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Topic: I'm curious to know why many on Film-Tech seem to be so negative on digital cinema
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Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster
Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 08-06-2008 04:14 PM
All I can say is that you're all invited to come here to see "Digital Done Right". The Rocky Mountain Show is being held here in SLC in September! I will personally take any of you over to either Megaplex Gateway... just 5 min from the show or even to the local Carmike about 15 min away. See of any of you see any of the problems you mention here... I really think you'd agree with me that what you'd see is dam good. I would hardly consider myself Mr. Film-Tech Digital... over 80% of my work is still in film which I also still like beter. I do like digital alot, mainly because of the stupid people mess it'll clean up as it happens around my area.
We are getting more digital screens here in SLC as I speak. 32 to be exact at last count. The Century 16 location and the Tinseltown in Layton just north of SLC both are Cinemark locations, it'll be interesting to see how those fare. We will be upto well over 100 digital screens in this area in just another week or so.
Speaking of the Director hating digital the Cinemtographer hates absolutely anything to do with anything digital!! Seems strange to me that he would be associated with a film that has a digital intermediate and an Imax DMR version. I guess folks will do anythng for the $$ though. It was interesting that when Speilberg, the die hard film guy, was shown clips of the last Indy film he agreed it looked good and gave his blessing for it to be shown digitally...
Edit: quote: Mark J. Marshall
If #2 happens, which is what Louis is suggesting, then there would be absolutely NO black between the frames at all like there is with the shutter in the 35mm film projector, which would indicate even MORE light hitting the screen, which even further makes my point that the lack of the mechanical shutter in the DLP projector blocking the light 48 times in a second (like the one in a film projector) is one of the things that makes the DLP image brighter on the screen than the film image, even with in some cases a lower wattage bulb.
Actually Mark... DLP is supposed to be 14 foot lamberts so it is not necessarily brighter... certainly brighter than many cinemas though. It is also NOT more efficient! Too much brightness washes out the blacks. It is absolutely necessary to properly calibrate the light-loc on any projector that is so equipped, yea those wonderful BARCO's still have that as a 2 grand option so many BARCO's are not equipped with it! Lamp-Loc allows tracking of the current based on the lumens comming down the pipeline(literally) in the projector. This keeps the screen at a constant brightness through out the lamps life and will automatically raise the current to the maximum specified for a particuluar lamp. If when a lamp is changed the hours are not reset its certainly possible that a brand new lamp could run at too high of current producing too much light on the screen.
How does it work exactly....? Thats a good question that only T.I. actually knows. There is much of the science of DLP that they will not divulge. I think Louis's #2 touches on how it works but rememmber that the formats are compressed so there is much more to it then just the vibrating mirrors. However the vibrating mirrors are still from my point of view acting as tiny shutters themselves.
Mark
[ 08-06-2008, 07:21 PM: Message edited by: Mark Gulbrandsen ]
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Brian Guckian
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 594
From: Dublin, Ireland
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 10-02-2008 05:30 PM
I want to chime in here after seeing (some) of Tropic Thunder a few days ago in 2K DLP at a local multiplex.
They weren't advertising the show as being in digital so I wasn't "pre-biased", and when it started I made a real effort to watch the film totally neutrally.
What got me - and this is now the third time I've seen this with 2K DLP with DCI-grade material - is how the blacks just collapse in dark / night-time scenes. The technology simply cannot capture the tonal subtleties and one is left with giant golf ball-size digital "grain" in the blacks. And it is a "grain" obviously with a regular grid-based structure so it is very distracting and unnatural.
The daylight material was much better, but at times the skintones were flat and unnatural - again, a reflection of the inability presumably to sample the full tonal range.
(Regrettably, try as I might, I just couldn't sit through it, and left after half an hour - nothing to do with the film which was enjoyably OTT).
And it's not an issue with the nature or quality of the installations - I saw 2K DLP at another Dublin site with the same issues on different material off different equipment, and in a site in the UK earlier this year, and again with different material and equipment.
All sites have top-of-the-line DCI-compliant installs, and all were running film material mastered for 2K. We're not talking 1.3K etc.
What we're also now seeing is that digital projectors open a Pandora's Box as they act as gateways for low-grade image formats never designed for large-screen projection, like SD-DVD, etc. Anecdotally I recently learned how at one (non-commercial) location the projectionists and manager are now frequently forced to run DVDs for special shows, in lieu of 35mm prints, now they have a digital projector installed.
What seems to be happening is a genuine diminution of cinema presentation quality and it's very serious for people who care about the art and craft of cinema. This may explain the reluctance of some directors and cinematographers to endorse digital, as Mark has referred to above.
It's also disingenuous to claim that the general movie-going public "don't care". They should care!
Another easily-challenged contention is that 35mm release prints are "worse" than 2K DLP. They aren't - at least over here, where prints are struck in the UK. Over the summer I worked at a cinema where we must have run over 50 different titles; the only bad print we had was one of Lars and the Real Girl which had inherent jump (no replacement was made available). Across the board, print quality was superb.
BTW John Bailey ASC had a quite critical article on the topic of all things digital in the June 2008 issue of American Cinematographer - it's worth checking out.
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 10-03-2008 02:47 AM
Very well put, Brian.
I think the pattern that we are seeing in this thread is that most people who have devoted their careers and passion to motion picture exhibition aren't negative about digital, but about what kind of digital. Way back when (first Jurassic Park II), when it was being shown in 1.3k digital, I was emphatic about how much it looked like dog turds....and even that minus any detail. If they had "rolled out" digital and it looked like 70mm, I KNOW I would have been praising the technology louder than Mark. But it didn't; it didn't even look like mediocre 35mm. In a word, it looked awful and anyone who tells you it looked better than film were either delusional or worked for TI and planned on making a bundle on it or Lucas, who was both. This planted the seed of our discontent.
Somewhere in these threads years ago I said, if they told me there was a technology that would let me present LAWRENCE OF ARABIA to my audiences the way I experienced it in 70mm when I was but a youth, and they said they could duplicate that experience, I wouldn't care if they did it with a contraption that used subzero nitrogen and super conductors; I would be thrilled and I would would embrace it. My love isn't the technology; it's the presentation --I have no allegiance to any particular technology. I want to use the one that achieves the objective the best (and I want to be able to afford it, which isn't a minor issue).
To those of us in the art house end of the exhibition especially, you can see how a technology that comes along which clearly can't deliver the quality that's gone before would be looked on with suspicion. ESPECIALLY if that technology isn't content simply coexisting along side the older systems that CAN recreate the experience for classic films, but rather seems hellbent on replacing and dismantling the older. It's quite possible that installing this level of digital quality could mean that very VERY few individuals in future generations will be able to see certain classic films with the impact that we experienced when we saw them. I think THAT is why there is negativity and resistance.....not to the concept of digital, but to the execution and how it is seems to be embraced by the industry while they ignore the shortcomings.
For those of us who know what 70mm and even EK Showprints looked like and to realize that from here on out, THIS lesser quality is what were are going to be stuck with and people are saying it's good enough for just because it's expedient to do so.....that's pretty troubling to say the least. We are not going to be locked into it 2K digital because digital can't be any better, but because once it's installed it will become too heavy a financial burden to replace it down the line should better versions be discovered. Exhibition won't be willing to buy into any newer technology, no matter how good it is, while they are still reeling from this conversion. They will be sick with roll-out fatague. A newer 8K digital, just as an example, would be seen as just another economic plank for the industry to walk. Exhibition will be finished with it after 2K.
Way back in the 1.3K days, big wigs in the industry were saying that 1.3K it was BETTER than film and film would be gone in 5 years or sooner. And my all my exhibitor and tech friends could say was, they are either blind or are going to make money on it. It was like Orwellian "NewSpeak" and DoubleThink, where you are looking at black and the mob is saying they see white -- the Emperor's new cloths syndrome. 1.3k looked like crap and anyone even marginally objective knew it. Yet the head of Disney, maybe at that time he was a VP or something, he was making defensive statements way back then once it was clear lots of clear-headed people were very disappointed in digital. You started hearing people saying that digital was nowhere near ready, but Cook was dismissing those opinions and saying that he thought digital was good enough "right now"....at 1.3K!! So from the get-go there was a lot of self-interest BS coming from those who had a vested interest in digital. And that kind of nonsense was transparant and got lots of us frustrated.
Imagine if we had gotten stuck with 1.3k in huge rollouts back then. THAT's the level of mediocrity we would be stuck with today. Same with 2K, I fear.
Much hasn't changed. Digital today isn't bringing us anything BETTER than film on the screen -- it brings convenience and reduced cost for the studios -- but the best it can do on the screen is matching 35mm. And those of us who would like to see a technology that would ADVANCE image quality, not have it stand still or go a few steps backward (certainly it's not beyond 70mm), know that the more 2K projectors get installed, the harder and harder it will be for us to move past that level.
I have nothing at all against digital, other than it may lock us into a level of presentation quality that is questionable AND which is being evaluated on equipment that for all intents an purposes, is new out of the box. How will the image quality fair after these components have been running for a decade...even less? No; it's not digital per se that generates the negatives, it's the fact that because of its economic model, it has the potential to just stagnate at this point, not with technology that goes beyond what film can do, but with technology that hovers around the "good enough" mark. No one stands up and cheers for "good enough" except the guys getting rich off the sales. Just like no one cheers handing over 700 BILLION dollars to bankrupt financial institutions except the guys who will be carting off money in wheel barrels to Swiss banks (sorry, couldn't resist).
[ 10-03-2008, 10:16 AM: Message edited by: Frank Angel ]
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