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Author Topic: Lack of Concern for DLP? Paul Konen Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 981 From: Frisco, TX. (North of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 07-06-2003 11:17 PM                     To answer John, DLP House seats 563 The following are placements for the film prints. Tue 266 (DTS), 563 (SRD) and 266 (SRD) Wed, Thu and Fri 266 (DTS), 242 (DTS) and 266 (SRD) T3 was moved out 1/2 way through Wed b/c LB2 was out performing T3.  |  IP: Logged Thomas Procyk Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1842 From: Royal Palm Beach, FL, USA Registered: Feb 2002 posted 07-07-2003 01:48 AM                     Pirates of the Car-rib-be-an (Care-Ib-Bee-Ann?) is also playing in DLP at the AMC Pleasure Island 24 in Downtown Disney. (of course) They'll probably pull Nemo out of there. The DLP house at the AMC is not their biggest. The largest house has a balcony on the second level, SRD and SDDS. But... it sounded more "stage-like" than "movie-like" in there; strage acoustics. The DLP house is THX certified. =TMP=  |  IP: Logged John Pytlak Film God Posts: 9987 From: Rochester, NY 14650-1922 Registered: Jan 2000 posted 07-07-2003 08:49 AM                        Thanks, Paul. As I expected, there is likely some correlation with the auditorium/screen size as well, so the higher numbers can't all be credited to digital presentation. For a picture like T3, I would normally seek out the largest screen. And once upon a time, the 70mm print.  |  IP: Logged Scott Jentsch Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1061 From: New Berlin, WI, USA Registered: Apr 2003 posted 07-07-2003 01:05 PM                        It's very difficult for the audience to find the "largest" screen that a movie is playing in out of multiple screens at a single location. Lacking special promotions in the newspaper, or THX/digital sound presentation indicators in the paper or online, it's very difficult to do. I've traveled from Milwaukee to the Chicago suburbs twice to see a movie in DLP, and I would definitely pass up a movie playing with film for the same movie playing in an equivalent screen in DLP. While I will allow for the fact that DLP may not exceed the best film presentation, there are very few instances of "best" film presentations in my experience. Using the limited sampling I have for comparison, I would wager that a very good presentation would be more possible with DLP than with film. No bad splices, no out-of-sync errors due to bad film tension or poor emitters, and especially none of that irritating film jitter that seems to be a hallmark of presentations in this area. If anything, the numbers posted debunks the idea that DLP is worse than film. If people really thought that DLP was a lesser quality presentation, they would stay away from the DLP shows. Think what you want about the intelligence of the average movie-goer and how that relates to the best quality presentation, the DLP presentations were earning more money per screen than the film presentations.  |  IP: Logged John Pytlak Film God Posts: 9987 From: Rochester, NY 14650-1922 Registered: Jan 2000 posted 07-07-2003 01:28 PM                        As I've noted here before, I've had my share of "Digital Done Wrong" too, even to the point of the show having to be shut down and going to the film back-up, with nearly a week needed to get the "Miranda unit" repaired. See the post on "Digital Hiccups": Digital Cinema Hiccups?  |  IP: Logged Darryl Spicer Film God Posts: 3250 From: Lexington, KY, USA Registered: Dec 2000 posted 07-07-2003 07:04 PM                    yeah but when it comes to advertisments you don't have them putting see it in the wonderful film done right splender of 35 mm prints. Lets see how well DLP would do if you didn't put the big word DIGITAL in the ads and just rely on word of mouth. Nobody will say anything because they probably wouldn't know the difference. It's that word DIGITAL that puts oh this must be better in peoples minds. That does not always mean it is better.  |  IP: Logged Paul Konen Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 981 From: Frisco, TX. (North of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 07-08-2003 09:40 AM                     I am going to add one final thing about T3 advertising. After looking at the newspaper on Sunday, the only DLP advertising was in the Cinemark ad for our theatre that had the DLP showtimes listed separately. The co-op ad had no special mention of Digital Presentation. However, Pirates and Nemo both do. To be fair, I will try to post numbers for Pirates around Sat.  |  IP: Logged Scott Jentsch Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1061 From: New Berlin, WI, USA Registered: Apr 2003 posted 07-08-2003 10:25 AM                        quote: Lets see how well DLP would do if you didn't put the big word DIGITAL in the ads and just rely on word of mouth. Nobody will say anything because they probably wouldn't know the difference. It's that word DIGITAL that puts oh this must be better in peoples minds. That does not always mean it is better. That's the kicker, though. Marketing should improve attendance, that's the reason marketing exists. In my experience, I would never want to put money into marketing the "quality" of a 35mm presentation. Personally, I've never been wowed by any 35mm show I've seen. What has wowed me has been 70mm shows of Far and Away, Cliffhanger, and Ben-Hur, a Cinerama presentation of How the West Was Won, and Star Wars Ep 2 in DLP. For each of these presentations, I had to seek them out, and without the marketing that accompanied them, I would not have found them very easily. I would imagine that a theater can screw up a DLP presentation just as well as they can a film presentation, some things just can't be accounted for. Back when Dolby Digital first came into the market, it took upwards of 1-2 years for some of the theaters around here to figure out how to splice a film so that every reel change didn't make the SR-D dropout. The $150k cost of installation is hideously expensive, and I can understand why a theater wouldn't want to dig deep and take the plunge. But to dismiss it altogether just because it is expensive and the quality may not meet the best 35mm presentation possible, that's a little shortsighted IMHO. I see tremendous possibilities with digital projection, and after some of the technical and logistical kinks are worked out (this is new technology after all) and the price of installation comes down, I think theaters will wonder what in the world took them so long to embrace it. What the theater industry needs is the equivalent of Mark Cuban. Someone with a vision for what is possible and the money to realize that vision. Take a 10-20 screen location and convert it to all-digital. Then demand digital prints for every film. To fill in some slow times or poorly attended films (how many sell-outs do you have on a Tuesday night?), show football games and other sporting events, as well as older films that would be of interest. Events like the recent Beyonce Knowles concert are an example of the flexibility that can be enjoyed by having a digital installation. Plus you could show any mixture of films in any screen, since they would all be networked together. Theaters would be limited more by contract and licensing restraints than by technical limitations. Family films do better during the day, and PG-13 and R do better at night? No problem, shuffle them out of your big screens for evening shows. The latest hyped film fell flat and you've got it in your largest screen? Move it to the next largest one that fits your capacity estimates. Maybe I'm just being naive, but there are so many possibilities that digital presentation provides to a theater, I'm surprised that more aren't embracing it at least in an experimental stage. IMHO, any chain that has well over 400 screens in over 40 locations can surely afford one DLP unit to play with. Both DLP presentations I attended were of better quality than most film presentations I've seen, and many of the annoying artifacts of film were gone. My experience with DLP is limited, but I've seen enough to get excited about its potential. I'm just disappointed that, in order to see a DLP presentation, I have to travel almost two hours to do so.  |  IP: Logged John Pytlak Film God Posts: 9987 From: Rochester, NY 14650-1922 Registered: Jan 2000 posted 07-08-2003 11:01 AM                        quote: My experience with DLP is limited, but I've seen enough to get excited about its potential. Many in the movie industry (including Kodak!) are excited about the POTENTIAL of Digital Cinema. Remember, DLP-Cinema is only one of the possible technologies that can be used, so please don't use it as a generic term for Digital Cinema. Also, many other technologies (digital mastering, color management, compression, encryption, storage, networking, service, etc.) are needed for a practical Digital Cinema Operating SYSTEM: http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/digital/system.shtml  |  IP: Logged Paul Konen Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 981 From: Frisco, TX. (North of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 07-08-2003 02:05 PM                     Scott, alot of what you said about maximizing attendance is already done today. I will move films around to do exactly what you said. Make the film schedule such that you switch kid / adult shows in your big houses. From what I heard, the Beyonce concert had poor attendance. I don't recall seeing any print ads or radio ads in the Dallas area. A third party company is working with my theatre to deliver alternative content via Fiber. They have demonstrated that it can be done and projected both live and video content in 720p HD. Yes, marketing has a lot to do with anything, however the coop ad for T3 in Dallas pratically says "DIGITAL" next to all locations meaning Digital sound, not projection. I will provide pics, or maybe someone else in Dallas, that show how DLP is advertised in the paper. More Digital content is coming. It costs the studio a fair amount of money to do the digital scanning, color correction, mastering to D5 tape, and whatever else they have to do before the technology provider, that is being used, gets to put their hands on it. Then they have to convert to their format, QC, make copies, distribute, and whatever else they have to do also.  |  IP: Logged Daryl C. W. O'Shea Film God Posts: 3977 From: Midland Ontario Canada (where Panavision & IMAX lenses come from) Registered: Jun 2002 posted 07-08-2003 02:14 PM                        Like Paul said, most of us move prints between houses if we believe that there is the potential that a smaller house might sell out while a larger one sits nearly empty. The best thing about running film is that I can pick up a print and move it from one end of the booth to the other at least 20x faster than I could move a digital feature over ethernet from one server to another. quote: I see tremendous possibilities with digital projection, and after some of the technical and logistical kinks are worked out (this is new technology after all) and the price of installation comes down, I think theaters will wonder what in the world took them so long to embrace it. They'll know why. They were waiting for the technical and logistical kinks to be worked out and the price to come down. That and they're still waiting for the quality to come up. Maybe it's just the magnetism up here, but the quality of current digital cinema systems is at best on par with the average 35mm presentations around 'here'.  |  IP: Logged Lyle Romer Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1400 From: Davie, FL, USA Registered: May 2002 posted 07-08-2003 10:36 PM                     Scott, Logistics are much more important than technology when it comes to day/night film switches. Moving a print doesn't take long at all. What does take long is setting up the show schedule so that the two films you want to switch (usually a 90 minute G or PG film and a 120 minute R rated film) end at approximately the same time so that you can get the people into the auditorium. I used to manage at a theatre that had two, 290 seat auditoriums and six with 160 seats. There were many times we wanted to switch and the times were just to kooky to do it (trying to schedule maximum showings AND be able to switch with enough time between shows). It didn't matter if we had film, digital or a live performance, it wasn't going to happen. Slightly off topic but I just wanted to point out that technology isn't the be-all end-all to everything. BTW, if we don't wait for higher resolution d-cinema, the theatre owners will be wondering why people in the front part of the auditorium try to climb the screen during the opening titles, then they'll realize that the people think there's a staircase!  |  IP: Logged Paul Konen Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 981 From: Frisco, TX. (North of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 07-09-2003 10:03 AM                     Here are the ads. (Please no comments about the quality, my batteries were low, so I rushed to get this out. Plus, working in close up mode it's hard to hold the camera steady) Co-Op ad of Terminator 3 (Notice the word Digital next to most theatres)People who didn't know better have called and wanted to know if this meant it was being shown on DLP. We let them know it means digital sound. Co-Op ad of Pirates Of The Caribbean Theatre Ad  |  IP: Logged Paul Konen Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 981 From: Frisco, TX. (North of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 07-21-2003 09:08 AM                     Because I said I would publish seat counts for Pirates, here it is. The DLP and Print A were in equal size (563) houses. 7/9 DLP - 1729 A - 1014 B - 724 7/10 DLP - 1270 A - 644 B - 566 7/11 DLP - 1738 A - 898 B - 701 7/12 DLP - 2075 A - 1479 B - 910 7/13 DLP - 1933 A - 1249 B - 825 7/14, 15, 16 and 17. DLP outperformed the film prints.  |  IP: Logged Joe Redifer You need a beating today Posts: 12859 From: Denver, Colorado Registered: May 99 posted 07-21-2003 09:17 AM                        Thus proving that DLP is BETTER than film!  |  IP: Logged

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