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Digital Movies and The Big Screen
Logic Bomb writes: "The New York Times has an extensive article [free reg req] about the move from film, invented in the 19th century, to digital cameras and projection in the movie business. It sounds like the shift is building a lot of momentum, with a nice push from George Lucas' decision to shoot Episode II of Star Wars entirely using digital cameras. The article covers both the technological developments making it possible as well as the business alliances. One neat detail is that if a distribution system based on streaming (instead of data on DVDs, for example) is set up, theaters could show things like live concerts or other performances as they happen. Sounds great to me." Rather neat the impact that George Lucas is making in this area by filming episode II all digital. Could theaters gain back with exclusivity some of what they've lost to Blockbuster and NetFlix? And how soon till the equivalent of soundboard recordings are squished onto MP4 before the credits are through?
Before the Karma Whores kick in:I .html
http://partners.nytimes.com/2000/11/26/arts/26SAB
--- And there it is. ---
Wow...I am really tempted to troll right now, but it would be too easy. Episode II, Natalie Portman.....streaming movies....way way way to easy to make something innappropriate. :)
On topic note: If we had digital streaming....I can see that being a great way for football fans to have big superbowl parties. No place better than a theatre for a massive super bowl party...that is...if you are into that sorta thing. But...besides concerts and stuff...sports would be a big thing for live streaming into theatres.
The anti-salmon
The only solution to this grave problem, it seems to me, is to ensure that digital film is watermarked when recorded, so that if it is modified it is easy to tell. This is the only way we can preserve film as a trustworthy exhibit in the courts of the future.
If we do not, many innocent people will be jailed and many guilty people will get off free. The time to act is now.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
Lucas's statements has been that he wants to release a good DVD, with lots of extras and such. There's no effort involved in VHS rereleases, since they're mostly just shoving the movie onto tape.
Men, Women, and children will be staring at him for hours on end and we will turn the population into a giant mass out to kill Lucas.
I, for one, just can't wait!
I love watching techno-laden art house flix online. But what about the hope that digital film production could open up choice at theaters?
What costs lots of money, upfront, for a movie theater is the ability to pay distros for expensive first run movies. Hence you have the second run movie theater with the $1-$1.50 ticket.
This said, most movie theaters, even those with the expensive tix, make most of their movies through concession stand sales.
So, my hope is that digital filmmaking becomes enough of a popular activity that movie theaters can buy the digital films at low prices. This would allow for many more movie theaters specializing in genre showings, art movies, etc. Even those movie theaters which show major distro stuff could round out their stables with GOOD digital movies instead of B-movies as they do now.
For this to work, the digital producers need to get together and distro on a national scale, reaching out to indie and general movie theaters at cut-rate prices.
Just a note- the Independent Media Centers - my favorite thing to plug on slashdot - is an example of how digital video has already lowered the cost of news authored by multiple sources.
Goat sex free since 2001
"Of course..there is a potential problem doing a movie all digital...you can get the pixelization affect and you don't really get true color the whole time....it is a lot easier for editing and such...but there are problems with pixelization and not having real color. "
You do have a great point there. Anything digital will involve some sort of limitation of resolution and color. The great thing about analog is that the limits are at the top and bottom of the color spectrum, with virtually infinate possibilities in-between. Even 32-bit color doens't make for every possible color.
However, I suppose that with the increased sharpness, the limitations of pixelization and color depth can't be discerned by 99% of the people watching it.
Also, digital filming has many great advantages that make up for any possible trade offs:
1. The 9999th generation copy is as sharp as the first.
2. It will end up being much less expensive.
3. It will be a lot easier to preserve digital films... People could go to a theater in the year 3001 and see Star Wars Episode II in the same sharpness and quality as when it was originally released.
There are a lot of classic films deteriorating now because they exist only in traditional film format.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
The whole SDMI issue should have opened your mind to the fact that watermarking isn't the obvious solution it might appear to be. You're treating it as if it was an already solved problem, and we just need to apply it to digital film. Maybe someday a truly effective digital watermarking method will arrive, but until then let's not pretend it's a solution. In the interim the only reasonable security comes from a combination of software and write-once hardware, like CD-R or WORM.
Technicolor, the largest supplier of movie prints to the industry, has taken a lead role in introducing digital cinema to the public
It's nice to see that at least some companies are embracing new technologies and ideas and migrating into that field, instead of trying to slow its progress.
May I remined everybody that a computer is also a 19th century invention, but we haven't stopped using those. Charles Babbage designed the first programmable computer on paper in the 1800s. It was never built, but a modern computer is fundamentally the same machine.
And what about the wheel? That's a pre-historic invention, but I'm not going to take the wheels off my car anytime soon.
You know, if somebody came up to me and said "Hey, there's this great piece of technology that solves such-and-such problem, you should check it out", the first question out of my mouth is not going to be "What year was it invented?"
That's the lousiest reason I ever heard of for getting rid of a particular piece of technology.
Free Hans!
The November 2000 issue was dedicated to digital entertainment. The article "Digital Cinema is for Reel" covers most of the issues of digital distribution and projection. I think the NYT article is a bit too optimistic about the costs of getting it all in place, in particular the costs to the theaters, which get squeezed more and more by Hollywood.
Now we have 35mm-only, with 5-channel compressed digital sound.
Soon, we'll be moving to HDTV. Yes, that's right, HDTV. That's what Lucas is using for SW Ep. II. He's using a Sony HDTV camera that captures images at 1920x1080, cropped to about 1920x800 to form a widescreen 2.39:1 "scope" image. (Compare that with the resolution of 35mm film, which is equivalent to about 4000x3000 for an anamorphically squeezed "scope" image.) Add to that the fact that the color and contrast ranges of HDTV are smaller than that of film, and you've got a nice step down (yes, down) in picture quality.
Also note that the DLP projectors built by TI are only 1280x1024, so you won't even get to see the full HDTV image if you go see this movie in a theater with digital projection.
All told, this is yet another reduction in quality for theatrical presentations. What's there to be excited about?
Free Hans!
Pixilization on most distribution media is totally un-noticable. The frequency response of your vcr is so much lower than the frequency response of an amateur digital video camera, it is impossible to tell the source once you have transferred to analog tape. As far as color goes, all silver films have their own frequency response due to the fact that the image is layed down by going through dye layers. "True" color is not a really easy thing to get no matter where you go. A 3 ccd camera probably can be made to get as good as a 3 layer silver film if you calibrate the system well. There is and always will be a place for some of the earlier technologies. The heavy silver large plate films of Ansel Adams will be very hard to replicate in any digital format in the near future. The grain size just gives too many "pixels". But for almost all "film" applications, digital is has and will replace silver.
A lot of this problem hinges on a single fact: Analog by nature is in a state of constant flux, think of a curve-like wave in comparision with constant packet-like bundles of binary data. Yes, I know that's a rehash of what many people already know, but consider the finer points of it: Analog can, in fact, be replicated using certain methods of transfer over a network or indeed, on a local host, over the local bus of that host. The trick is to triangulate hexadecimally produced void resultants, so that static resultants in the codec delimiter don't stay at one logical depth the whole time. In other words, we need to retrometricise symbolically compressed equation identifiers in such a way that the resultants of the code interacting with the codec is in a state of flux similar to that of analog motion. Using these methods, we can design octadecimal output tuned theoretical pipes in the software interfaces interacting with the codecs and create logically programmable integrated exchange dividers within the codec interface itself. This will basically eliminate the problem with digital resolution/colour.
Everything is but a number spoken by itself.
What does digital mean? It means it's represented in ones and zeros. But that isn't what people are talking about when they compare film and digital media. They are complaining because digital media is quantized: It is split into little finite segments and chopped to hard values. No one cares how it's stored. Film is quantized as well.
Look at film mechnically, it consists of an array of fiber like strands of photo-reactive material. Some strands are more reactive to Red, some to Green, some to Blue. Chemically each reactive molecule is either exposed or it's not exposed, the exposure is timed so that the number of exposed molicules is purportional to the amount of light hitting it. So the dynamic range of a color is directly releated to the number of reactive molicules within a sufficently small space. The values are quantized, the quantization is non-linear varries by spacial location and the exact thresholds are randomized, but it is still quantized.
Film is also quantized in space. It has a resolution (directly related to grain sized).
So how does film compare to 'digital media'? It has a much lower dynamic resolution for luminance (thus color) compaired to state-of-the art digital stuff, and it's much more expensive to use higher resolution film (you simply use BIG film).
So why isn't digital unargueably better? Because it turns out that the quasi-random quantization of film is *MUCH* more perceptually acceptible then the rigid ordered quantization used by digital media.
Because of this, we use oversampling and dithering. State of the art digital film making using 12bpc (12 bits per color component per pixel) and a resolution several times greater then would otherwise be used for film. When we need to output to display devices with lower resolution and dynamic range we use dithering both in space and on values. With dithering we mix small amounts of 'colored' (frequency filtered) noise into low-order part of the selection of 'high quality' contentent brought into the low quality mix. This increases the percieved quality greatly.
Is digital media today better then film? When you mix in cost as a factor (it always is): YES! Because digital cost so much less then film, you can afford to use sufficent oversampling to make it look better then film of a simmlar price point.
Oh, now I get it!
Thanks, you've made this muddied pond oh so clear... and I thought it was a problem with the flux capacitance of the alloys used -- silly me!
dolt.
Debian - the distro for the sensible Linux user. Now available in 3 delicious varieties!
(A) Remember, live actor footage for SW Ep. II has already been completed. It's long over. Lucas (and company) are spending the next year or two on post-production and effects. For analog film, how do you add in laser blasts, matte shots, lightsaber blades, and other fun stuff? The traditional way involves someone sitting down on the film with a very expensive crayola marker, while the more modern version involves transfering the footage to a computer, doing it digitally, and then spooling it back out. Either way is substantially more difficult than just taking it digital all the way through. It's the same issue as with analog vs. digital LCD monitors. The digital ones have fewer steps, so they are faster, cheaper, and have better pictures.
(B) It takes time to paint in all of those blasters/phasers/lasers. And it takes even more time to piece together all of the various scenes, especially when each scene exists in seven different pieces. Remember the brief shot in the original Star Wars, where Luke is practicing with his lightsaber against the robot ball while Chewie and the droids are playing chess in the background? That shot contained over five different "layers" that had to be put together and synched, and then all alligned with the rest of the footage. That takes a fraction as much time to do when it's all in Adobe Premier (or whatever program LucasFilm uses) than when it's all on celluloid rolls.
(C) Time is money, or so say the beancounters. The time you save by doing development and post production digitally will translate into less money you have to pay your post-production people (good for the studio, bad for the post-production people, which means the major studios will go with it every time), which means higher net profit. In addition, chemical film costs a lot of money. So does the development cost. And then you need the storage space to archive all of it until the movie is finished, and sometimes even then you keep all the bits and pieces. (Lucas did for the original trilogy, which is why they were able to do the Special Edition release.) Digital equipment is not cheap, but once you have your cameras and a few (dozen) DV tapes, you're set. All you need for storage then is a ton of hard disk space, which is now going for a song. You then have perfect reproduction copies of all your footage, and you can reuse the tapes for the next scene, or the next movie. Over the long run, that brings the cost of production down substantially, just as digital still cameras do compared to 35mm film cameras, even if the quality isn't quite as good yet.
We can argue until we're blue in the face about whether the quality of digital film (that's a fairly big misnomer, isn't it?) is noticibly poorer or better than traditional film. But to a studio, quality is irrelevant. (Just look at some of the stuff coming out in theaters.) Time, money, and simplicity are what they work on, and in all three of those categories digital video wins hands down. I expect that for art films and movies without many FX, traditional film or even the "enhansed" film we're starting to see will continue for a long time. But for anything requiring substantial FX or post-production, digital is going to take over, whether we like it or not.
--GrouchoMarx
My other account is CmdrTaco
--GrouchoMarx
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
This only shows your basic confusion of what "32bit" color actually is, and how that relates to the amount of colors the eyes can "see." It's a VERY complex issue, and I suggest you take a longer look at it before declaring it to be as fanciful as vinyl zealotry. It's not- it's a real issue, especially when you start doing things like throwing it up on a huge public screen, using compression and different bit-level pipelines for editing, etc.
From the article:
Still, the first high-definition digital video camera said to be worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster, the one Mr. Lucas used for "Episode II," is now a reality, a result of a six-year collaboration between Lucasfilm and Sony and, more recently, Panavision. What makes it different from other high-definition cameras is that it captures video images at the 24 frames-per-second speed of film, rather than the 30 frames-per-second of conventional video. "In the film world, 24-frame is the de facto standard, and it is much loved and considered integral to the `film' look," said Larry Thorpe, a Sony vice president responsible for the camera's development.
It took Lucasfilm, Sony, and Panavision six years to develop a camera that's only distinguishing characteristic is a shittier frame rate?? I wonder if they have any engineering openings...I could get into a work schedule like that.
Digital movies/theaters are a pretty good idea whos time is coming. They are not however to be forced on people any time soon. I wish 100% digital editing had been mainstream when I was doing some production video editing. Now you can grab a DV camcorder and a PC and do 100% digital video transfers and edit them as you filmed them. I had to fight with taking VHS video (if I was lucky Hi-8) and making it look pretty. You can render and edit shit at radical qualities on your computer but when you have to transfer it to another medium you've got difficulty so keeping the same medium through the entire process of production, post-production, and distrobution makes for some pretty good quality video.
There are very serious problems with this, ones that many people completely disregard. In order to make a 100% digital movie, you need complete vertical integration. This means your cameras need to be digital your editing is all digital and then your distrobution and display is all digital. This is prohibitivly expensive! Digital cameras are getting cheaper indeed and maybe we'll see some 6 megapixel cameras that can deliver 25fps and 36-bit colour (12 bits per colour channel for oversampling). Digital editing is already in place and in some cases can be considered a comodity if you think that even low budget movies can have non-linear digital editing or CGI effects in them. The biggest and most serious barrier is distrobution and display. Do you ship some hude RAID box to theaters like Lucas did with the digital viewings of Episode I? Or do you try to download the literally terabytes worth of video? After you figure out how to get the movie to theaters there is the problem of showing it. The TI DLP projectors in use now are of pretty low resolution and won't scale past 24fps; not only are they pretty locked down in that regard but they are twice and a half more expensive than a single good film projector. DLP projectors can't use the lighting that film cameras use and those things are fucking expensive. Film is high resolution which makes it easier on the eye to watch on a large screen. You can of course really oversample digital video to emulate the analog-ness of film. That in turn adds another layer of complexity to the digital video because the projectors become that much more expensive and the video is that much larger due to the extraneous data. Theaters are already fucked because a good number of them are on the border of bankrupsy. How can these companies that can't afford shit afford to revamp all of their theaters with really expensive new projectors? Small theaters are going to be completely left out because they exist on even smaller margins than big chains and new projectors would be way too much for them. You've also got to take into consideration that studios probably won't be making digital copies of their old movies any time soon so the theater by your college isn't going to have a Kevin Smith festival or be able to have that money making Rocky Horror late-night screening if they replace all of their projectors with new fangled ones. No infrastructure == slow transition.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
>> What's there to be excited about?
>
> Oh, I dunno, crystal clear quality?
>
> You still listen to records, don't you?
But you're missing the point that you're actually getting much less quality. Yes, digital instead of film means that there won't be the occasional specks of dust on the print. But there'll be less picture resolution.
It's like this: Imagine you're given the choice between two images to work with. One of them is taken with a digital camera and gives you a 1024x768 16bpp picture with no dust or other analogue issues. The other was taken with a film camera, and gives you something like 4000x3000 with better-than-32bpp, but there may be small dust specks. I'd want to work with the film image, because there's more to work with and a few dust imperfections can be fixed--if they're even noticeable.
As for your remark about records versus CDs, that's not fair because CDs give sound quality almost equal to that of vinyl, but with the advantages of being digital and easier to take care of. But, resolution of digital video cameras isn't nearly the equal of 35mm film cameras. The right analogy would be comparing a record to a low-quality mp3 recorded at only 112kbps. Sure, it's digital. Sure, most people won't notice the sound difference. But a lot of people *will* notice the sound difference, and it's a huge step down.
Roger Ebert is one of the most consistent critics of digital film and digital projection. He says they're wonderful for independent projects and for films that big studios won't agree to produce. And he's right--they're great for that. But if it's a major film with an actual budget, it should be shot on film. I think he's right. Film has a much better, less harsh look than video, too. Video is often sharper, but not as true with its treatment of colors and contrast. But the killer is that video resolution can't touch film. What happens 50 years from now, when we're moving to HDTV-2? It will surely outstrip the limits of video resolution. Lucas's new pet all-video Star Wars saga will look pathetically scaled-up. Yet, anything shot on film will probably still need to be scaled *down* to fit the new standard.
Technology progresses, and one day probably soon there will be a digital video camera that can rival the quality of film's resolution and color. But that time is not now. Shooting on digital video is pathetically shortsighted, unless you think resolution will never, ever get better than current HDTV formats. Where a budget demands, fine, go for digital video. But, film is better. And yes, sitting at a theater, you *can* tell the difference between a real film and one that's being shown digitally.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
It doesn't sound cold and lifeless to me. But even if it did, I'd prefer it over the constant hiss of static present in most analog recordings.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
I'd want to work with the film image, because there's more to work with and a few dust imperfections can be fixed--if they're even noticeable.
Sorry, I'd want to work with the digital as long as it looked better, lasted longer, and offered the other perks of digital works. That's why I use a good digital camera instead of an awesome film camera.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
If the theatre distribution system were to change to digital streaming of some sort, this might pose a significant advantage for small time low-budget films to be available to audiences. Think about it; as it is today, a theatre company will only show a film on it's screens repeatably, and hope that enough people will show up. I've been in cinema rooms with as few as seven people in them during off peak hours or when the movie wasn't a fresh release.
After all, the theatre knows that seven tickets are better then one, and since it has the film at hand, it shows it again for the additional marginal revenue.
But what if an underutilized cinema screen could be showing any current movie in existance [at least, more recent ones that have the benefit of being digital]? This could add significantly to the competiveness of the theatres by alowing them to diversify their offerins significantly. A group of 7 to 25 people who want to see some particular low-budget or subversive art film could get together and bid as a group for a desire to reserve a screen at a certain time. Both the theatre wins by offering exactly what it's customers democratically bid on, and the customers win, by having an enormous expansion of the available material in the theatre.
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man sig
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
Much loved?
I think Larry Thorpe has been smoking too much crack. One of the really annoying things about film is the low frame rate. It requires cinematographers to avoid certain types of shots, since they will look terrible at 24 FPS. Higher frame rates, such as the 60 FPS format promoted by Douglas Trumbull, look much better.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I just hope studios don't eliminate celluloid altogether. Just as there is an undefinable "warmth" to vinyl for some people, there is also a certain indestinguishable quality celluloid has that makes it enjoyable to watch. I saw Waydowntown, a Canadian indie movie, which was shot almost entirely on digital, with a few scenes of celluloid. You should check it out to see if you can tell which scenes were on (real) film. I found it odd that the difference in the scenes wasn't so much quality as it was tone. Diversity of filming techniques has been used to great effect many times before (eg. Natural Born Killers). I think digital film will be most effective if it is used as another film making tool, instead of a replacement for celluloid and traditional film entirely.
Of course it's allready becoming apparent that digitial film is making appearances in indie films much more than traditional movies because of the cost benefit, and also the general experimentation which is usually present in indies. It will be interesting to see movie making become as prolific and accessible as music making is.
Instead of focusing on the technology, why don't they focus on the story? I heard Episode I was a terrible, terrible movie story-wise.
Not to mention that they over-marketed that movie. Too much marketing; I refuse to EVER see that movie on the grounds that I could probably piece it together scene by scene if I took the time to remember all of the movie, game, pizza, and soda commericals... c'mon, I had Darth Maul staring at me from my Mountain Dew cans for MONTHS!!
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evil adrian
evil adrian
I am working on Star Wars II and just want to clarify that it has not been shot with all digital cameras. The digital cameras have one critical flaw, they only shoot 24 frames per sec. So any thing that needs to be sped up or slowed down (which is quite a lot of shots) was shot with film.
Think about this, if movies are being shot in HDTV resolution, and people start getting HDTV, then why should anyone go to the theatre when an implementation of Pay Per View would be cheaper to deliver? Where is the actual service of the movie theatre then? better sound? Lots of people have 5.1 setups in their house. Better image quality? I don't think so. The only reason to go would be because the movies would come out there first, which wouldn't be at all neccesary, it would just a be a blatant attempt to suck money out of individual people. HDTV, and digital movies will change alot of things for sure.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
But, on the other hand, the NUMBERS for digital video are much less than analog pictures. How can one compare 1280 lines HDTV pictures with the 7500 lines achieved by 35mm film?
Yes, but will shooting SWEII on Digital prevent it from being as totally crap and overhyped as the last pile of steaming wookie turd that morons queued up for hours to see and pretended they liked ?
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Not by a long shot. A major studio release, shot in HDTV, starring Kathleen Turner, Gabriel Byrne and Sting was done in...ready for this...1987.
Julia and Julia was shot using the Sony 1" 1030i format as confirmed by Leonard Maltin.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
George Lucas' claim to be the first in this area is limited to the very qualifier-laden "the first major motion picture, shot on the new 1080i/24p Sony camera and projected digitally". Every single part of that statement has been done by other film-makers. HDTV shot films are all over the place. I attended an HDTV Film Fest just last week (most of the films sucked, but that's hardly the point).
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
The more digital screens that are up, the better.
I know one of the expenses for studios that produce 3D only is the converting from digital to film.
This process reverses the problem that other studios going from film to digital have. The color correction is a big one. I know that we have to look at it being a big factor for taking our digital content to film.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Right now in the movie industry there is a big commotion about digital cinema. Everyone agrees that it is an increadible technology and everyone belives that it is the way of the future. However the problem is that no one wants to have to pay for it. Right now in the industry there are basically 2 things that are holding up widespread digital projection.
The first hurtle the industry must overcome is the security issue; how do they prevent some punk from stealing their movies? This has been addressed in other threads already and the choices that have been thrown around the industry are as follows:
1. Ship the movie on some sort of digital media to theatres instead of cans of film. Pro: Just as secure as current methods. Con: Not much cheaper than current methods since every screen still has to have an item shipped to it.
2. Send the movie electronically and then store it locally at the theatre. Pro: Expensive to start out with since each theatre will need an extensive network upgrade but VERY cheap over the long run since once the groundwork is layed movie transmission will be virtually free. Cons: "Hackers" could steal the movie during transmission and release the movie on the internet before it opens in the theatres. (gasp!!)
What the industry is waiting for is a way to transmit movies without the need to worry about people tapping in to their system and stealing the movie. Another hurtle they have to overcome is the file transfer method. Sure Titan AE was transfered digitally between coasts perfectly fine but that was just one theatre being sent one movie. What happens when you have thousands of theatres each needing to download 3-4 movies weighing in at a couple of gigs a piece? How many transfer errors do you think there will be? Granted every theatre won't be accessing every movie all at once but it will still be a huge load on any network.
This however can be overcome, network technology is being improved almost daily and there are other options such as splitting the movie up into smaller chunks which are then combined after recieving all of them very much like a rar archive. This also has the added benefit of additional security since someone would need to steal all the parts to the movie in order to watch it. This however is actually not the biggest hurtle the theatre industry needs to overcome before digital projections becomes commonplace.
The real obsticle holding theatres back is the question of who is going to pay for the upgrades to the theatres. The exhibitors (theatre owners) believe that the distributors should pay for the upgrade since they are the ones who will see the immediate benefit from digital distribution. Distributors on the other hand think the exhibitors should pay for the upgrade since it's their theatre. This is the true hurtle that the industry must overcome before digital projection can become feasable, someone can develop the most incredible encription scheme known to man that is uncrackable but it won't make a lick of difference if only 1/20th of the theatres are equipped with digital projection capabilites. However if the distributors and exhibitors can come to a finacing agreement than the securtiy issues would be dealt with quickly by both parties.
Of course these are just the ramblings of an asst. theatre manager with too much time on his hands, so who knows how it will turn out...
Digital movie making is not about picture resolution and quality. It is not really about using optical effects instead of digital effects. It is mostly about film distribution.
Making 1000 prints of a movie for opening night costs a lot of money, say several million for a big release. Doing the same thing on digital costs significantly less. Thats really why the studios want to go digital. Even a cheaply filmed movie gets expensive really quickly. You can shoot a movie for $4000 but you can't release it for less than several hundred thousand.
As for effects, well yes, all digital means you save a generation in editing but the studios don't really care about that. All effects today are done on computers, effects are not optically composited. They are digitally composited. Switching to digital means you don't have to transfer the footage to digital to do the effects work and then transfer the footage back to show the movie. Cutting out this annoying and time consuming process is probably the real reason Lucas is so keen on digital. It makes the effects heavy movies he likes to make significantly easier to create.
The big question is how good is a movie which is shot and edited digitally, like Ep 2, going to look when shown on 35mm film at the local theatre. Remember, there are limitations on current filming techniques too (you can't read signs on most moving objects for example) so hollywood is not considering this for the look of the end product.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
You do realize that this is *Star Wars* you're talking about, right? Take a look at the technology used to create the original Star Wars (the costumes and effect), and take a look at the technology used to advance the story line (the map of the Death Star and C3P0 with wires sticking out everywhere).
The Original Star Wars isn't very impressive compared to contemporary offerings on either side, yet people still enjoy watching the movie. People who will enjoy the next Star Wars (not I -- I wasn't impressed by Episode 1) will still enjoy it in 50 years despite it's campy quality -- afterall, that's what the series is all about -- a campy space opera!
You're also forgetting something else about the advancement of technology. The current limit to visual advancement is the human eye. We can't see faster that 60 fps, we can't distinguish more than 16.77 millions colors, etc. Anyone know what the maximum resolution the human eye can distinguish between might be?
--Cycon
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
Actually, I know the answer to this one. Some of the gamers don't realize that they can only see 60 fps, they just assume that a larger number of frames == better, so they go ga-ga over one-ups-manship.
Of course, the real benefit to having >60 fps on a video card is that during complex scene renders (when you have lots of people on the same screen, or lots of explosions) then the video card is harder-pressed to render all of that detail, and the framerate will drop starkly. The higher your maximum framerate, the higher the framerate will remain when the scene gets complex.
Also, bear in mind that gamers are also looking for higher and higher resolution at that magic 60 fps number. Currently, the highest-end gaming cards can get 1600x1200 @ 60fps ... but once you have many characters on the screen at once, the slowdown is going to be visibly noticable as the framerate drops.
--Cycon
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms