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Topic: More d-cinema morons
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 02-19-2004 08:18 PM
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Right now, they are at the theatre enjoying a DLP show, seeing a movie that is bright, colorful, clear, sharp, and involving. What they are NOT doing is sitting there counting rows and columns of pixels or estimating the color depth, because, at the end of the day, they couldn’t care less
All the more reason for theaters not to invest in D-Cinema. If the audience doesn't care about the differences then 35mm is good enough.
quote:
But saying that the current resolution standard will mean the death of the industry is like going into a sold-out D-Cinema screening and insisting that there is really no-one there at all.
I believe mass adoption of digital projection in its current state would do great harm to the exhibition industry. I'll repeat, you have the impossible-to-support cost model: giant cost, little if any return on investment.
Exhibitors are still hurting financially. They cannot afford $200,000 per screen, yet the distributors expect them to foot the bill for the hardware. The distributors are very foggy about improving percentages for exhibitors that do buy into digital projection. Film distributors are steadily shrinking the window between theatrical release and DVD release, which hurts the theaters further. You admit audiences are apathetic and/or unknowledgeable about the differences between film and video projection. So it all adds up as one very bad investment for any commercial movie theater at this point.
Even if the theaters could afford it you still can't get away from the marketing problem. More and more people I know are buying HDTV systems. Every single one of those people compare their new system to what is offered in a commercial theater. They all talk about how they will visit commercial theaters less often. HDTV is still a pricey high end item. But it will be commonplace and a lot more affordable before the end of the decade. When it comes to digital technology it is very easy to do numbers to numbers comparisons. It is not so easy when you have the movie on a different, analog medium like film.
Mark, you mention premiere-class theaters like the Ziegfeld, perhaps maybe to brag. I've watched lots of movies there when I lived in New York and seen movies at other truly great theaters like the sadly lost GCC Northpark #1 in Dallas. As great as you think DLP may be in such a house, I watch such fare with a hollow feeling. The thing that really needs to be shown in a true movie palace is 70mm. When you see a movie that was filmed in 70mm and shown in a first rate theater then you have seen the very best technology that cinema has to offer.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 02-20-2004 01:19 PM
I would like to see film productions that use digital intermediate go to a 4K or even 6K standard. But it seems to be impossible to get them to go above the "its good enough" 2K standard.
The shrinking release window between theatrical and home video release just makes it harder to get above the 2K standard. The studios seem to care less and less about the theatrical venue and simply want to get to the better money in the sell-through-DVD market faster. With digital projection systems not striving to surpass the 2K standard, that just makes things like 4K more difficult to sell.
Computing technology has matured to the point where 4K is feasible. The computers are fast enough to render to it, and there are better ways to store all the data. There are even monitors out there (such as this 9.2 million pixel Viewsonic model) that can show all the detail. Still, the powers that be think 2K is good enough.
Regarding the new 2K DLP chips from TI, I'd like to know specifically which theaters are upgrading to them. For now, the bulk of DLP installations is of the older 1280 X 1024 standard.
About HDTV versus D-Cinema differences, I don't think people are going to care about, much less understand, differences in color bit depth. But they can count pixels. Again, home theater products have a rapid improvement cycle. Right now you can't buy a plasma screen TV with true 1920 X 1080 resolution (yet you can buy flat screen computer monitors that show much more than that for some odd reason). Such monitors will be commonplace before the end of the decade. The home theater market can improve through product generations at a rate faster than commercial cinema will sustain.
Just look at the sound format comparison. There's lots of people who believe home theater audio is superior to that of commercial theaters based on a number of things. The audio bitrates for DD and DTS are higher in the home versions, particularly for D-VHS (DD runs at 576kb/s or even 640kb/s and DTS is showing up at "full" 1509kb/s). DTS' 6.1 Discrete format is exclusive to the home format, and I don't think DTS has made any moves yet to supply 6.1 Discrete or better tracks to their new XD-10 processor even though it can support it. Finally, you have the DVD-Audio and SACD multichannel formats. Because of all that stuff commercial theaters really can't market themselves based on offering surround sound anymore. Ten years ago it was a big deal for a commercial theater to show something in Dolby Digital or DTS. Outside of New York and Los Angeles, you're not going to find many movie ads denoting sound format information anymore.
I think this is the direction we'll head if 35mm projectors are replaced anytime soon by D-Cinema systems. People won't care if the theater blew $200,000 per screen to install it. To them it won't look any better than the HD systems they'll have in their homes. Movie theaters will have to work hard in other areas to set themselves apart from the home experience. In fact, the theater companies really need to be working in this direction very hard already. Aside from special venue theaters, bars, restaurants, etc., I'm not sure what else they can do. Super fuzzy comfy "love seats"?
IMHO, I think there is a special aspect to watching a movie projected from a real strip of film. If everything goes to video projection, I'm just going to feel like I am watching a big TV.
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Ian Price
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1714
From: Denver, CO
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 02-20-2004 03:00 PM
I've seen two films at 2K, Finding Nemo, which didn’t count, and Love Actually that looked very good. I would be perfectly ok with buying a ticket for and watching D-Cinema at 2K in a cinema. The room I saw it in sat 2,000 people and had a 40' wide screen for scope, Love Actually was presented in 1.85:1. I know 2K isn't the resolution of 35mm film but it is highly watchable. The picture is sharp, bright and steady. My color differentiation isn't good enough to tell the difference between film and video. The black level was good enough but I would have to watch Blade Runner or Alien to be sure. I know 4K would be better, but TI isn't making 4K chips, they are barely making 2K chips right now.
I'm a theatre owner, what I'm not ok with is paying for D-Cinema with no guarantee of a return on investment.
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Brian Guckian
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 594
From: Dublin, Ireland
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 02-20-2004 08:25 PM
I thought the studios were pushing hard for 4K.
In any case, as people have mentioned previously, resolution is not the only determinant in the perceived clarity of the digital image - as we know the contrast ratio is equally important.
Pushing the contrast ratio up - e.g. in the TI case by using the "dark chips" has yielded significant image quality improvements without having to increase the resolution.
If I can throw my 2 cents worth into the debate, I think the opposition between film and digital is a false and unhelpful one. From looking at demos, digital seems to be a middle way between the hard realism of analogue video and the emotional "truth" of film. Like the artist's palette...with oils, watercolours, acrylics and so on - a useful analogy.
Hence digital is another medium, operating alongside film, as it too continues - this must be the way forward.
Going back to Leo's comments near the top of the thread, the enrollment of the arthouse cinema community (over here at least) into this false opposition that digital is "replacing" film is indeed tragic, and I see the impact of this all the time now. Whilst the focus is on the "digital future", festivals and many art venues (not all of course) continue to damage prints, show films with incorrect lenses and plates, cut out service calls and neglect the day-to-day stuff whilst waiting for this promised revolution to happen. It's being used as an excuse to avoid dealing with the here and now!
Which is all the more reason why we are redoubling our efforts here to provide more FILM training, resources and information ![[thumbsup]](graemlins/thumbsup.gif)
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