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Topic: "Chicken Little" Going Deep for Digital NYT article
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 09-30-2005 05:19 AM
quote:
For theater owners, it meant smaller savings, but improved quality. A movie could run for weeks - or indefinitely - without the scratches and other defects that become noticeable after as few as 10 screenings of a celluloid print.
I am as pro-new technology as the next guy and would gladly listen to any new ideas on how to make presentation better. But as soon as I hear dog-do like this spewing out of someone's mouth, that's where I stop listening. Print degradation after 10 screenings? What shithole screening room are they watching their stuff in?
Keep your booth, equipment and film clean (apply Film Guard --spareingly) and in good repair and hire people who know how to do the above and that's a much, much cheaper way to keep the film image prestine for hundreds even thousands of runs.
I believe the lengend goes that when MY FAIR LADY was playing in the Rialto in NYC, they had a back-up print in the booth so they could switch if and when there was any visible wear or in case of print damage to the show print. They ran this title in Roadshow for like two years and never had to use the back-up print.
THERE IS NOTHING INEVITABLE ABOUT PRINTS GETTING TRASHED. Prints don't come from the lab with scratches and gobs of dirt (most times). If they are being mutilated and contaminated with dirt in a booth, then when you stick a $150,000 video projector in the same booth with the same imbeciles, they will find a way to trash the new digital equipment -- you can take that to the bank.
As for 3D eyestrain, Dominic, you may be more sensitive than most to that descrepancy between the focal point and the virtual distance that 3D necessarily presents to the eye. I submit that experience shows that it is easily learned and accepted by most people. As Mark J. pointed out, we watched sometimes seven hours of dual strip 3D features a day for a week at the 3D Expo at the Egyptian. It was 3D about as perfect as I have ever seen and I heard that from everyone there. I never felt any eyestrain, even at the end of an exceptionally long day of screenings. There was not a hint of ghosting in that system and no eyestrain complaints from any of people in the audience that I spoke to, many of them cinema professionals. So even if in theory the brain is having a difficult time correlating the "cognitive incongruence," it doesn't cause eyestrain in the majority of people.
When you look at a 2D image, you are doing pretty much the same thing....your brain sees a single focal point but is "tricked" by perspective to accept the incongruity of distance beyond the focal point. The brain learns that no matter where your eyes focus, objects can be at other virtual planes, hence your "cognitive incongruence," but the brain is a fast learner and most people seem to "get it" fairly easily with no problem or eyestrain.
I did ask a doctor at the festival about eyestrain. This is the best I can paraphrase:
Eye strain comes when a 3D system is not aligned properly, as were many in the days of the '50s 3D releases; back then, whatever was in the booth in terms of lenses and projector placement was enlisted to produce two images that were not necessarily a perfect match. Lenses that were perfectly fine for change-over would not necessarily magnify both images to the exact amount; projectors that are mounted to satisfy the phsyical geometry of the booth might not be at perfect angles for perfect screen convergence. On the other hand, when the system is DESIGNED for proper double strip 3D projection as that week-long 3D festival was, the old 3D dual film system worked marvelously.
Eyestrain comes about when the muscles in the eye are asked to do things that they normally don't do, like one eye having to moving up and the other having moving down to converge slightly misaligned framing. That's a physical strain that causes pain, whereas the eyes can focus, i.e., converge, every easily at any point, except perhaps up to say 5 inches from the face. They do that all the time and it is painless. The muscles that focus the lenses of the eyes are not straining if they are focusing at an object (the screen) that they normally have no trouble focusing on. True, they are being asked to perform those natural actions in an unusual configuration, but nothing that they are incapable of doing in real life without strain.
Asking the brain to re-interpert focal points vs the convergance point isn't something physical that will cause discomfort; it's just something the brain has to learn to interpret, just like it does with perspective. Hence, 3D done properly will not cause pain, be it dual strip, or single strip or alternating frame video.
I think the 3D Expo had a very valuable side-effect in that it served as a kind of lab test with a good number of subjects that showed that it is not inevitable that 3D will cause eyestrain, even for extended periods.
[ 09-30-2005, 08:45 AM: Message edited by: Frank Angel ]
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