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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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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!
Posts: 12814
From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 07-29-2008 06:57 AM
Setting up 4 2K projectors into a 4K array is definitely doable from a technology standpoint. The cost is what would kill the idea for now in mainstream markets. In order to edge blend you would want oversized chips (beyond 1080 and 2048) to allow for the blending and retain all of the resolution.
From a capture technology...progressively higher digital resolutions will continue. People always want more detail...especially when they want to magnify things. The problem with projection technology is how many people want higher resolution projectors plus the cost of making those projectors.
So Mark....have you ever sold a Kinoton "E" series projector? Are you just making up the prices? Typically, the increase in price is on the order of less than $6K street price.
To say that light improvement on the order of 20% is not significant shows you don't pay a theatre's electric bill. Ask any exhibitor what their monthly electric bill is and what the return on investment would be if they could drop it (or at least the booth portion) by 20% would be. I guarantee that before the theatre closes, the savings in electric alone (not to mention the potential reduction in actual lamp size) would have more than paid for itself.
A 4-5 times steadiness improvement (from previous "E" versions) is also rather significant...we are not talking about 4-5% but 4 to 5 times! That is a benefit that even the layperson can see as it actually increases projectable resolution.
It is amazing how dismissive of the shortcomings of digital projection you are. It is one of the things that "angers" people, which I guess you know.
DLP doesn't come close to film contrast ratio? Never mind, says you, after all, theaters suck anyway so you won't be able to see the difference! The same goes for resolution.
Color is probably a more esoteric concept for many. In fact, lots of people prefer wrong colors! Then again, while film definity has a larger color space...DLP is more uniform from machine to machine since they may be easily calibrated. Film often changes from reel to reel...particularly in release prints. See...I have no problem acknowledging films short comings...it has them. Digital, for the moment, has more.
As for TI guys laughing....big deal...many more people laugh at your posts in the last few years and I bet it doesn't affect you one bit either. But just what are people who work for TI supposed to say or think? They have to think and believe that what they are doing is great and will continue to be so. You seriously ask the wrong people about things. They have a vested intrest in the success of DLP, they are the wrong source to find any truthful information on its status. How many people that go to traffic court "didn't do it?"
Did you look at TI's last quarterly report? Below expectations.
Steve
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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!
Posts: 12814
From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 07-29-2008 11:31 AM
quote: Mark Gulbrandsen
Exactly! On the exhibition side the improvement is meaningless. Theater owners and especially the large chains don't give a hoot about it and today's typical release print doesn't justify the extra 4 to 5 times steadiness. Whats the point in the extra steadiness when 95% of the the prints are manufactured with so much unsteadiness and no more equivelent resolution then a DLP projector can muster out? Oh, I guess it's for those one or two good looking prints a year thet the labs can muster out, uually Disney stuff. Now for a screening room situation for critical viewing thats a fine machine but otherwise to most exhibitors its like throwing money in the campfire... and they could better use the money to make themselves money in other areas where they actually do make a profit. And hey, a P-35GP's image quality still exceeds almost all release prints manufactured today.. A Simplex might also still be able to do that. And what if you have a servo motor failure my friend... then you may as well be paying the equivelent of a new light engine for a DLP projector... oops, a new light engine is actually considerably less expesive according to a servo motor price Larry Shaw posted in these pages a few years back! So very defnately the Kinoton E series makes absolutely zero sense for daily exhibition. If you've sold some to theaters that use them daily I have to wonder what your customers think they are actually gaining . The typical theater isn't going to gain anything by running shorter life 1600 watt lamps.
Mark, you've lost it....you just don't know what you are talking about anymore...it is like DLP has just blinded you.
Power reduction is power reduction. Image improvement is image improvement. Most recently, we've replaced "Typical" cinema projectors with Kinoton E series and in the same theatre, the difference was night and day on the image quality. Can they make a poorly printed film look like an EK...of course not but they sure can get as much out of it as possible. There is no reason to just settle for the least common denominator.
Naturally, Europe seems to have embraced the "E" versions a bit more than in the US. The "E"s in the US seem to be more at screening rooms and studios.
I'm curious to the post you refer to by Larry. Pricing out an Kinoton intermittent motor versus a DLP light engine...there is nearly an 8-times price difference, depending on which light engine and which motor...with the DLP being on the pricey side of things. Oh...and the motor is repairable. Why must you just make things up? Again, this goes to the anger side of things that the thread speaks to. Let things sink or swim on their merits/failures...there is no need to just fabricate things.
Steve
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Carl Martin
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1424
From: Oakland, CA, USA
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 07-29-2008 06:51 PM
i project films and i watch films, a lot of them, so the job threat and image quality arguments have some relevance for me. but it's not that i fear the loss of income that would come from the elimination of my job. after all, the pay is hardly worth the hassle. no, handling film is one way that i engage with the medium and maintain a personal relationship with it. and image quality isn't just some linear measure, with film being "better" than video or vice versa. they are qualitatively different in how they constitute the image and in what sort of manipulations they allow.
film imagery is built from random grain and is most fittingly manipulated in a holistic way, whereas video permits manipulation at the level of its fixed pixel grid. thus film will, in a sense, give you a more coherent image, and one that has a more direct relationship to the photographed subject. the easy manipulability of video allows for more effects, but lessens its connection to what was photographed and its meaning. when i see the result of digital manipulation, instead of thinking "wow, look at that beautiful play of light", i find myself thinking "there they go twiddling knobs again". it's a different ethos.
all of this is very important for film (/video) as art, which is a perspective that's easily overlooked but matters a lot to me. and when it comes to presentation, i think it's important to respect the nature of the work. a classic film should be seen on film, because that's what it is. (and please, no more digital restorations!). the same can't be said of a recent work that has used a digital intermediate, and i can't object so strongly to digital projection in that case. but i also can't appreciate the work as much, unless it finds a really inspired way to justify its passage through the digital domain, rather than it being just a matter of convenience.
a tragedy of the sound film is that it more or less killed the silent film, as the color film has, over a much longer period, almost killed the black and white film. in both cases, the new technologies opened new avenues of expression, but were often used insipidly, while closing access to other well-developed avenues.
at least, even today, any cinema can play a black and white film with no extra effort, and a silent one with some moderate effort. the only real problem is getting people to show up. but a full-scale digital conversion will completely kill the film medium, and even if the conversion extends only to mainstream cinemas, it will set the film-based cinemas apart as oddballs, stacking the odds against them economically. i don't like to think of film in industrial terms, but it's true that film does require a certain amount of infrastructure to sustain itself. in addition to a man with a movie camera, you need a man with a lab, a man manufacturing filmstock, a man with a cinema, a man building projectors, etc.
digital cinema leaves me cold all around. on the other hand, i can watch a beat-up technicolor print and just swoon.
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. The typical theater isn't going to gain anything by running shorter life 1600 watt lamps.
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