Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

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Posted by Geoff Jones (Member # 3668) on 10-15-2013, 09:39 PM:

I saw this at the Alamo Drafthouse in Littleton, Colorado (auditorium 2). My first trip to the theatre.

The screen was "medium" sized. Not spectacular, but not terrible. I'd guess around 30-40 feet wide. The auditorium felt kinda boxy to me. I normally sit pretty close, but it looked like you would really be craning your neck to look up from the first few rows.

A Sony digital 4K trailer ran at the beginning. The picture was great in every way except one: Dark, contrast-y areas had a swimmy, shimmery look.

Audio was solid with decent split surrounds.

I re-watched the first three movies at home with my 9 year old daughter before taking her to this. IV was far and away her favorite. Fun times!

Posted by Michael Kurtzke (Member # 7512) on 10-15-2013, 10:26 PM:

Geoff,

I work at another Alamo and have basically the same setup in the Projection Room as Littleton. The "Dark, contrast-y areas had a swimmy, shimmery look" came from the 'Blu-Ray' we were provided by corporate.

I'm sure if Littleton just corrected the color space on their projectors with a white point of 6500 [Instead of the DCI White Point] and the Gamma to 2.2 [instead of 2.6] on their SRX-515's, the picture would look a little better. For us, we have a separate Macro for working with the 'Blu-Rays' sent to us by corporate.

-Michael

Posted by Michael Putlack (Member # 6523) on 10-15-2013, 11:00 PM:

Was this on film? I didn't know Voyage Home was available on DCP...

Posted by Geoff Jones (Member # 3668) on 10-15-2013, 11:00 PM:

Interesting. I asked my "waiter" before the show if they were projecting a Blu-Ray or DCP. He went to ask someone else and came back to tell me it was a DCP.

Was I lied to?

Posted by Michael Kurtzke (Member # 7512) on 10-15-2013, 11:08 PM:

Well... yes and no.

I'm not sure if I can say this, but we make 'in-house' DCP's from Blu-Rays to make it easier to schedule these special events. We can put these Blu-Ray DCP's into SPL's and set light-up cues and automate the process. We get a DCP from the studios when we can, but if no DCP is available we will 'make' our own and ship them off to Alamo's across the country on the little Western Digital My Passport drives. We just tell the studios they will be played off a Blu-Ray and pay Blu-Ray rights.

Posted by Michael Putlack (Member # 6523) on 10-16-2013, 11:36 AM:

Michael, we do the same thing. Who wants to go up to the booth and have to navigate a disk menu anyways!?

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 10-16-2013, 11:55 AM:

The fact of the matter is...it would seem that the studios put LESS effort into classic titles when they make their own DCPs...sound could be anything, including just Left/Right...picture could be whatever was the easiest transfer.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 10-17-2013, 01:55 PM:

I understand the motives behind making a home-made DCP from a Blu-ray rip (bypassing all the stupid menus, FBI/Interpol warnings, etc.). Unfortunately, it's still a bad standard of practice.

A 1080p/24 video encode in AVC or VC1 format on Blu-ray is already severely data compressed. Even a movie on Blu-ray like Saving Private Ryan which has the movie using an entire 50GB disc is very compressed compared to the size of the original master. Add to this all the inter-frame compression techniques used to get file sizes lower in AVC/VC1 encodes.

A JPEG2000 DCP is essentially no more than a huge number of JPEG compressed still image frame grabs. It's a good format when an uncompressed or lossless compressed master is used as the source. If a Blu-ray encode is used the end result will be an image that has gone through two levels of lossy compression instead of one. Any efficiency or eye-tricking stunts inter-frame compression in the Blu-ray encode used would be lost in the DCP.

In short, a Blu-ray of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is going to look better than a DCP derived from it. There's going to be some sort of generational loss due to the double level of data compression happening.

Solution: the movie studios need to get more on the ball about this stuff. They need to recognize the fact there is some demand for catalog titles in commercial theaters. They shouldn't be punting a Blu-ray to theaters or having them do even worse things like making DCPs from Blu-ray rips. The movie studios need an organized work flow where DCPs can be created from 2K/4K masters they are creating on a regular basis.

Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 10-17-2013, 02:22 PM:

But the (most) studios Just Don't Care.
What needs to happen is the farming out of their libraries to subcontractors who want to handle them and are willing to make decent DCPs (and 35mm if we're lucky) and want to make them available.
It is sorta happening with some of the studios, but there is a long way to go.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 10-17-2013, 02:42 PM:

quote: Bobby Henderson
Any efficiency or eye-tricking stunts inter-frame compression in the Blu-ray encode used would be lost in the DCP.

No they wouldn't. All that stuff is done on decode, and the file has to be decoded before it can be recompressed. Otherwise a Blu-ray to DCP encode would play back as Entire Frame--Partial-frame--Partial frame--Partial Frame--Partial Frame--Partial Frame--Entire Frame--Partial Frame etc etc etc.

While I agree that the DCP ecode will be **slightly** worse than the Blu-ray encode, I doubt anyone could tell a difference back-to-back or even side-by-side.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 10-17-2013, 06:20 PM:

quote: Bobby Henderson
the movie studios need to get more on the ball about this stuff. They need to recognize the fact there is some demand for catalog titles in commercial theaters. They shouldn't be punting a Blu-ray to theaters or having them do even worse things like making DCPs from Blu-ray rips. The movie studios need an organized work flow where DCPs can be created from 2K/4K masters they are creating on a regular basis.

You're right, but it will never happen. Studios already charge stupidly high rates just to show their old movies from a Blu-Ray. Can you imagine how much MORE they would have to charge if they were going to have a DCP created, ship it out, have Deluxe or Technicolor create a key and send that out, and handle the booking and billing paperwork involved?

In an ideal world there would be a monster server at each studio holding all the archived movies, and a theater should be able to log in with a password, order a DCP online, have it delivered "pre-unencrypted" via satellite, and charge the reasonable fee to a credit card. No human beings need to be involved at the studio end. But remember we are talking about MOVIE STUDIOS -- can you think of any time in history when they were actually reasonble? I've been in the business a long time and I can't.

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 10-17-2013, 11:10 PM:

So there is no way at all possible to copy a BluRay to DcP without quality degradation? Surely in this day and age, someone should be able to come up with software that can do that -- what about all that business about 1s and 0s make perfect copies with NO degradation? Why can't a straight forward one-to-one identical copy be made of the BR/DVD -- skipping all the crap, of course?

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 10-18-2013, 03:15 PM:

Compression. That's what changes the 1s and 0s. So first, the already compressed Blu-ray is decompresed into a stream of 1s and 0s but that stream still perfectly represents the compressed Blu-ray. It's not lossless compression like a Zip file or a RAR file. By the way, anyone remember Zip Disks? You could only put Zip files on them. They would click if you tried to put a RAR or SIT file on them. Anyway so that stream of 1s and 0s are compressed into a new stream of 1s and 0s with further visual data missing from the decompressed stream because digital cinema just isn't powerful enough to play back uncompressed movies. Well maybe it is, but the hard drives and all that associated with it probably aren't fast enough and the studios are too lazy to send out files that big.

TLDR: The computer industry hasn't advanced to the point where we can easily and cheaply do uncompressed video and copy it back and forth willy-nilly without a care. We are still living in the primitive ages where people will look back on and laugh at our technical ineptitude. Digital cinema today is the equivalent to a hand cranked projector or at the very most silent movies of the past. It's very silly. In 2113 the future owners of Film-Tech® LLC but that first L doesn't apply to our products™ will make videos making fun of today's standards.

Posted by Lincoln Spector (Member # 6835) on 10-18-2013, 07:30 PM:

Actually, the number of classics available on DCP keeps growing, even if it's not growing fast enough. The CineMark chain runs weekly classics, always of DCPs (http://www.cinemark.com/cinemark-classic-series). Of course, their idea of classics tends to not-that-old American films.

The Castro will screen Alien and American Werewolf in London on DCP within the next two weeks. The Film Forum is showing UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, TOKYO STORY, and THE FRESHMAN (Harold Lloyd's version) in DCP.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 10-18-2013, 08:53 PM:

I could see where a chain with the size/clout of Cinemark could get a studio to build them a DCP of whatever they wanted. But if any other exhibitor wanted to play the same title they would be told, "You'd have to use a BluRay for that, we don't have a DCP available."

That happened a number of years ago with WB cartoons on 35mm. Warners made a custom batch of Looney Tunes for one chain exclusively. At least with those, later they were released to a small company through which they could be booked in groups of 3...but of course the prints were hashed.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 11-17-2013, 07:59 PM:

quote: Frank Angel
So there is no way at all possible to copy a BluRay to DcP without quality degradation? Surely in this day and age, someone should be able to come up with software that can do that -- what about all that business about 1s and 0s make perfect copies with NO degradation? Why can't a straight forward one-to-one identical copy be made of the BR/DVD -- skipping all the crap, of course?

The reason why you can't is simple: Practically all current Blu-Rays use H.264.

DCPs do currently not support H.264 and also no uncompressed image data. Also, the color space of Blu-Rays is different than that of DCPs. So, you need to decompress your H.264 stream and compress it again, either using JPEG2000 or MPEG2.

So, DCPs aren't the solution. The solution is a server or IMB that can play H.264 compressed files directly.