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I too am a cinephile who grew up with epic presentations (remember the add blitz on Quest for Fire, which stressed the largesse of the presentation). What I wish would have taken off was Maxivision48, which was a practical variant of Showscan. The Maxivision48 system ran at 48fps (twice the amount of a "normal" 24fps film), giving the audience twice the information. But it was backwards compatible, meaning that a movie shot at 48fps, could create standard 24fps prints for theaters that didn't have the Maxivision48 projector add-on. When digital 2K took the lead, my heart sank.
--
Franklin

Ebert on MaxiVision 48

Is digital currently the way to go? I know Roger Ebert is not a big fan of digital. He prefers a system called MaxiVision I know this is an old artical, but has digital film solved these problems, especially when compared to MaxiVision.

Of course, I don't think the movie industry is really interested in quality. They want the conveniences of digital. Again referring to Ebert, he thinks the films of 40 years ago had better standards than today. How often do they shoot 70mm films today?

Film has been an impressive technology for quite some time, this I grant. Kodak did some amazing things.

But Digital is going to overtake it. Not might, not could, and not just because the public is full of stupid people. Digital will overtake film, because digital will enable video with proper frame rates.

It's kind of funny talking to film people about frame rates. Given the general cluelessness of computer people about all things AV (I spent a few weeks working on low latency audio under standard operating systems; it's a nightmare, the entire architecture presumes nobody would want to do more than a thousand things a second), I didn't really expect that I'd find something about motion pictures that film people were ... ahem ... creative about. But, alas. In the era of 60fps gaming, who's backing 24fps imagery?

Film people. They have to; doubling the frame rate doubles the size of the cans, doubles the cost of printing each movie, to say nothing of the effects on production. So they tell stories. "It's dark. The human eye just can't see very high frame rates when the pupil's all big." Or they make it a challenge, "A sign of a master cinematographer is that he can work around this awful framerate...not that you'd be able to detect it anyway."

It's not that film itself can't run at higher framerates -- Maxivision48 was a system that finally fixed some of films most annoying problems -- not only the low framerate, but physical jitter from the motor. You know what? No traction, none whatsoever. They blamed digital, but at some point the entire production line made the call: Nobody needs higher framerates, why try?

(Yes, IMAX is also >24fps. But it's on a massive screen, so the effective fps still isn't fast enough. The bigger the screen, the higher a frame rate you require for panning to seem credible. Too low a frame rate, and objects in Frame 1 become difficult to locate, ten feet away, in Frame 2. But I digress.)

Digital has a reason to make people try. Viewers -- the ones who are actually bringing in money -- don't care at all about lowered expenses to ship 3000 movies; it's not like they're going to see any of the savings anyway. And of course viewers really don't care about the cool security technology being used to prevent the piracy of the video streams. However, viewers "care" about quality. I put that in quotes, because on average they don't, but as a few "experts" rail on digital for having visible pixels and thus looking bad, average viewers, not generally seeing a difference between film and what they're seeing, will "play along" rather than look bad for being unable to perceive the problems. (I know this sounds awful, but it happens all the time in a number of different fields. The irony that the complaints about digital are coming from people with huge home theatre systems w/ MPEG-2 compressed DVD's playing should not be lost on anyone.)

Framerate changes everything.

Seeing large amounts of silky-smooth motion is a noticably different experience. There was a small period in the late 90's where there was still argument about whether the human eye could detect frame rates above 30fps. 3Dfx ended up assembling a demo where the left side of a spinning donut was animating at 30fps, and the right side at 60fps. That ended that debate rather quickly. I expect we'll see the same thing out of digital. Potentially, movies will be run through framerate-upsampling algorithms that intelligently interpolate the motion vectors to derive new frames -- in English, simply by doing compression, the computer knows what's moving where between Frame 1 and Frame 2, so it's not ridiculously difficult to invent Frame 1.5. They'll do a side-by-side for the press, and everyone will ooh and aah.

But what I *actually* expect will happen involves Slashdot favorite Steve Jobs, acting not with his Apple hat, but with his Pixar hat. Pixar will render a movi

Read my comment again, as well as the white paper on the maxivision site. 24 fps films (existing and future) could be distributed _on_film_ at less cost (both in the film production end and on the shipping end) due to the facts that films shot at 24 fps could be printed with "closer" frames, thus removing ~25% of the amount of film needed to display a current-day film.

Or, in short, Maxivision offers signficant savings with minimum infrastructure investment. And existing films even get jitter-free projection.

Think of it as an upgrade of your existing home computer, vs. throwing everything out and buying new. Only hardcore tech geeks think that throwing out the old equipment is the way to go.

As for the full 48 fps Maxivison, "event" films (i.e. summer blockbusters and the studios' oscar hopefuls) would get that treatment. At the scale of investment that goes into those films (paying 20 million for a single actor, for example), the additional cost of using 48fps Maxivision would be "neglible".

As for film "wear-n-tear", the MV48 process should tend to mitigate this effect, due to the high-precision handling that occurs as the film is run through the projector. while this is not "perfect" a la digital, I think most film audiences would prefer scractch/tear/burn artifacts of current film to the blocky digital artfcats of a malfunctioning digital projector. Or a giant screen of nothing should a section of the film get corrupted (you can't just cut out those frames - digital data is fragile in different ways).

As for the 300mm disc you mention, it does not exist yet, either as a working prototype, industrial or a consumer level. If the studios and distributors weren't so mesmerized by the word "digital" they'd realize that they're missing out on a major money-saving opportunity that's available right now, even if they never produced a true 48fps feature.

the site contains a white paper describing the technology in full (goes into much more detail than the thing article), as well as Ebert's testimony to the visual impact of Maxivision.

www.maxivision48.com

You mean Maxivision?

DVD certainly does offer a clearer picture, but that can't be extrapolated to digital projection just yet. It's very bright and the contrast and color are excellent, but I've seen them both, and I think Maxivision is considerably better at this time. However, since it's not "digital" it must be antiquated and not worth the trouble. Besides, wide adoption of digital is economically attractive to studios eventually, since movies will be downloadable instead of deliverable. That, and you won't have to worry about film splicing anymore.

• Todd-AO was originally 65mm negatives shot at 30fps. "Oklahoma!" was filmed that way, as was "Around the World in 80 Days". The trouble with that system was that in order to have the movie shown in non-30fps equipped theaters, a second take of every scene had to be shot at 24 fps. "Oklahoma!" was essentially two movies done side-by-side. Later, Todd-AO was changed to 24fps for compatability, but kept the larger 65mm negative.
• Cinerama used 3 strips of 35mm film running side-by-side at 26 fps. "How the West Was Won" is one movie filmed in that fashion. Compatability was not a problem for Cinerama because in order to show it at all theaters had to install special equipment anyway, so theaters could upgrade to 26 fps at while installing everything else.
• Showscan is a 70mm process done at a whopping 60fps and is currently used for motion-simulator rides and such.
• Maxivision is new system using 35mm film running at 48 fps that solves the compatability problem that plauged Todd-AO by exactly doubling the normal frame rate, thus allowing every-other-frame prints to be made for normal, 24 fps theaters. It also uses an different sized frame area to get a larger negative (and thus more resolution) than ordinary 35mm. So far, no features have been made in MaxiVision.

I have also heard Sony is working on getting their digital cameras to work at higher frame rates. Personally, I think they should strive for higher resolution and color range first.

High Resolution of the digital format? Cute...

The biggest problem with MaxiVision, as far as I can tell, is that anything digital is automatically *better* in most peoples eyes, and since this particular format is still celluloid, it's probably going the way of Betamax, which is unfortunate. I'm sure digital distribution will catch on, and the picture quality will improve exponentially, but right now, this is the leader in projected picture technology right now.

Information from the horse's mouth is here:
MaxiVision's website