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Topic: 70 vs. DC starring Larry Myres
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Ramon Lamarca Marques
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 186
From: Edgware, England, UK
Registered: Feb 2006
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posted 02-19-2006 04:03 PM
quote: Stephen Furley
Sorry, but I must beg to differ with you. A release print is not an archival element, or, to put it another way, something which is not replacable should not be sent to cinemas and run through projectors
I am wrong, I should have not used the word archive. I should have used the word storage. It is good to have prints available and if they keep their colour and are properly handled the better. It is very expensive to ship prints from the US to Europe as you know, and so if there were more prints stored by the distributors, they could be shown more often. I am sure you remember the good double-bills repertoire cinemas used to screen in the past. If more prints were available and in good condition maybe it would be easier to show them more often.
quote: Stephen Furley
I have a few frames which spent several years on display with a fluorescent lamp behind them, and they have faded
Thank you for posting the samples, I could not find them, my computer is rubbish and it takes me ages to move from page to page. My parents keep 8mm from when I was born (39 years ago!) and the prints keep their colours intact! I wonder what system was used then in Europe. However, stills from the same time have lost their colour completely.
quote: Stephen Furley
A release print is not an archival element, and if you find yourself in a situation where that's all you have left, then you're in trouble, because it's not really suitable for duplicatig from, it was never intended for that purpose.
As I said, I apologise for wrongly using the word archive. I know that release prints are not suitable for duplicating. However, as you know, thank for all those release prints that have been preserved in good conditions, because sometimes this is the only element that has remained of some films.
quote: Thomas Jonsson
How about countries that do not speak English? Those who are
dubbing their films can use DTS. But the rest... I understand
subtitling a 70mm print is very expensive? I very much doubt any
Swedish distributor is willing to pay for 70mm prints and sub-
titling. They will figure how many 35mm prints they can get at
the same price as one 70mm print.
Lucky you, you live in a cultured country where films are not dubbed. I think that both Dolby and DTS have got subtitling systems to be projected onto the screen and so this avoids having to subtitle the print.
Talking about cultured people, I recently saw Memoirs of a Geisha (a film which could have benefit from dye transfer saturated colours and pitch blacks and also from 65mm and 70mm). The print I saw was rather bad and the cinema was a big home cinema, as it happens these days. As accurate as the film may be, the fact that all the characters speak in English put me completely off, it is what I call the Captain Corelli’s syndrome, the stupidity of American Film Makers of making everybody in the world speak English with different accents depending on their country of origin. We all have seen the silliness of seeing German officers in Second World War Films speaking in English with German accent, and saying some German words now and then!!!!
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Ramon Lamarca Marques
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 186
From: Edgware, England, UK
Registered: Feb 2006
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posted 02-20-2006 06:09 AM
Just to recap a bit.
It looks like everybody in this forum like the film medium.
I personally think this is not just a technical issue, it is also an artistic issue. My point being once again the comparison between oil on canvas and watercolour; painters would never consider the difference between the two textures as just a technical issue, whereas people in the film industry wants us to believe that digital and film is just a technological difference, not artistic.
Directors of photography, obviously, also have film in very good regard and would like to use 65mm negative. Digital, so far, has not got the capacity to capture images as good as 65mm negative can. However, it seems pointless to me, as it has been said before, to film in 65mm to then get the film into the digital domain, especially at a lowest resolution than 65mm offers.
The main problem seems to be the creation of a digital intermediate for postproduction purposes. I do not know about the postproduction process but I wonder if it would be possible to create a digital intermediate for editing but once the film was completely edited, cut the positive manually to avoid loosing any quality and not to lose the film feel. Perhaps the sequences with digital effects (if any) could be scanned at the highest resolution and just print out from digital intermediate these sequences. I wonder if the colour grading, if using dye transfer, could be done through computers controlling the dyes and hence being able to do the colour grading from the colour separations instead of having to print from digital. As I said, I have got no idea on postproduction techniques and what I am saying may be nonsense. The idea would be to keep the film quality as much as possible. Also, as Stephen has mentioned and I am also aware of, dye transfer can give different looks, not only the colour saturated with pitch blacks.
We are talking about the directors of photography tools and they are the best suited to talk about it. I believe we could write a letter (another one!!!) to the directors of photography guild. It would be interesting to find out their opinion about the use of 65mm photography in films who can make good use of its advantages, printed on 70mm, avoiding digital intermediate as much as possible, and what would they think, if it was possible, to use the advantages of dye transfer printing for colour grading. Also to ask them about the possibilities of using wide angle lenses, like D-150 for some shots to enhance the film and make it different from other visual mediums.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 02-20-2006 11:01 AM
quote: Steve Guttag
35mm is going to go away as a distribution medium much faster than most people here wish to think.
The transition is already underway in a good number of places. The Carmike location in my town will have all its 35mm projectors replaced with 2K Christie units by the end of 2007, if not sooner. I expect other circuits to announce full circuit-wide D-Cinema conversions soon (if some others haven't already made such announcements).
quote: Ramon Lamarca Marques
I personally think this is not just a technical issue, it is also an artistic issue.
I happen to think it's mainly a money issue. Video is faster and cheaper. It can be less expensive to videotape a movie rather than film it. Certainly speeding up production is a big advantage. It usually costs more to film a movie on 35mm and distribute thousands of 35mm prints.
As far as artistic differences go, I hardly think there's little art involved on the video end -at least as long as the digital proponents continue to try to make the video they shoot look like film. If video is so great then why not embrace the video look fully? I've seen multimedia exhibits at major art museums that used video footage and didn't try to make it pretend to look like film. There are some storylines where the video look might have a more immediate, documentary-like feel to it.
quote: Ramon Lamarca Marques
However, it seems pointless to me, as it has been said before, to film in 65mm to then get the film into the digital domain, especially at a lowest resolution than 65mm offers.
It's pointless to shoot a movie in 65mm if you only want it to play on current video projection gear and don't care about how it will work on future formats. In the decades to come there will certainly be formats that far exceed the pixel counts of any video formats today. The one constant in all digital technology is change.
If I spend $100 million or $200 million on a major movie production, I would want to shoot it on film in the best formats my budget would allow. I certainly would not want people immediately channel surfing past the movie because it had an unacceptably soft, low resolution image. Many people skip across black and white movies or old movies on cable for this reason. Many avoid buying or renting DVDs of older movies because they look old. Shooting movies on film in larger formats (like VistaVision for 1.85:1 stuff and 65mm for super widescreen material) would enable the show to gracefully transfer to just about any new video format for decades to come.
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Brian Guckian
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 594
From: Dublin, Ireland
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 02-20-2006 03:27 PM
Go for it, Michael!
This is an awesome thread, with incredible contributions, whether positive or negative.
Just to clarify, when I mentioned the possibility of releasing in both 5/70 and 15/70 in NO WAY did I wish to imply the frame would be cropped in 15/70. The image would obviously have to be letterboxed if projected in the latter format.
On post-production matters, there is a way to intelligently cut digitally but still keep in touch with the film texture. Good productions these days have both a non-linear (digital) editing cutting room AND a parallel film cutting room. When a viewable cut is reached, prints of the selected material are ordered up and film editors conform these to create a film workprint for critical viewing.
For sure, many productions are now doing all this via HD, and also printed rushes / dailies have long been in decline. But over here anyway, quality productions are still with film when they get to the later stages of post.
DI is great where SFX have to be carefully integrated into the finished work. But it should ideally be used very carefully, and with knowledge of its limitations. It can certainly get away from the "truth" of the film image if used unnecessarily.
Could existing lab equipment currently used to make IMAX prints be modified to make 5/70 dye transfer prints? Costly though that may be, it may be an awful lot less expensive than having to build plant from scratch.
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