quote: Mike Blakesley

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I like to think we had a darn good film image here, but I still think the digital picture is better.

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Yah... I have to say I've been pulled over to the "dark side" on this one.

5 years ago (or so), I bought into all the grumbling (much of it here), that film was in all ways superior to digital and could never be surpassed by DLP.

Today's DLP may not match film, and if you're looking for that then perhaps you'll never be satisfied. However, considering the elements that I think matter to the average viewer, steady picture, sharp, consistent image and evenly-lit screen, digital is proving to be a suitable substitute. Now that digital is commonplace, the product has become what customers use to compare their experience from one place to another... for better or worse.

(disclaimer)... Brad, and a few of his calibre, were accustomed to getting performance from film that the common folk never did. This opinion is not aimed at his group.

The playing field is no longer level, and likely can never be for film in the future. I do believe that print quality is nothing near what it used to be, but I can't do anything about that. We've been forced to drink the kool-aid, and I, for one, feel myself fortunate that the result at my business is perceptually better than what I had before the change. I was certainly prepared for much less than I got.

The drive-in environment is extreme. To even shoot at what the indoors did with film, we needed the brightest lamps and best lenses. Past that, we needed the most stable projectors, because jitter that might show up in millimeters on an indoor screen was inches or feet on our drive-in ones. Every single flaw was magnified, due to the size of picture we had to paint. Even then, we frequently failed at screen brightness, as you could only push so much energy through a 35mm frame, and we had no access to the gain screens that are commonplace elsewhere. To get an extra fraction of a fL, many of us traded off a bit of ghosting and shaved shutter blades beyond anything an indoor would ever consider.

Considering that relatively few of us paid that kind of obsessive attention to projection detail, the installaton of today's digital is a dramatic advantage.
 

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Posted by John Wilson (Member # 269) on 05-31-2013, 06:18 AM:
 
Plus with digital projection you can get a MUCH brighter picture than what you could with 35mm. That alone makes it a no-brainer for a drive-in.

(Edit: I wrote that while Jack posted)
 

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Posted by Victor Liorentas (Member # 5272) on 05-31-2013, 11:28 AM:
 
One advantage D Cinema has at a Drive-In (film too) is no perfs to lose light and pixels.
I wish more of you had seen the Technalight system at it's best.
It had no problem burning up a screen with light...even too much light if you like.
It also put film grain up there instead of just 2 million pixels.

 

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 05-31-2013, 01:47 PM:
 
The film versus digital thing is a moot point when the finished Hollywood product is a digital intermediate, typically of 2K resolution. Add to this the declining level of quality in high speed 35mm release prints (based on complaints I've read here in the FT forums).

D-cinema has a hard time standing up to a pure "old-school" film production presented in true film done right standards. But modern theaters aren't delivering that.
 

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Posted by Jack Ondracek (Member # 1466) on 05-31-2013, 07:43 PM:
 
I think you pretty much said what I was trying to... in a lot fewer words!
 

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Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 05-31-2013, 08:31 PM:
 

quote: Jim Cassedy

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shortening movie
trailers from 2.5 to 2min each

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