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Topic: Time machine

Manny Knowles
"What are these things and WHY are they BLUE???"

Posts: 4247
From: Bloomington, IN, USA
Registered: Feb 2002

posted 09-03-2011 05:29 PM

AMC propaganda touted Stan Durwood as the creator of the multiplex.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

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

posted 09-03-2011 05:33 PM

I would have had W.K.L. Dickson invent polyester film base back in 1888, instead of nitrate. That way, archivists would never have had to deal with base decomposition issues, a lot more early films would have survived, the operating costs of distribution and exhibition would have been a lot lower, and, crucially, several hundred lives would have been saved that were lost to nitrate fires in theatres and distribution exchanges while the stuff was in mainstream use.

If I'm allowed a second, I would also have made the brief widescreen boom of the early 1930s (e.g. Fox Grandeur etc.) stick, rather than fizzle out for a couple more decades, with the wholescale conversion to widescreen happening at the same time as the conversion to sound.

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Mitchell Dvoskin
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1869
From: West Milford, NJ, USA
Registered: Jan 2001

posted 09-03-2011 05:39 PM

quote: Damien Taylor
I'm misunderstanding block booking, but didn't it allow studios to produce overall lower quality content?

Block booking is a different issue. Prior to the Paramount Consent Decrees, each studio owned it's own chain of theatres. In fact, MGM was created and owned by Loews Theatres. Because they owned the theatres, it required them to keep them profitable. There were independent theatres, but they existed mostly in smaller towns.

Block booking required an independent theatre to play all the product of a given studio for a period of time. They got the good films and the bad.

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Randy Stankey
Film God

Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99

posted 09-03-2011 11:09 PM

I don't know... I would like to go back to some time around 1945 or 1950 and just stay there.

No matter what you did, who you killed or what you changed, progress would catch up and you would have a whole new set of problems and political bullshit to deal with. You could also inadvertently make a change for the worse.

I would rather just go back to a time when things were more like the way I wish they could be and take things as they come. If I played my cards right, I could be a lot better off in the long run.

Since I would have traveled back from the future, I would have knowledge of the way history is supposed to unfold.

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David M. Leugers
Film Handler

Posts: 43
From: Fairfield, Ohio, united States of America
Registered: Jan 2005

posted 09-03-2011 11:50 PM

I think I'd go back to 1959 and watch films with my older brothers at the Paramount theater in Hamilton, Ohio like we did. It was my first year going to the movies and it was miraculous. A beautiful showplace of a theater with a balcony and pipe organ, it had ushers walking up and down the aisles carrying flashlights. It was abruptly closed and torn down to make a small parking lot in 1961. I would change the ownership of studios to prevent corporations from ownership, prevent the industry threatening wastes of huge budgets on overblown idiotic film ideas (Cleopatra for one, there are many over the years) and make sure film makers with real talent and fresh ideas get to make films. Only when customers are flocking to the theaters can those theaters survive. Great films are the key.

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Aaron Garman
Phenomenal Film Handler

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

posted 09-04-2011 12:56 AM

Very tough to pick one, but here are a couple:

-Kodak develops analog backup for CDS: it would have hopefully prevented the digital sound war of the 90s.

-2K projectors never sold to a single cinema. Instead, 8K becomes the standard from the beginning, including all work flows.

-George Lucas consumes hemlock in 1984, and never makes the prequels. Star Wars Trilogy preserved for all ages to come in its original form.

AJG

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Tom Petrov
Five Guys Lover

Posts: 1121
From: El Paso, TX
Registered: Jan 2003

posted 09-04-2011 01:25 AM

quote: Aaron Garman
George Lucas consumes hemlock in 1984, and never makes the prequels. Star Wars Trilogy preserved for all ages to come in its original form.

Now that is funny!

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Monte L Fullmer
Film God

Posts: 8367
From: Nampa, Idaho, USA
Registered: Nov 2004

posted 09-04-2011 01:36 AM

Film-Guard was invented at the beginning of film projecting.

Can you imagine how film would have ran through those older machines if they were treated,esp nitrate?

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Damien Taylor
Master Film Handler

Posts: 493
From: Perth, Western Australia
Registered: Apr 2007

posted 09-04-2011 06:07 AM

quote: Mitchell Dvoskin
Block booking required an independent theatre to play all the product of a given studio for a period of time. They got the good films and the bad.

Thanks for validating what I thought.

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Geoff Jones
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 579
From: Broomfield, CO, USA
Registered: Feb 2006

posted 09-04-2011 01:14 PM

First, I'd forbid my girls from watching any movies on home video.

Then I'd travel forward 4 years to pick up my 3 year old at age 7. I'd take her and my (currently) 7 year old back to 77, 80, & 83 to see the Star Wars films on the big screen. Then I'd go pick 'em both up at around age 11 to see Raiders, and again at 15 or so for Alien & Aliens. I'd continue doing this for a while.

After that I would travel forward 10 years at a time to see if they ever start making good movies again, and if they ever come up with technology to make movies look better instead of worse.

(sorry for not following Brad's rules.)

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

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

posted 09-04-2011 03:27 PM

quote:
-2K projectors never sold to a single cinema. Instead, 8K becomes the standard from the beginning, including all work flows.

I agree 8K would be great as a standard for digital intermediate use and native resolution for projectors.

Unfortunately, 8K isn't very practical for widespread use in post production due to limits in computing power, particularly hard disc I/O. My understanding is 8K work has to be done in gray-scale channels or in a low resolution "proxy" for full color operation. 4K projectors are only now starting to become common in some areas. There's no telling if/when we'll ever see 8K resolution digital projectors.

Some of this gets back to how freaking slow certain developments have been in processor design and hard disc technology. Companies like Intel squeezed out as much as they could in single CPU designs. It's only now that symmetric multiprocessing is more common (yet the vast majority of computing applications are not compiled in multi-threaded form to take advantage of multiprocessing). I thought eSATA might help beef up hard disc speeds due to greater consumer demand, but eSATA never was all that common. Now there's another chance with USB 3.0. But the hard disc itself can move only so many bits only so fast.

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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99

posted 09-04-2011 05:39 PM

Bobby, these days you can go down to the grocery store and buy a 4 terabyte hard drive with a side of spaghetti. In 5 years (or even less) we'll be buying drives which have sizes of 100+ terabytes. People will LOL at 2011 technology. They will view you and I as primitive plebes 10 years from now. My point is that the only thing the 8K "practicality" thing means is that digital would have had to wait a few years for technology to catch up.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

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

posted 09-05-2011 12:09 PM

Capacity isn't the biggest problem with hard discs. Rather, it's how much data the hard discs can read/write per second.

USB 3.0 is 10 times faster than USB 2.0 (transfer speeds up to 5 billion bits per second). But I doubt those new USB 3.0 external hard discs now appearing in stores will actually sustain those speeds. Uncompressed 1080p HD with basic 8-bit per color channels uses 1.4 billion bits per second of bandwidth. An 8K image is 16 times larger than a 2K image. For real time record/playback the disc system would have to sustain 22.4 billion bits per second just for basic color. I'm not sure if even the highest end RAID systems could handle that.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

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

posted 09-05-2011 01:32 PM

quote: Bobby Henderson
Uncompressed 1080p HD with basic 8-bit per color channels uses 1.4 billion bits per second of bandwidth. An 8K image is 16 times larger than a 2K image. For real time record/playback the disc system would have to sustain 22.4 billion bits per second just for basic color. I'm not sure if even the highest end RAID systems could handle that.

Hence the reason (or one of them, at any rate) why d-cinema imaging systems generally take a lossless compression approach: the server's processor can uncompress a lot faster than the equivalent generation of technology enables the uncompressed image data to be transferred from a hard drive.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

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

posted 09-05-2011 08:29 PM

D-cinema prints are really lossy compressed, via JPEG 2000 format. The level of compression is relatively mild in comparison to the much more severe levels of compression used in formats for home video. In the production/post production stage I think the crews generally work on uncompressed or lossless compressed imagery.

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