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This topic comprises 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
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Author
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Topic: Rocky Horror Digital
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Ramon Lamarca Marques
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 186
From: Edgware, England, UK
Registered: Feb 2006
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posted 08-27-2012 04:08 PM
quote: Manny Knowles
And now...One more thought on the subject of "original format" -- How open are we to seeing "Lawrence of Arabia" on 70mm with DTS sound? -- Does it matter that the "original format" was mag tracks?
I have enjoyed Lawrence even on TV but the best time ever was when it was first restored and re-released in 70mm, even in Spain. It was in a gorgeous one screener now gone, with curtains, magnetic sound, an elegant bar for the intermission,... It was an experience I will never forget. I saw Cleopatra in Todd-AO and magnetic sound (pink print) and not long after the restored version with DTS sound. The magnetic sound was much better to my ears, it had a fuller sound.
Nevertheless, it is great that they have produced new 70mm prints with DTS sound of so many films. It is also great that they keep restoring films and DCPs are available, I just wish there were also good 35mm prints for some cinemas.
I am sure you will attend the Cinerama film festival. I did in Bradford this year and I strongly recommend it. I never thought I would see the Brothers Grimm in three strip Cinerama, the print is dye transfer and so the colours are intact.
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Manny Knowles
"What are these things and WHY are they BLUE???"
Posts: 4247
From: Bloomington, IN, USA
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 08-27-2012 07:31 PM
Again, that's fine for a special film-festival kind of arrangement. The difference will be in the handling of that film material. The trouble with film isn't film -- it's that we got to a point where "projectionists" included many people who had no knowledge of how to properly handle (or present) film.
Standard 35mm exhibition got onto a slippery slope. It was only a matter of time before digital projection became practical. The need was certainly there for some time already. Some time back, the industry made a series of choices that disregarded (or else took for granted) the special-ness of film, and then it became a fact -- 35mm presentation (generally speaking) wasn't special anymore.
What kinds of decisions?
- The 1.85 aspect ratio (instead of scope)
- Super-35 (great for light output and AR, but bad for grain)
- Ultra high-speed duplication of thousands of show prints
- CRAP Code
- Lower than 35mm resolution Digital Intermediate
- Xenon - not bad in itself, but makes it possible to run a lamp far beyond its usable life expectancy
- Automation -- not bad in itself, but adopted to make it possible to have...
- Non-professional "projectionists"
Of course, the transition has been covered in the press with a heavy "slant" in favor of digital. And, while I am in favor of digital PROJECTION, I take issue with the way the articles invariably make it seem that film itself was the problem. The way I see it, the real Achille's heel came from film projection, which became plagued with a "human error" factor. We have to admit our hand in this. Too many of us are in denial of this fact -- Exhibitors contributed to the demise of film.
My preference is to see films SHOT on film. But I definitely see the benefit in digital distribution and exhibition. I like the "film look" and I think it comes through just fine if the work originates on film. I don't personally believe that film projection is necessary to preserve that. If anything, it will introduce jump & weave, and add grain (too much of a good thing).
All movies (regardless of how captured) should be ARCHIVED on film.
When we start getting unskilled labor working in the Camera Dept of feature films, and in Archives, then I might revise my opinion. But, for the foreseeable future, one can expect those areas will be populated with people who know how to work with film.
I suspect we'll see 35mm continue as a sort-of technological curiosity, like 70mm and Cinerama -- and those events will (hopefully) hire the best film projectionists they can find -- Lord knows, there'll be a lot to choose from.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 08-28-2012 10:40 AM
quote: Mike Blakesley
I personally think that story is a bunch of crap.
Well, we will probably never know. But there is no reason why this couldn't be true.
I've seen this so many times in the real world... Storage system fails, some human error: massive data loss.
I've even seen a perfectly working backup off-site solutions fail in the end. Everything worked perfect, until that night that everything exploded. Luckily there was this off-site backup and it even did run without a hitch for more than a year, only nobody remembered the encryption key that was used to encrypt the data...
I could perfectly see the same happening with Digital movies. Especially because the studios are doing everything to keep you from the raw digital data. So, even if they do a perfect job of copying all their old DCPs from the old storage system to the shiny new one, I could, for example, perfectly imagine someone to trash the keys they've used to encrypt them.... Hey, what's this old bunch of PEM files good for? Who cares, rm -rf the hell out of them...
And who knows if the studios that we entrust those archives too, even exist in 10, 20, 50 or 100 years from now? Many studios have been merged, sold, split off or closed even in the last 15 years or so.
And it is not like this never happened before, isn't it? How many prints didn't vanish during the last 100 years? Even generally accepted masterpieces like Metropolis have at least partly vanished.
So, even if this story is bullshit, it actually isn't. Similar stuff happened before, with digital files and movie prints alike.
In this particular case, it probably not even involved a finished movie, but work in progress like character wireframes, textures, 3D scenes, etc.
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 08-28-2012 12:06 PM
Just look at the story and consider when it supposedly happened. After a year of work, the movie was only on one system? They expect people to believe that ONE person with ONE mouse could wipe out all the files, folders, backups, copies of backups, test copies, etc etc etc of the movie that would have existed by the time this supposedly happened?
Then there's the idea of the home computer. That must have been one fantastic, ahead-of-it's-time home system to have that much storage space. If that one person had the movie on their computer, surely other people had it on theirs as well.
I just think it's some overactive imagination at work. I am not saying it COULDN'T have happened, I just have a feeling it wasn't quite as dramatic as the way they present it. You know, a little movie-type embellishment at work.
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Chris Slycord
Film God
Posts: 2986
From: 청주시, 경북도, South Korea
Registered: Mar 2007
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posted 08-28-2012 02:14 PM
quote: Mike Blakesley
Just look at the story and consider when it supposedly happened. After a year of work, the movie was only on one system? They expect people to believe that ONE person with ONE mouse could wipe out all the files, folders, backups, copies of backups, test copies, etc etc etc of the movie that would have existed by the time this supposedly happened?
Taking the story at face value:
1) The command that was run didn't at all use a mouse. It was run at the command line.
2) The command would, in fact, remove everything in the current directory and everything in every sub-directory (and if it was done starting at the root directory it'd essentially erase everything on the computer). It happens more often than you'd think when people are remote connecting to multiple servers and run the command on the wrong one...
3) I saw a more detailed explanation of what happened somewhere and a guy who worked at pixar at the time explained that it wasn't everything that got destroyed but when they used the existing backups they found that they couldn't get them to work due to the backups being too corrupted and were going to use a fairly old, but proven functional backup before one of the people said they might have another copy.
Put short: The guy accidentally erased important stuff and the backups for that stuff were no good.
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