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Please join Kodak Monday, March 14, for "An Evening of Independent Film" featuring a special digital pre-show and full-feature digital experience, at the Century Orleans 18 Theatre. Screenings at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., with a reception following the first screening.

Ongoing demonstrations of the Kodak Digital Cinema Solution during tradeshow hours in Palace Room 3 at Bally's (across from the tradeshow floor). RSVP for Monday night or schedule a day/time to visit the Kodak demo room.

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Posted by Ian Price (Member # 14) on 03-18-2005, 04:45 PM:
 
I saw the Sony demo.

The ballroom was medium size at best with a non-perfed 1-gain screen with speakers below. The projector sat on a stand at the back of the room. There was a technician sitting at a laptop computer handling the show. The screen was about 10' high and I sat about 10' from the screen. There were four rows of chairs and the last row was about 20' from the screen.

The test material consisted of a Sony sourced digital series consisting of the usual color saturated shots of an attractive woman in a bikini jumping into a pool all in rather slow motion. The ripples of the pool were mesmerizing. Then she sits at a counter and strokes a glass of water. The next sequence was the woman descending a staircase. Then there was the couple overlooking an attractive landscape from their balcony.

In the woman descending the staircase sequence I noted a bit of motion artifacts on one of her arm movements. All of the sequences looked to have originated on video.

The next sequence was taken from the camera negative of the Sound of Music with Julie Andrews. It is the picnic scene after she has sewn the kids play cloths out of the curtains and she sings Doe a Deer.

Our first thought was "Oh my god is that great photography!" Then you think, "Hey, Julie Andrews wasn't a young as we thought in this movie." That's because the image is so crisp that you can see the lines in her face. Then you start watching the grass blowing in the wind and note how truly hideous those play cloths are. Another tech though that the image was very flat and two dimensional. He also had trouble with the way the projector played with light. Once again I noticed motion artifacts during a movement of Julie Andrew's arm.

Then there were a series of glitches while they tried to bring up the next file for the demo. I chalk that up to probably piss poor planning and the suits changing the order of things during the show. Eventually we got to watch a bit of I Robot with Will Smith. At this point I was looking for motion artifacts but the screen was too busy and the action was all computer animated so I didn't see anything amiss.

The next sequence was a mind blowing series of shots from an 8-70 production about India. The colors were rich and saturated and we were stunned to watch what was going on the screen. I think most of us forgot about what we were watching because we were involved in the image. But we were watching a 10' image of material that was made to be projected on a 60' to 80' screen.

After that they projected some still images and invited us to approach the screen and try to find the pixels. Well there they were plain as day and square to boot. Even if they were only 5'millimeters across, they still have a square aspect and I wonder if that still affects the image with it's artificial sharpness and what I have come to think of as hyper-realism. That no matter how small the pixel that there is an unreal edge to each image that the brain rejects as unreal.

Certainly it was a great video projector with all the usual video attributes like a very still picture without any motion. Good uniformity of light. Very good focus across the image.

In the end they projected a nice test pattern and were gathered around discussing the detail of this and that. I noticed that the panels were out of alignment but about half a pixel.

In the end, I feel that this will be a very good staging video projector but it is not a good cinema projector. Even though it has twice the resolution of the current TI projectors, the TI projectors have been optimized for the cinema environment.
 

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Posted by Mike Olpin (Member # 1115) on 03-18-2005, 05:28 PM:
 
I noticed that while most of the ripples in the pool with the girl swimming were good, the ones directly behind her were full of artifacts. That said, I was mezmorized by the India sequence. My conclusion is that 4k is a sufficient resolution for cinema use. The major obstical now is in the video processsor. We need to have a system that can fill all of the pixels with no artifacts, distortion, or blur.
 

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Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 03-18-2005, 06:25 PM:
 
Dammit! Hopefully Sony will have one of their 4Ks set up at NAB here next month.
 

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Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 03-18-2005, 06:44 PM:
 
No matter how good the Sony looked I can only think SDDS .

Mark
 

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Posted by Mattias Ohlson (Member # 1662) on 03-19-2005, 09:59 AM:
 
Ian Price
I wonder one thing about the pixel edges.
With d-ila pixels affecting neighbouring pixels, a kind of bleeding that should give more natural transitions. This is not strange with one continous liquid crystal layer. Sxrd is not that different. Were pixels not affecting each other on the image you saw? It might be difficult to see since you would probably have to look at the pixel edges. Also the state of focus might also affect this. Is it not practise with dlp cinema to apply a slight defocus.
 

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Posted by Ian Price (Member # 14) on 03-19-2005, 02:33 PM:
 
Sorry Mattias, I can't answer your question. I don't know the answer. All I can report is what I saw at a very short demonstration. I might be able to answer those questions if I had a week or a month to look at the projector instead of 17-minutes.

All I gave were my impressions, other technicians saw other things. All agreed that it is a very nice video projector and all agreed that it isn't film.
 

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Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 03-19-2005, 03:12 PM:
 

quote: Ian Price

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The next sequence was taken from the camera negative of the Sound of Music with Julie Andrews. It is the picnic scene after she has sewn the kids play cloths out of the curtains and she sings Doe a Deer.

Our first thought was "Oh my god is that great photography!" Then you think, "Hey, Julie Andrews wasn't a young as we thought in this movie." That's because the image is so crisp that you can see the lines in her face. Then you start watching the grass blowing in the wind and note how truly hideous those play cloths are. Another tech though that the image was very flat and two dimensional. He also had trouble with the way the projector played with light. Once again I noticed motion artifacts during a movement of Julie Andrew's arm.

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Interesting that they chose to use a 40 year-old 65mm film production to show how sharp a 4K digital projector is, only to find that better quality was probably achieved 40 years ago using a 70mm film projector costing much less than the new system.
 

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Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 03-19-2005, 03:28 PM:
 
It is not the practice to defocus a DLP projector. Some may defocus an LCD projector to minimize the screen door but not so on a DLP.

The next thing I'm seeing for LCD is making the pixels so close together that the screen door pratically vanishes. DLP and DILA/LCOS are reflective technologies so there is no screen-door persay though they all have pixelation and have potential Morie` problems with perforated screens.

Note too that Sony chose to use a non-perf small screen. Probably the best demo room was Panasonic. They used a high-dollar Stewart screen and had their projector dialed in (just a baby DLP with 1366 x 768 resolution). They combined that with a cinema sound system to present themsevles extremely well for a projector and lens system that can be had for under $30K.
 

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Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 03-19-2005, 05:08 PM:
 

quote: Steve Guttag

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Probably the best demo room was Panasonic. They used a high-dollar Stewart screen and had their projector dialed in (just a baby DLP with 1366 x 768 resolution). They combined that with a cinema sound system to present themsevles extremely well for a projector and lens system that can be had for under $30K.

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