Are Digital Movies Really Better than Analog?

Beatlebum asks: "I have watched two digital presentations of AOTC, the first at AMC1000 San Francisco and the second at the Metreon S.F. I did notice a few digital artifacts; however, what bothered me most was the lack of clarity of the colors. Many scenes seemed to be very slightly foggy. I expected the colors to be clear, crisp and rich. The Matrix Reloaded trailer looked significantly better in this regard. Am I crazy or did anyone else notice the same thing? I'm especially interested in hearing from those of you that have seen both analog and digital versions."

Comments

Can't complain

[cei]

Well, you really can't compare the two if you haven't seen both. Truth be told, I've only seen it digitally -- 4 times projected, 3 times on hi-def monitors -- but I'm pretty happy with the color.

I could see it analog, but probably won't as my favorite local theatre is showing it digitally too. (why see it an 8th time? My wife hasn't caught it yet; and I haven't seen it in a crowded theatre.)

You're not going to get me to say digital is better, because like I said, I haven't seen both. But I do think it does the picture justice.

Re:Can't complain

[dimator]

I haven't seen it in a crowded theatre.

You better hurry... I saw it opening night, and again on saturday night, and the crowd was considerably less enthusiastic the second time. This wasn't a cow-town, tiny theater either; it was the Fox in westwood.

Re:Can't complain

[pete-classic]

I saw it at 12:01 on opening morning. Lots of cheering and all. At 10:00 that morning the theater was half full, and there was very little audience participation.

Something odd at the first showing though, the theater filled with nervous laughter during Anakin's dream scene. Anyone else experince that? I think it was the giant nipple waving around on the screen.

Oh, and will you do a "special" 1.0 release of QT Mozilla? Can you start linking against a newer version of QT?

-Peter

Also worth noting...

[cei]

If you saw the feature digitally, the trailers were digital also. So if you liked the color in the Matrix trailer, then you liked the color of a digital projection. The trailers were loaded in a playlist before the feature (along with the THX logo, the DLP logo, and perhaps one other depending on which playback device was in use by that particular theatre.)

Re:Also worth noting...

[Domini]

The trailers were displayed digitally, perhaps. The real question: was the entire production digitally? I think not.

George Lucas wanted the original master to be done digitally to improve the lifespan of the film. Thus the film will never need to be digitally remastered, and will never fade.

Perhaps other films have more brilliant full colours because they are expected to fade? But this is only un uneducated guess.

Re:Yeah. That's the problem with digital

[OneFix]

I was under the impression that IMAX was just 70mm run sideways.

No, as this link shows, it is actually 3 times bigger than 70mm film ... however, the film runs at such a high speed that signifigant part of the film is "wasted" on the camera spin-up and to keep the cameras small enough to lug around, they only get 15 minutes of film per reel.

This as well as a few other reasons is why most IMAX films are under an hour long and feature little or no scripted characters (documentary films). Why documentary...because you can't really get a dolphin to perform better for a different take...

For insight into IMAX film making, try one of the many IMAX DVDs with commentary...one of the best to decribe the unique IMAX film making process is Super Speedway: Mach II Edition ...

The IMAX film format is actually the best quality you can find for dvd transfers.

Like it or not, anything that lucas used on EP2 will not compare to the film quality of IMAX!!!

Render unto Digital that which is Digital...

[Chasing Amy]

...and render unto 35mm that which is analogue.

What you noticed is actually the *opposite* of what is generally the case regarding *AotC*. Mo0st likely, if the digital projections looked worse in some way--more blurry, less saturated, etc.--than the film projections, then this is entirely the fault of the digital projector or some other element in the theater being set wrong. It's probably that the digital projector's settings were not all adjusted optimally, since the tech is so new. Hell, my local multiplex often sets their standard film projctors sub-optimally, and that tech is ancient...

The fact is, assuming the digital projector is set up correctly, *AotC* will look better on a digital screen because it is an entirely digital movie. The masters are digital, and when you see a digitally projected version, it should be as pristine as the masters (or nearly so, if resolution has to be adjusted). If you see a standard 35mm print of the film, you're seeing a digital->analogue conversion which willn not be as crisp and vibrant.

This is not true of showing most films, though, because most are primarily shot on film and not digital--even films with a lot of digital effects everywhere are generally primarily film. This has the advantage that a 35mm print has a far superior resolution than even the special custom digital camera which Sony made for George Lucas to shoot his digital movies with. 35mm film also has much greater sensitivity to a broader spectrum of colors than current digital cameras will allow--50 years of development on the color film stock front has produced some amazing things. So, while there is generational loss in th analogue->analogue transfer from master to new print, it hardly matters since the resolution is so vastly greater than the resolution of digital, and since the color spectrum is wider than current digital video camera sensitivities. This is why people like film critic Roger Ebert, and even me, can't stand digital projection for 35mm movies--even with my 20/100 vision, I can see the inferior resolution and color saturation of a film that was intended for 35mm when it's projected digitally on a very big screen.

So, naturally, it would seem that all-digital films like the new *SW* movies and digital animation like *Shrek* should best be viewed on digital projectors, while movies which are primarily 35mm are bet viewed on a traditional 35mm projector. And the fact is, until digital technology makes resolutions and color spectra approaching that of 35mm film possible both on the shooting and the projecting ends, I don't believe digital should be adopted as the standard.

Don't get me wrong--the time will come to go digital. But until its resolutions and color sensitivities can truly rival 35mm, that time is not now.

As an aside, here's film critic Roger Ebert's take--he's an outspoken critic of current digital projection for films shot on 35mm, but he shows an even-handedness when it comes to allowing that digital films naturally look better on digital projectors: http://www.suntimes.com/output/eb-feature/cst-ftr- star15.html http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/2002/0 5/051001.html

The fact is, except for all-digital special effects films like the *SW* movies, the current push for digital is coming out of economic penny-pinching rather than better quality. There was a time when Hollywood was interested in greater quality and experimented with impressive 70mm filmstocks and 48fps speed. 35mm and 24fps stuck around because it's cheaper, albeit less visually stunning. And now digital, which has 1/5 to 1/7 the resolution and less color sensitivity at the moment, is chomping at the bit. For all-digital special effects flicks likw *SW* and *Shrek*, naturally it makes sense since rendering isn't yet done at very high resolutions (compred to 35mm). For other films, it doesn't, especially when projected on a rally impressive screen where the resolution, saturation, and intensity will be exposed for their inferiority.

Re:Render unto Digital that which is Digital...

[dada21]

Great post, but your theories on resolution needing to be higher are really flawed...

I do a lot of "hobby" work in the home theater field, and I have to say, a crappy old CRT-based video projector will run circles around almost any LCD, DLP, or other digital projector. Why?

Not resolution at all, but CONTRAST. The resolution factor is a must, but to say that 35mm film is "higher resolution" than the DLP's they use in high end digital cinema is flawed as well. Maybe the original masters are pristine, but the film we're watching is flawed because it could be 5 or 6 generation, and it's going to be old (scratches, warps, missing spliced frames, etc). Also, the film has a definite grain that can be seen even on 70mm prints. With digital, it's the same movie, every time.

The problem with digital is that the color gamut is not as great as film (although soon will be beyond what film can produce at the generations of film we watch). The other problem is the contrast generally sucks. The reason old low resolution CRTs (worth $500 used) that are properly calibrated can look better than LCDs that cost $50,000 is because the color gamut is better, the contrast is WORLDS away from digital, and there is no screen door effect.

In the next few years, I believe digital theatres will overwhelm analog, mostly because of the cost controls the studios can impose (controlling how often the film is played), distribution costs being lower, and eventually, the medium will be better quality.

Already we're into our third generation of digital theatre projectors, and the ones that are up and coming just literally blow film away in many ways, with contrast, and yes, even resolution getting better at each step.

Re:Render unto Digital that which is Digital...

[Chasing Amy]

> It is my understanding that for some time, feature films have edited digitally. Not like they digitized
> it, came up with an EDL, the used the EDL to cut the film, but rather that they digitize it, edit it, the
> print back to film.

No, it is not the standard practise to digitize the film and then edit the digital copy and then print it back to 35mm. This has been done, but is not the norm last time I looked, being reserved for almost-all-digital-effects films. Most films will thankfully never fit this bill, focusing on story content rather than special effects--Ithink this has been Lucas' downfall with his prequels; he focuses on the digital effects to the detriment of the dialogue, acting, and all the rest that goes into a great film.

Aside from which, film can be digitized at a higher resolution than current digital cameras can capture, since specialty equipment has been developed for years to do just that.

> I don't know what exactly was done for star wars.

*AotC* was filmed with a special digital camera made by Sony especially for George Lucas--state of the digital art. Then the rendered scenes and characters and the digital film of the live actors were all edited together and then special effects where the live actors interact with the digital characters and scenery were added to that. The resulting "masters" are completely digital, and have been at every step of the process; IIRC the "masters" of *AotC* and *PM* are digitally preserved across a bunch of magneto-optical, optical, and magnetic media, redundantly, for posterity.

> But a lot of digital work isn't done at the highest quality possible.

Absolutely true. To cut costs, rendering is typically done at only a quarter or a half of film's full resolution. The result is usually not noticeably inferior, since that's still a decenmt resolution and if done well will look good even when printed back to 35mm. However, there are many exceptions--like Gladiator. Its digital elements, like the Coliseum background and its digital audience, looked very poor to people with a discerning eye when projected at theaters--muddy, indistinct, undersaturated, and not matching up seamlessly with the action in the foreground. It was all the more noticeable in the action sequences which were shot deliberately at a lower FPS (I think offhand 18fps) in order to produce that famous "tearing" effect during some fight sequences. And, a lot of films with lower-quality digital effects just look *awful* when projected onto a really huge theater screen, even if the effects were done really well and would have looked pristine on a smaller theater screen like you find at your average multiplex.

At any rate, yeah, digital effects are typically done at far less than full 35mm resolution. It makes me long for the days of special effects artists who'd spend weeks on a single detailed model... Today, the same effect is usually done digitally, with the loss of a "real" object and its associated weight and presence. Digital characters and effects often look less realistic precisely because they lack weight and mass, or don't seem to be effected by gravity, or other things which would just "be there" if they were being done with highly detailed real-world special effects artists at the helm instead of CGI artists.

> I think that film is a much more flexible medium for the forseable future, but most people don't work in a way to take advantage of it.

You're right in general terms. A whole lot of movies are using lower-res digital effects, or not using their 35mm capabilities to their utmost. But then again, I think we have to look to those few films that really do transcend anything digital has to offer today. Look at a truly great, well-shot film like *American Beauty*. Its cinematographer has had 50 years of experience behind a 35mm camera, and it shows--no scene is shot poorly, the lighting is so perfect as to generally not be noticed, and the effects that different film stocks and camera settings have have been used to great advantage. Digital (except of course in the scenes where a consumer-level DVcam was used to show the kids' use of that camera) would never have produced that richness and texture--things would have looked, well, more ordinary. In addition, while digital special effects had to be used for some scenes for obvious reason--the rose petals flying from Mena Suvari's chest, e.g.--most things were done with good old-fashioned "real" effects. The scene in the steamy bathroom between Spacey and Suvari, for example, used real steam and real lighting effects. Theoretically, digital effects could have been used to produce steamy fog and lighting effects--but it ouldn't have looked so real and so striking as when done with the real thing.

Let's also not forget that film just has a "look" of its own, distinct from either digital processes or "real life." That look of film is what we're more or less used to seeing on the big screen and even on the small screen when it comes to movies. It's stylized in a soft, "natural" way, due in great measure to the lighting required when working with film. Digital film seems to me more harsh and less forgiving, showing off every blemish and making things look like harsh reality rather than the escapism of a film. This can be used to great effect, as in the boot-camp war movie *Tigerland*, which was shot on digital and looks the better for it because the harshness and "reality look" of digital matches the harshness and eality of the situation. But in most cases, that "harsh" look would be far less welcome. Even George Lucas has gone to great lengths to make his digital movies "look" like they were shot on film. Ironic.

> Starwars would have been one film that should have though.

I do miss the old *Star Wars* movies. First off, because as much attention was paid to dialogue and character development and acting as was paid to the special effects. I think this is Lucas' biggest problem with his latest films. But I also miss that the special effects were "real," done with very elaborateloy detailed life-size models of aliens and real people inside costumes--because they have a weight and real presence, and little unintentional movements which make them look natural and real. You don't get unintentional movements with digital effcts, and consequently they often look unrealistic, and they always lack realistic responses to gravity since weight is very complex and doesn't usually figure into digital effects yet except as a "guesstimate" by some animators. Before digital effects can look realistic, gravity and mass will have to be accurately modelled for digital elements instead of guessed at by an animator.

just my opinions though. :-)

How far we've come

[ptomblin]

3 years ago I was working on a project that took film, scanned it at 4kx3k resolution with laser scanners, did digital post production at that resolution, and then printed it back on film at 4kx3k resolution. The powers that be at this company canned the project, even though it's still the best in its class, because it was expensive and slow compared to the lower resolution competition. People who care about quality, like the people doing post production on all three Lord of the Rings movies, are still using our software even though we pretty much abandoned them.

3 years later, I'm back at the same company, and now we're working on a way of delivering digital movies to theatres, and presenting those movies on the screens. Guess what the resolution for the first generation is? 1280x1024. A resolution I consider barely adequate on a 17 inch monitor, and wouldn't even put on a 21 inch monitor, and they've going to blow it up to a huge theatre screen. Yuck.

Re:How far we've come

[Gordonjcp]

Thinking... what would be the actual DPI on a movie screen?

For a 50-foot screen, with a 1280-pixel wide print, each pixel would be about half an inch across. OK, you'd probably not see it if you were a good way back, but in the front row you would see individual pixels. They'd be about the size of your fingernails.

Re:Yeah - digital SUCKS

[sphealey]

Vacuum tubes are still the way to go.

There is an assumption in modern Western society that

newer = more advanced = better

When dealing with stuff that directly hits the human sensory system and/or is directly operated by human beings, this is not necessarily the case. Analog gauges are superior to digital readouts in most control applications (e.g. auto speedometers), for example.

However, as Julian Hirsch pointed out 10 years ago, once a digital method of doing something becomes available, it quickly becomes less expensive to manufacture than the analog technology, and shortly thereafter drives the analog technology off the market. That is not to say that the digital technology is better than the analog, just cheaper to manufacture and easier to modify.

sPh

artifacting

[.@.]

DLP will NOT look better than normal film stock. The reason is simple: DLP uses thousands of tiny, independent mirrors to project the image. On a screen the size of a public movie theater, you're going to see all sorts of aliasing, because you'll be able to discern each individual mirror that makes up the image.

This is normal for DLP; it always has been. Go back and research home theater discussion groups for the past two years or so, and read all the complaints about DLP.

I saw AotC at the AMC1000 also. It was fuzzy. It was blurry. IT WAS ALIASED. And it was all because of DLP, not because something wasn't "set up properly". That's the way DLP looks. It's aliased. It's pixellated. It does NOT look better than good quality film stock.

Re:artifacting

[dada21]

You can't compare high end DLP with home theater DLP as they do in the discussion groups (I attend to all of these regularly).

The home versions use a single DLP with a spinning color wheel to "recreate" the colors you need. The professional versions use 3 DLPs with a prism to get more exacting colors.

The home theater versions use weaker bulbs, much lower quality lenses, and power supplies that all contribute to lower contrast ratios. The digital theater projects use MLA's and other techniques to extract as much information as possible to the screen.

Last month, I saw a DVD movie (basically 720x480 resolution) upconverted to 1080p (1920x1080 resolutino) and then projected on a Sony G90 CRT projector, in a guy's basement, onto a 140" horizontal screen.

I was literally blown away, and I know good quality when I see it in theatres. This low resolution DVD absolutely gave me the most breathtaking, goosebumping movie experience I had ever seen, and it was in this guy's basement, accomplished with less than $40,000 in hardware.

If Star Wars takes 1280x1024 resolution (which is 4+ times higher resolution than the upconverted DVD I watched), its not resolution that will bother me, not even on a 80 foot wide screen...

Remember this movie was shot on VIDEO

[Llama Keeper]

An important point that everyone seemed to miss is that AotC was shot on Video, not on film. This is really a major step forward for the movie making industry. Shooting on Video instead of film should decrease post production time and expense while preserving quality. I got a demo of a Hi-Def Editor using Hi-Def monitors and the fact that this wasn't film pbly wouldn't have been noticable had I not been aware that it was video not film. When shooting Hi-Def you get almost the Same color-space and definitly the same (if not better) quality without having to pull down to video the edit and then back up to final cut it. Long Live Video. The real reason peopel think digital is inferior is the digital projection not the quality of the output "film".

Is digital better?

[mosch]

Digital projection in it's current incarnation, DLP, is terrible. Theoretically the color depth should be fine, the spec is for 45 bits of color, though AoTC demonstrated well that apparently they don't use all those bits, because at least at the theatre I was at, the blacks weren't very black.

The real problem is the incredibly shitty resolution, 1280x1024. 35mm film is roughly equivalent to 20 million pixels, a wee bit more than digital. Watch a slow pan of a detailed scene carefully (the waterfall scene would work), and you'll actually see everything moving pixel by pixel.

Oddly enough, the digital projector should be able to get an equivalent or better contrast ratio than film. 35mm film is generally specced to get about 1000:1, but the Barco DLP Projectors can get up to 1250:1.

The storal of the ,mory is that contrary to popular opinion, adding the word 'digital' to a technology does not make it better.

Re:Is digital better?

[divbyzero]

Is this true? Is the resolution used for projecting AOTC in DLP really 1280x1024? That's horrible! Stretching 640x480 resolution to display on a 21" monitor is bad enough. Stretching a conventional monitor's resolution to display on a theatre screen is just plain ludicrous.

When I went to see AOTC last night, I noticed that the pixellation was rather bad during the closing credits, but wasn't distracted by it during the main movie. I guess I was just too interested in the film itself to care.

ATOC digital bad; TPM digital good

[crow]

I remember seeing TPM in New Jersey on a digital projector, and it was incredible--the best picture I've ever seen.

Last night I saw ATotC in Framingham, MA in the digital theater, and it just wasn't as good as I would expect from analog. Sure, there was no bouncing in the picture, but there was pixelization. It was really obvious during the credits, and was distracting in some of the other scenes.

I'm not sure what the processes involved were, but clearly digital can produce an outstanding picture, but due to the costs involved, they aren't using the technology necessary to produce the best picture possible.

Re:ATOC digital bad; TPM digital good

[divbyzero]

Hmm, I probably saw you there last night. :-)
I'm glad your assessment matches mine.

Re:Analog film looked fuzzy

[HughsOnFirst]

R2D2 has always been the focal point of this series.
Think about it, which character has been involved in every major plot point ?

the credits...

[boopus]

I saw it digitally at the Van Ness AMC and from the seccond row center thought just about everything looked great. What stood out the most, however, was when the credits rolled. You could see the pixels of the text moving up the screen. I assume that all credits are done digitally these days, so it would seem that the problems stem from the projector, not source material.

The thing with digital is that at this point it may not be better than film, but soon enough the resolution will surpass film. The purists will still complain about motion blur and "warmer colors" however...

Very soon, digital projection is going to be very affordable compared to film when you include the cost of making a print of a movie. If it costs less, the quality available today would be plenty to keep the average movie goer happy to keep buying popcorn.

Re:the credits...

[boopus]

Yeah, but this is a free(ish) market economy. In the end, something will give. They may be at an impass now, but it won't take that long... Effiencies will be exploited.

Re:the credits...

[dubl-u]

Effiencies will be exploited.

Is that the new euphemism for fans? Or consumers in general?

Re:AotC had an advantage over tPM

[.@.]

Careful; HD is not digital, and digital is not HD. The two reference separate aspects of delivery. One deals with resolution and presentation, the other deals with encoding and delivery.

This already causes problems in the HD space, with cable companies and home entertainment vendors using the two interchangeably, and it's dangerous. "Digital" can be whatever resolution you want, and can be presented just as (if not more) crappily than analog (just look at digital cable, where the cable co's have used the "higher quality" to instead lower the resolution in order to squeeze more bandwidth out of the available pipes).

What Lucas is on about is digital encoding and delivery. One only has to walk into a DLP cinema and watch the dreck that is the poorly-presented AotC to see that it's NOT high-definition by any stretch of the imagination.

Re:yes...

[divbyzero]

Um, wasn't Yoda CG in this episode? As in, Frank Oz only did the voice, not the usual puppetry?

Re:Is digital better? [Exaggeration]

[dada21]

The only 35mm film that can get 20 million pixels worth of resolution is a single snap frame of a perfectly lit scene, shot a tripod and high end lens that weighs a ton.

Add motion, irregular lighting, and the vibrations of the camera onto the film media as it passes, and you really end up with somewhere between 3 million and 5 million "pixels."

Go through a few generations of editing, color correction (very important), and other steps, and you may be closer to 1 to 3 million.

You will NEVER see a film with 20 million pixels, or even half that. It just won't happen.

Re:Artifacts

[innocent_white_lamb]

I'm a projectionist. In fact, I own and operate a theatre.

I believe these are still fairly common, even though larger theaters have moved to platter systems rather than 2 projector systems that require reel changes. With a platter, I believe the film is looped back to the center of the spool (like an old 8-track tape) so the reels don't require rewinding between showings.

This is all correct. However, the changeover dots are still present on film reels because not everyone has a platter. Old theatres use two-projector systems with 2000-foot reels (the ones that the films are actually shipped on), and some "newer" ones use two-projector systems with 6000-foot reels which allow for less changeovers but still have to be rewound.

Platters allow for no rewinding between shows and no reel changes.

Re:Yeah. That's the problem with digital

[OneFix]

I realize this, but the origonal poster seemed to suggest that IMAX offered no advantage over standard 70mm, and that is simply not true...

And as to your final comment...yes, alot of directors started shooting in "open matte" after the popularity of home video. One of the more popular directors that films open matte is James Cameron. And it is true that there are often "goofs" in the full frame version and this why the matted (theatrical) versions of these films are still prefered. Actually the whole Widescreen vs. Pan & Scam thing would be alot simpler if open matte didn't exist.

And as is obvious from the comparisons, IMAX films can fill the whole screen on a standard TV.

So where are we...well, the point of this was that the "IMAX is just 70mm sideways" comment seems to be missing a huge part of the picture (no pun intended) :)

My friend described it best

[tzanger]

"Digital movies don't have that infamous pube running around the screen."