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This topic comprises 8 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
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Topic: Imax Digital
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 12-15-2008 04:28 AM
You all know I have never bought into the "digital must be good because it is digital" hype and have always been highly skeptical of all nonsense in those press releases about the digital conversion, but boys and girls, I just saw THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL in IMAX digital, and I must say, if this is the way people will be watching films in the future, then I admit it, this changes my mind about digital.
Now mind you, this was not a "real" IMAX theatre with a full-sise IMAX screen. My guess is that it was about 50-55ft width with a slight curve and for this reason I was not evaluating it against what I know the original, full-size IMAX image looks like. But looking at this presentation against film presentation on the same size screen, i.e., against film in a similar size multiplex room, this digital show had one spectular image; there's no other way to describe it. Brightness, contrast, color saturation and apparant resolution looked better than multiplex film presentation, and not marginally better, but hands down better. Really, it put all my fears to rest that the conversion to digital would short-change or compromise presentation for future generations. If all digital presentation can mimic the quality of that IMAX show, then I have crossed to the other side of the isle.
The only anomily I saw in this presentation was that fast horizontal movements still have that slight strobe effect -- a kind of stuttery look that I find annoying, but that's just me --I can see the jump when they do drop frames to shorten the run time of films on TV and it drives me crazy, yet others don't know what I am talking about when I point it out, so evidently this isn't a big deal to most people. But other than that, everything else about the look of the image was striking. Yah, it may be 2K, but I can tell you, you'd be hard pressed in a blind test to tell if you were watching digital or 70mm. I know that up till now, I would consider that heresy coming from my mouth, but that was my honest feeling throughout the entire film. Bottom line, I was very impressed.
I don't know if it is the fact that they use 2 projectors that somehow makes the apparent resolution look so good -- it certainly accounted for the high brightness, but how they could get that crisp, crystal clear, razor sharp look using just 2K (my assumption, based on what you all have said about IMAX digital) is a mystery, but it WAS that good.
Even the fact that it was a silver screen wasn't as bad as I expected; truly I only noticed the hotspot when the entire screen went to white; when the picture was normal, it was barely detectible, even with me looking for it; I am sure most in the audience weren't distracted by it.
What WAS distracting was a light somewhere in the theatre that cast light on the very left corner of the screen. THAT was distracting, not fault of the digital system of course, but something the managment should have tended to. There were no cleaners to annoy me as I sat thru the credit crawl, so that made up for it.
I still feel that since our classic films will be waiting a long time to be transfered to digital prints, if they ever are, film will still be around for quite some time for the prep and art houses which for the most part can't afford digital conversion anyway, but this is going to be the way to go as film prints age and deteriorate more and more.
I am now convinced that the fear I once had that future generations would never be able to experience the richness of a LAWRENCE OF ARABIA on 70mm film the way we saw it in first run 70mm, is unfounded. If this is what it would look like in digital, at least IMAX's version of digital, then mission accomplished.
For the longest time I thought, if digital presentation was going to be what I saw in those early days of JURASSIC PARK and STAR WARS, then saying it was a viable replacement for film would have been akin to me going over to the Dark Side. But that is simply no longer the case as this IMAX presentation has been a revelation to me as to what digital is capable of looking like, and I assume it can only improve from here. Now it really is just a matter of the economics that will allow us to afford the technology.
PS -- Sound was spectacular as well, but that was expected.
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