Digital shooting and projection

[Formeruser012523]

Stumbled on this thread & then stumbled on this link today. Very sad to me but thought I would share.

http://www.fujifilmshorts.com/motion_e-news/fujimp_mar13.htm

 

[QueenOfRandom]

I'm gunna jump in...

Film is beautiful, agreed. However it is impractical, expensive and it was always just a compromise, an accident if you like. It was chosen as it was the cheapest and easiest method at the time. 24fps was chosen as it was the cheapest way to ensure the picture still looked alright.

But film will not die, people still photograph on film and have their own dark rooms me included and the same will be said for film.

In fact it could be a blessing in disguise. Artistic directors (God the film student in me wants to use the word auteurs but that has been stolen by Hollywood) will want to use film and they bloody well will! Hollywood will use digital as it is cheaper, which is fair enough for them. But it will mean that film can be seen and will be seen in an artistic light, which is what it seems everyone is debating here.

I can't say much for independent houses as I know they have got support here in the UK for digital conversion.

And me? Well I may be the only person in the world to say this, but The Hobbit was stunning and the higher frame rate helped with that, the clarity was extraordinary and I really felt like I was in Middle Earth with Bilbo and the Dwarves gallivanting across country. Peter Jackson really pushed the boundaries for 3D with this as well and you could tell that he had not only filmed in 3D directly, but that he had watched it back as it was being filmed, and that made all the difference. Some 3D I have seen are shockingly bad and just a fad, but he knew what he was working with and used it to his advantage.

Oh and being able to see the horrible little hairs etc. well that just made it more life like for me. Kids have enough self esteem issues as it is, if the actors little faults are being picked up I say good!

That's my 2 pennies worth

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, we've finally joined the dark side here -- I've spent this week working with our tech director and a surly, grunting fellow from the digital-cinema company in the installation of a Digital Cinema projection system in our booth. We spent four twelve-hour days getting it in place, and it had its first screenings this weekend.

My first impressions?

I've been around 35mm film my whole life. My uncle was a projectionist dating back to the late forties, and I was in a booth the first time when I was five years old. I've been a projectionist myself, on and off, since the late '70s. I know film. I like film. You might even say that I love film.

Digital Cinema is not film, and I doubt very much that I will ever love it. I might tolerate it, the way you come to tolerate a dripping faucet or a squeaking hinge in a place you can't get at to fix, but I will never love it. There are several reasons for this.

1. Contrary to what the salesmen tell you, it is not easier to operate. If anything, it's more cumbersome and complicated than film -- there are too many switchers, too many options to choose on the screen, too many things that are locked behind "tamper proof seals" to give a small house like ours the freedom to improvise that we're used to. And in our booth, it requires a lot more steps to get from one "event" to the next than it did with film. This is especially true for "alternative content," which Hollywood *doesn't want you to see* because it cuts into their pie. Thus their system going out of its way to make it complicated and difficult to get it to their projectors.

2. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, cheaper to operate. Even aside from the cost of initial installation and setup, it will burn thru $1200 xenon lamps twice as fast as our film projectors did. That adds up fast, quite aside from me having to risk life and limb changing the damn things every time they wear out. It also doesn't "save us the cost of a projectionist," since our booth still has to be attended to control the sound, the lights, and the curtains.

3. The picture quality lacks the life of film. It's clear and sharp, but it's also quite dead, like a videotaped soap opera. There is no energy to the images, they just lie there on the screen. And they're too detailed. Nothing is gained by seeing every pore in an actresses' surgically-corrected nose. This is a more subjective opinion than the previous two points, but I think anyone who stops to think about what I'm saying will end up agreeing with it. People shouldn't have to spend $8.50 to look at the sort of lifeless, overdetailed picture they'd get on a big TV set. A theatre isn't a big TV set.

So, there you go. I knew what we were getting into before we got into it, but we didn't have any choice. Hollywood had us -- and every other small, independent theatre -- over a barrel, and we had to play the game by their new rules or they wouldn't let us play at all.

But we *have* refused to remove our film projectors, unlike most theatres, and will continue to use them for special revival screenings. And I suspect they'll still be in first-rate condition when the sixth generation of digital projectors has been obsoleted to the toxic-waste pile.

 

[Worf]

^^^^^^^

Very interesting. I've a close friend of 30 years who owns an independent "art house" Cinema. We discussed this very topic over a year ago. She's made the switch as well with some if not all of her theatres (www.spectrum8.com). I'm seeing her tonight and I'll show her your comments. I'll be interested to see what she says in response.

Worf

 

[Doctor Strange]

Well Lizzie, at least you are going to stay open. With the near-death of film as a distribution medium, little local theaters like the Strand don't really have a lot of choice in the matter.

And I hear you about the quality of digital projection! While it's great that the scratches, dirt, film breaks, and reel-change marks are gone... something has been lost. (*) Photochemical film projection has a sense of live presence that digital video, for all its resolution, doesn't. It's pretty much the same thing we observed when CDs supplanted LPs: CDs are much harder to damage, but their sound often lacks a certain presence and vitality that old analog records had (and have, for those of us who still play LPs). Like almost every technological evolution, something unique is lost in the transition.

(* Let me say for the record that while many issues have been made idiot-proof by these digital projection systems, things like getting a properly framed and masked image still seem beyond most neo-projectionists. There's nearly always some portion of the correct-aspect-ratio image that seems to be off the screen, e.g., often tops of heads that you just know were NOT intentionally cut off by an Oscar-nominated DP!)

 

[Atomic Age]

Around the time of the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark on blu-ray, I went to see it at a local theater, projected digitally at 4k on a 75 foot screen. Now I was a film projectionist for 5 years, and I have shot and edited film as well as digital motion pictures. I'm very experienced with the look of film. If I hadn't known better, I would have thought I was looking at a brand new 70mm blow up of the film. The grain was in tact and it looked for all the world like I was watching projected film.

The digital medium will present exactly what is put into it. If the source material looks like film, so will the projection.

Doug

 

[Doctor Strange]

Interesting piece on a big problem going forward: successful long-term, archival storage of digital media presents a whole new set of issues:

http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/429-film-preservation-20/

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've been saying this for the past twenty years to people in the "old time radio" community, who think that once a recording is "preserved" on a CD-R it's safe to dispose of the master. A lot of those people are waking up to find that their "archival CD-Rs" suddenly won't play anymore.

Digital is not a preservation medium. It's very useful for facilitating access and distribution once a recording has been saved. But that recording needs to be preserved in a pure analog format as well -- or it really isn't preserved. The same applies to film.

 

[John in Covina]

Interesting piece on a big problem going forward: successful long-term, archival storage of digital media presents a whole new set of issues:

http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/429-film-preservation-20/

The answer is to find a way to print all the movies to archival card stock as suggested at the beginning.

 

[rjb1]

My electrical-engineer friends have a name for the inevitable deterioration of digital recordings: "data rot"
Very descriptive, and it gets the idea across, I think.