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Topic: keeping 35mm and running digital

Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 05-09-2013 07:15 AM

quote: Aaron Garman
No. That's not an entirely fair comparison. The original work is still there, just in a different space. It's not being presented on a different medium all together.

Granted, I was coming up with an extreme and provocative example. However, the point it was trying to illustrate is the question of where do you stop when it comes to the importance of the medium?

quote: Aaron Garman
I've always felt a given director took into account that they would be showing their work on film. It's the work they signed off on. It was what we all experienced. That was the final product.

So if, say, the director of Becky Sharp or Gone With the Wind signed off on an IB nitrate print with variable density sound that he saw projected on a silver screen with carbon arcs and the audio played through tube amps and huge horn drivers, is it any less authentic seeing it on a DCP today that has been tweaked to try to reproduce that impression than it is on a polyester, chromogenic film print, projected onto a high-gain white screen with a xenon and the sound re-recorded onto variable area and played through a modern A and B chain?

There appears to be a group of people who believe passionately that film - any type of film - offers a fundamentally authentic viewing experience, even if the actual photochemistry used on that film and the audio technology used alongside it differs completely between that used in the production and that used in projection; whereas a digital copy - any type of digital copy, does not and cannot. I find this puzzling: I've never heard anyone reject, say, a TV show that was originally recorded on 2" quad and since remastered onto DigiBeta as lacking authenticity when the latter is shown.

quote: Aaron Garman
Digital technology has made revisionist filmmaking common place.

Granted, it's made it easier, cheaper and more widespread. But attempts to rewrite film history have happened before. I seem to remember that in the 1997 Star Wars, various 'defects' in the stop-motion effects and one or two lines of dialogue that were deemed racist or sexist (can't remember which) were excised, after which Lucas tried to destroy all the remaining 1977 prints. But I do take your point - anyone can play that sort of game with a decent scanner and Adobe After Effects now, hence the tsunami of classic film re-releases on BD complete with a 'restoration' featurette, usually featuring some teenager at a workstation proudly crowing about the extent to which he's totally changed everything with little thought of the original viewing experience.

quote: Aaron Garman
You now have this question: "what is the correct version and way to see a given movie"? Did David Lean ever want people to see Lawrence of Arabia on an iPad?

That's an easy one, but what would he make of 4K? Given his love of rich, detailed images, I'd hazard a guess that he'd much rather we saw Larry that way than on a beaten up, dropout-ridden 70mm mag print. And if, by investing in a carefully scanned and mastered DCP, using a 70mm print for a reference guide to the timing, the film can reach hundreds of Sunday afternoon theatre audiences across the world, compared to a dozen or so for the print (the last time I was involved in showing a 70mm Larry, the print cost £1,200 to ship alone), what is the better investment?

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Scott Norwood
Film God

Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99

posted 05-09-2013 07:33 AM

While I don't totally agree with Leo's opinion above, I do appreciate that he takes an interest in making archival material available for screenings. From the exhibitor's point of view, archives are really good at preserving films and really bad about making them available to be shown. I would argue that if a pristine print of a terrific film is perfectly preserved, that does no good for anyone if it is never made available for screenings. Archives need to do a better job at the "access" part of their mission, and I am glad that someone in that community seems to care about such things.

Some practical issues with DCPs of archival material:

In addition to the relative costs of making a print vs. making a DCP, many film programmers want archival films to be shown on film. A good 35mm reprint of a classic film will likely generate more bookings than a DCP. I have been booking films for a performing-arts center that occasionally shows movies and have flat-out refused to book anything on Blu-Ray (we have a great video projector, but don't have DCP capability). I distrust the format and fear that there is a slippery slope to the point at which movie theatres become giant-screen television sets, and believe that the distinction between home viewing and cinema viewing needs to be maintained; exhibition formats are one way of doing this. Admittedly, DCP is better than Blu-Ray, but not if it is derived from the same (often de-grained, remixed, re-timed) HD master.

Another issue that DCP lacks support for frame rates slower than 24fps, meaning that most silent films would need to be stretch-printed (or the digital equivalent) in order to screen them as DCPs. By contrast, most venues which show silent films on film on a regular basis have variable-speed projection capability.

Finally, what of the current stock of 35mm prints that have no DCP equivalent? Even if one accepts that DCP is a legitimate exhibition format for archival material, 35mm capability will be needed for years to come until (unless?) existing 35mm material is scanned.

There are plenty of miserable 35mm prints that are unfit for exhibition and need to be shredded. There are plenty of miserable operators that need to be fired. Neither of these should invalidate 35mm (or 16mm or 70mm) film as an exhibition format for existing material.

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Ramon Lamarca Marques
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 186
From: Edgware, England, UK
Registered: Feb 2006

posted 05-09-2013 01:51 PM

I completely sympathise with Aaron and Scott’s point of view. For classic films I prefer projected film. We should assume it is properly projected film from a good print. I think we all agree with Leo’s point of view of a good DCP being better than a bad 35mm print. However, Leo says that a DCP is cheaper to ship, true, but if you think about the exhibitor’s point of view, it may not be that cheap. Those 70mm prints were unique and attracted people from around the world to specialised cinemas/festivals. The 4K files are extremely ubiquitous, especially now that even the multiplexes are showing classics on DCP and now with the Ultra-Super-High-8K-Definition TVs, I bet you they will use the same masters for everything. And this ubiquity may kill the specialised cinema, therefore you are saving on the shipping and the whole cinema operation since you won’t have a business! As to how removed from the original… I always give the example of the nitrate print I have seen of Spellbound, the best experience I have had of the film, the next one would be a good 35mm print (non-nitrate) then a DCP. I think a DCP is far more removed from the original experience than a proper 35mm print, even if it is not a nitrate print. I just hope that there is a plan to keep film exhibition for classic films, it is a different experience to watching them on DCP, as it is a different experience to watch a film on a plasma, a LED or LCD TV. Let’s get that dye-transfer Technicolor machinery from the 90s out of the cupboard!

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Aaron Garman
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1470
From: Toledo, OH USA
Registered: Mar 2003

posted 05-09-2013 02:19 PM

You all kind of summed up what I was about to say: sure, a DCP is going to be better than a destroyed or damaged print. What I was getting at was an ideal situation where you have a good print vs. a good DCP.

My screening of American Beauty was a recent example of a bad DCP. I saw the film a few times in 35mm and it was beautiful. The recent DCP is edge enhanced, digital looking grossness that in no way represents what the film looked like upon release nor what Sam Mendes/Conrad Hall intended. In fact, it looked exactly like the Blu-ray. Yet, it's being shown in the cinema, on the big screen, as part of a series that's goal is to allow people to see their favorites in the place they were always intended.

I'll cite Jurassic Park as an example as well in reference to the sound mix. Re-mixed for what, the sake of being re-mixed? Award winning sound that "needs" to be changed? Why? Even though Gary Rydstrom himself did the re-mix, it's more revisionist thinking.

It's incidents like this that make film prints invaluable for the preservation of an art form that is slowly being destroyed by revisionists and those too lazy to bother checking "what should the film look and sound like?"

Digital is a good thing in that it is pushing studios to have to scan things in order to get released in cinemas again. The problem is that they are either being done on the cheap or by people who have no concept at all of preserving the actual experience and essence of the film.

Not to be completely negative about DCPs, the Godfather, Titanic, and the Sound of Music were DCPs done right. I'd have prefer the mono sound mix for the Godfather but the one included was not horrific.

Leo, I also had a nice chuckle when you referred to Lawrence as Larry. [Smile]

AJG

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 05-09-2013 03:54 PM

quote: Leo Enticknap
I find this puzzling: I've never heard anyone reject, say, a TV show that was originally recorded on 2" quad and since remastered onto DigiBeta as lacking authenticity when the latter is shown.

Perhaps no one has complained about "authenticity," but I have seen countless complaints in reviews of videos, DVDs, Blu-ray discs, etc. where TV shows have been mastered to the given playback medium in not such a great manner resulting in sub-par image quality.

Average people think "digital" means "perfect" when it's anything but perfect. Compromises are made at a growing number of steps in audio/video/image acquisition and conversion of it to digital format, post processing of that data and the distribution of the finished product to customers. The person who doesn't know better might think a lossy compressed 192kbs MP3 file of a classic rock song is every bit as good as the original 2" wide analog master tape when the fact is that MP3 file is a piece of digital shit. The portable tune might have been turned to shit by the lossy encode/compression process, various post production tricks that increase loudness and compress dynamics in the "digital remastering" process and in the manner of how the original analog audio was sampled and converted into digital data in the fisrt place. It's a little easier to understand with how analog sourced audio is treated with digital tools. Movies are no different. All that audio/video data can be severely bastardized in the hands of someone who doesn't give a damn about making the finished product more true to its source.

quote: Scott Norwood
Admittedly, DCP is better than Blu-Ray, but not if it is derived from the same (often de-grained, remixed, re-timed) HD master.

DCP is supposed to be better than Blu-ray. But if the person making the encoding decisions chooses to ramp up compression to very severe levels, squeezing a 2 hour DCP that should weigh around 200GB down to only 50GB, the DCP won't be any better -certainly not any better than a well mastered Blu-ray.

At severe compression levels some of the things that are supposed to make a DCP better than Blu-ray, such as every movie frame being a separate JPEG2000 encoded image, may end up putting it at a disadvantage. The AVC and VC1 video formats on Blu-ray make heavy use of inter-frame compression techniques. You can't do that with a JPEG2000 DCP.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 05-10-2013 02:20 AM

quote: Ramon Lamorca Marques
Those 70mm prints were unique and attracted people from around the world to specialised cinemas/festivals.

Sure, but how many people and how many festivals?

When I worked on the arthous circuit, we would occasionally project classics on VHS when a print failed to arrive or (more often) it was so bad as to be physically unshowable. It was very, very rare to get a complaint from the audience, who were drawn to see it in the cinema mainly because of the social aspect rather than the presentation technology.

That is not to say that I'm endorsing a race to the bottom - far from it. I'm looking mainly at this problem from an archival perspective. As Scott points out, they have a poor reputation for making their collections accessible, part of which comes from the technical standards they require theatres to meet in order to be trusted with their film prints. The overwhelming majority of theatres out there do not have the expertise or the money to comply, especially when a changeover installation is demanded. I've been involved in attempts to crack this nut over the last 20 years. There has been some progress: the British Film Institute, for example, is a lot more relaxed about this than it was in the '80s and '90s, and UCLA now has 'B' prints of a few of its heavily requested titles, for which a platter is not in itself a rule-out.

But as the cost of making film prints increases and then for colour becomes no longer possible, archivists will instinctively go into preservation priority mode, and we'll be into a vicious circle whereby it becomes more difficult and expensive for theatres to maintain high quality film projection installations, in response to which archivists start to pull up the drawbridge.

While I'd hope that there will be a small number of theatres that do maintain film projection capability decades into the future, and form long-term relationships with archives (and/or develop existing ones) to ensure that regular screenings continue, that's only going to be realistic and possible beyond the next 5-10 years for, I would guess, 10-20 venues in the US and about the same in Europe.

But if archives and re-release distributors concentrate on creating high quality digital versions of their major holdings, then for the first time theatres that had never previously been able to show classics and re-releases at all (because the cost of doing so was too big a barrier) will be able to start. Far from causing theatres to close down, it might even bring people back in who are currently buying Blu-rays and watching at home.

As Bobby notes, digital can be 'done wrong' as well as film. But we've now got to the stage at which, with all other things being equal, it's a lot cheaper to do it right than with film, in most cases.

quote: Ramon Lorca Marques
I always give the example of the nitrate print I have seen of Spellbound, the best experience I have had of the film, the next one would be a good 35mm print (non-nitrate) then a DCP.

And the best recent experience I now bang on about is Criterion's Bluray of The Wages of Fear, shown on a 2K projector. In the scene where Charles Vanel sees the huge boulder blocking the road and realises just how big a problem he has on his hands, there is a rock steady picture, a deep, dark grey sky (with no digital artefacts that I could see), and when you cut to the close-up of his face, you can see every wrinkle and drip of sweat. There was no distraction to break the suspense, and my eyes were glued to the screen as it dawned on him that he was no longer the tough guy and had no idea how to solve the problem. When the camera cut away after that shot, there was an almost audible release of tension from the audience. And that was just a BD! The last time I'd previously seen it (all through) was on the BFI's 35mm print dating from their 1990s re-release. I remember in the same scene, vertical weave (which won't have been a projector fault - this was at the NFT), constant dirt and scratching and flattened contrast from the heat damage of repeated projections broke the suspense totally and I felt the action was slow moving and tedious.

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