had 3 so far, each one we either borrowed from another local theater or we had deluxe ship a new one overnight. They give enough time to make sure we have time to ingest (and if we are lucky with KDMs, test).
Film had its time and the industry has moved on, maybe not for the best reasons and maybe a little too soon before the technology was perfected, but I look at the 70mm nightmare that is hateful 8 right now and realize that film is never coming back in any sort of major role. Archival will stay on film of course, its simple, lasts forever and just works, but eventually that will change too. I am still just confused as to what people who are film purists are arguing for? The days of projectionists are long gone (even before the change to digital), there were ushers in the booth getting paid minimum wage to scratch prints like no tomorrow, I'd argue that a good majority of theaters have a much better presentation with digital now (especially if they invested in digital done right a la the FT DCS)
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Randy Stankey
Film God
Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 12-22-2015 04:13 PM
If I don't maintain my projectors, if I don't take care of my film and something goes wrong, customers will look to me for answers and I will be the one who provides the solution or takes the blame when customers aren't satisfied. That is as it should be.
If my digital system breaks down... for whatever reason, through my fault or not... the only thing I can tell my customers is that I have called the Network Operation Center in some town far away and that a technician will come to fix it in a day or so. I still take all of the blame but I have no ability to solve problems. Not fair!
You guys who work for big corporations like AMC, Cinemark, et. al., are more insulated from this. You've got company technicians with equipment, training and resources who can be on-site, sometimes, within the hour. I don't have such a luxury.
Further, people who work at megaplex theaters are faceless drones, as far as the public is concerned. In my town, I am "That movie guy." People stop me on th street and ask me questions about why such and such a movie didn't play right.
All I can tell people is that the computer crashed and that the guy will come to fix it on Monday.
Things like that don't make me feel very happy when I go to bed at night.
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Scott Norwood
Film God
Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 12-22-2015 06:57 PM
quote: Manny Montes
I'd argue that a good majority of theaters have a much better presentation with digital now
And I would agree with that. Not because ![[dlp]](graemlins/dlp.gif) at its best is better than 35mm at its best, but because so much junk equipment and so many awful operators who were running low-quality high-speed prints on the aforementioned junk equipment were replaced with new equipment that (at least while new) requires less human involvement and provides a high degree of consistency from show to show.
The people who really got screwed on the D-cinema transition were the smaller theatres who were actually doing film right (with good equipment and operators) and who were forced to spend money for equipment that provides a demonstrably inferior result to what they were getting with film. The other group that got screwed were the filmmakers who actually wanted their work to be screened in its original format.
I am something of a film purist myself, but even I would not advocate a return to film projection for the AMCs and Regals of the world. I do want film (in all formats: 70mm, 35mm, and even 16mm) to remain an option for original photography and projection for the filmmakers and exhibitors who prefer it. I don't necessarily expect that every new feature will be available on 35mm, but I do think that older films (which were originally intended for film projection) should continue to be available in quality prints, and the option of distributing a feature in 35mm should continue to exist for the filmmakers who prefer it.
I am happy to live in a time when producers and exhibitors have both film and D-cinema as options, and would like to see both options remain for production and distribution. They have different looks and are in no way interchangeable as far as I am concerned. I think that the Hateful Eight 70mm roadshow is a noble experiment, and I hope that it is a success for all concerned.
As for the Arclight--I don't blame the theatre or the operators for what happened, but the situation clearly could have been handled better (for example, by closing the douser and muting the sound before fast-forwarding or rewinding to the appropriate point in the feature).
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Tyler Purcell
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 180
From: Van Nuys, CA
Registered: Dec 2015
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posted 12-22-2015 07:53 PM
The biggest problem with digital cinema is the quality being no better then home theater. With the advent of UHD BluRay and 4k viewing devices at home, we are slowly seeing a push towards superior quality at home.
What makes film special is that it's an experience you can't have at home. For better or worse, proper film acquisition and distribution is nothing like digital. When done right, through a photochemical process, the color information rivals any digital formats we have available today. The sad part is, the only real change in 35mm since the late 50's has been audio. Even at the end of 35mm, we still projected a smaller academy image rather then full-frame, loosing quite a bit of resolution in the process. The industry kept going the same direction, never really re-inventing itself along the way. Small changes like 2 perf and 3 perf projection for 2.35:1 and 1.85:1 presentations, with 1:1 optical printing from camera negative, could have been huge, allowing far less camera and print stock to be used. Films could have been shipped pre-built from distributors on 2 perf and maybe even used reels instead of platters.
I mean, there is a lot the industry could have done to save film, but it's all down to money. For the distributors, digital is a godsend because it's practically free. For theaters, digital is a huge overhead/expense which raises the ticket prices to the point that pushes a lot of people away. I mean heck, the only reason anything is released in 3D today is because it makes the theaters and distributors more money! Most 3D movies aren't even shot in 3D! You can thank James Cameron for trying to do the right thing and unfortunately failing because the vast majority of people could care less about 3D.
Never the less, the final nail in film's coffin happened 2 years ago, with the decommissioning and destruction of both high speed duplicators in the US. This basically means no more mass-duplication of film prints. However, the resurrection of 70mm for films like The Master, Interstellar and Hateful Eight, maybe the beginning of a new era in film distribution. Only time will tell!
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Daniel Schulz
Master Film Handler
Posts: 387
From: Los Angeles, CA USA
Registered: Sep 2003
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posted 12-22-2015 10:24 PM
quote: Tyler Purcell
The biggest problem with digital cinema is the quality being no better then home theater. With the advent of UHD BluRay and 4k viewing devices at home, we are slowly seeing a push towards superior quality at home.
I have to push back on this a bit. I am a film fan, and like many on this forum I am extremely frustrated by the decline in presentation standards and the loss of things like constant-width screens, true anamorphic widescreen, curtains, proper masking and so on.
But still, there is a *world* of difference between a DCI compliant projection system and any home theater setup. The pixel count between 2K digital cinema and 1080p home theater may be similar, but the digital cinema data rate, compression scheme and color space are all vastly superior to the home theater experience.
Yes, there are very well-designed home theaters that perform at cinema levels, and yes there are terrible cinemas (true in the film era as well), but the average cinema is orders of magnitude better than the average home for both picture and sound.
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Tyler Purcell
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 180
From: Van Nuys, CA
Registered: Dec 2015
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posted 12-22-2015 11:57 PM
Daniel, I was referring to the new UHD .h265 BluRay format and 4k monitoring devices at home. That new format is 10 bit 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 color space, unlike the prior 1080p 8 bit 4:2:0 format it replaces. So it's MUCH closer to DCP quality. Plus, BluRay already has 24 bit 192khz DTS and Dolby Digital 7.1 audio. There are very few theaters that rival my home theater audio quality wise.
There are also loads of brand new 25,000:1+ contrast ratio, 2500+ lumen, 7 seg color wheel, single 1.5" DLP 4k projectors hitting the market. They can do 3D with active glasses, they don't have the RGB DLP imager alignment issues. Some of them actually are powered by laser lamp technology as well.
So where it may not be in homes today, it's coming fast and theaters have yet to move away from the world of 2k, which is substandard compared to good 35mm film projection.
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Daniel Schulz
Master Film Handler
Posts: 387
From: Los Angeles, CA USA
Registered: Sep 2003
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posted 12-23-2015 02:05 AM
quote: Tyler Purcell
Daniel, I was referring to the new UHD .h265 BluRay format and 4k monitoring devices at home. That new format is 10 bit 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 color space, unlike the prior 1080p 8 bit 4:2:0 format it replaces. So it's MUCH closer to DCP quality. Plus, BluRay already has 24 bit 192khz DTS and Dolby Digital 7.1 audio. There are very few theaters that rival my home theater audio quality wise.
There are also loads of brand new 25,000:1+ contrast ratio, 2500+ lumen, 7 seg color wheel, single 1.5" DLP 4k projectors hitting the market. They can do 3D with active glasses, they don't have the RGB DLP imager alignment issues. Some of them actually are powered by laser lamp technology as well.
The UHD Blu Ray standard is still 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, although it is going to 10-bit color. And the bitrate will max out around 128Mbs vs DCIs 250 Mbs. Although now that you mention it, I wonder how HEVC measures up against JPEG2K? Hmmm...
I don't deny that at the high end consumer projectors have gotten very, very good, and likewise home theater sound can be utterly amazing. But the percentage of home theaters with projectors at all is vanishingly small, and likewise the percentage of home theaters that have more than 2.0 sound is not huge. And even those with 5.1 or 7.1 can't play at anything close to reference without distorting or simply breaking. I think the existing DCI standards do an impressive job at presenting a theatrical experience in the cinemas that cannot be easily bested at home.
I do wish we could have anamorphic 4K projection (5K once unsqueezed) to truly differentiate the cinema experience though.
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Scott Norwood
Film God
Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 12-23-2015 07:34 AM
quote: Tyler Purcell
The sad part is, the only real change in 35mm since the late 50's has been audio.
I disagree. There have been many improvements in 35mm, and nearly all of them have been backwards-compatible with existing equipment: camera stocks, intermediate stocks, print stocks, camera and projection lenses, screens, and the brief return of dye-transfer printing in the late '90s.
We have lost a few things (dye-transfer printing (twice), really good B&W printing, magnetic sound), but, on balance, I think that the improvements have outweighted the losses.
And that doesn't count improvements on the production side, either (smaller and lighter cameras, computer-controlled animation stands and optical printers, etc.). The DI was (and is) a step backwards from photochemical printing, but the latter is still possible (and cheaper than a DI!).
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Alan Plester
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 209
From: great yarmouth england
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 12-23-2015 11:13 AM
Marco...ouch, we never had dolby,dts,, the company wouldn't install it, as for the other stuff you mention, of course we had our fair share, never could get replacement copies, not without trying though, my main point was, the cinema only lost one show when I was on in 20 yrs, sorry for any confusion, if there was any.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 12-23-2015 01:16 PM
quote: Daniel Schulz
But still, there is a *world* of difference between a DCI compliant projection system and any home theater setup. The pixel count between 2K digital cinema and 1080p home theater may be similar, but the digital cinema data rate, compression scheme and color space are all vastly superior to the home theater experience.
Not always. When the projected image on screen is soft or even warped that higher bit rate and deeper color depth is all but wasted. Meanwhile the Blu-ray image on the TV screen at home is perfectly sharp, even if it is more data compressed.
Fake 'scope in d-cinema, combined with all these wall-to-wall screens that letter-box the results, is just a huge problem for me. That makes d-cinema feel more like TV in public than anything. The movie industry either needs to fix that problem or they just need to stop cropping movies in 'scope format. It's insulting.
quote: Daniel Schulz
I don't deny that at the high end consumer projectors have gotten very, very good, and likewise home theater sound can be utterly amazing. But the percentage of home theaters with projectors at all is vanishingly small, and likewise the percentage of home theaters that have more than 2.0 sound is not huge. And even those with 5.1 or 7.1 can't play at anything close to reference without distorting or simply breaking. I think the existing DCI standards do an impressive job at presenting a theatrical experience in the cinemas that cannot be easily bested at home.
Surround sound has lost some of its novelty. I think the main reason it isn't in a lot more homes is because it's a pain in the ass to install. I wouldn't mind having a Dolby Atmos/DTS-X capable home theater setup, but I would not be looking forward to installing it. Nevertheless, the technology is there for home theater nuts who want it.
The bigger danger for movie theaters is the increasing sophistication of TV screens. Unlike surround sound, those things are going to proliferate everywhere. Current 4K UHDTV screens are already pretty impressive. The new breed of screens that support HDMI 2.0 and REC 2020 are going to be even more impressive. Meanwhile there's a lot of commercial cinema screens, including about 99% of IMAX-branded digital screens that are stuck at mere 2K. They're looking at having to spend a fortune to upgrade to things like laser projection and "HDR." The same kinds of things will be so much cheaper for consumers to acquire. It really isn't fair.
quote: Tyler Purcell
JPEG2000 is far superior then .h265 of course, mostly because it's a lossless intraframe codec. I have a feeling (knowing Sony) they'll have a "high band" version of UHD which is 10 bit 4:2:2 or even 4:4:4 sampling. .h265 is the first codec to allow that bit depth and chroma sampling in a streaming format. In a lot of ways it's good for the industry, but I'm also wary of how it will effect the cinema.
Comparing JPEG2000 and codecs like MPEG-4 AVC or H265 is like comparing apples to oranges. Both have their pros and cons.
First of all, JPEG2000 is not lossless at all. It is a data lossy system. Judging by the file sizes of some DCP's I've seen some movies have very lossy data compression applied to them. One 2-hour DCP would be more than 200GB while another is less than 60GB. Even a movie at 200GB is using some serious lossy compression levels. An uncompressed or lossless compressed master with 10-bit or 12-bit color is going to consume terabytes of hard drive space.
JPEG2000 compression is inefficient. Add to that some of the "rules" studios are supposed to follow when encoding movies. No intra-frame compression is allowed. Only so many transform blocks are allowed. A lot of the tools one has for authoring video for Blu-ray, TV broadcast, etc. are off limits.
I have some movies on Blu-ray where the feature is consuming pretty much all of a dual layer BD-50 disc. Saving Private Ryan and Minority Report are two examples that come to mind. Just how inferior is the video quality on those discs really going to be compared to some DCP with a JPEG2000 encoded feature only 60GB in size?
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Tyler Purcell
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 180
From: Van Nuys, CA
Registered: Dec 2015
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posted 12-23-2015 03:30 PM
JPEG2000 is considered a lossless codec by much of the industry. It CAN BE lossless at high bandwidth, but of course is not when presented at cinemas where bandwidth is a problem. JPEG is also intraframe meaning, the compression is based on single frames and not a group like a transport stream. You can't make JPEG2000 a transport stream, it's always basing its compression on individual frames, not variations on one frame like most MPEG systems.
Because JPEG is so good at representing the original media, it's the number one long-term archival format. Tiff formats like Cinema DNG and TARGA, are also good at doing this, but aren't as supported. Tiff sequences are also larger, JPEG is a more efficient codec. JPEG2000 isn't efficient at all, but it's good at what it does.
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