Slashdot Mirror
Digital Movie Projection: Can It Live Up To The Hype?
hobb writes "OK, so Roger Ebert's not a technical genius, but he's written an interesting piece on the future of digital movie projection (theatres, not home.) Read his essay here. Digital for home systems is great, but will 1280x1024 be good enough for theatres? That's about 10mm dot pitch, folks...
"
stay a normal distance away.
The thing I'm curious over is, why is HDTV almost 50% higher resolution than this? HDTV goes up to 1920x1080, and this is significantly lower... But, it's what Mr. Lucas is using for Ep 2.. Oh well. At least it means no more scratches.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Forget about the laughable technical errors in Ebert's article; let's cut to the chase. Ebert makes the following sweeping statement:
I have seen the future of the cinema, and it is not digital.
This is absurd. Ebert sees a demonstration of the current implementation of a video projection system, doesn't like what he sees, and then jumps to the ludicrous conclusion that "digital" projection is inherently a Bad Thing.
I take strong exception. Based on Ebert's review, I agree that the current implementation probably does have a ways ago. (I'll reserve final judgment until I've seen it for myself.) However, I will say for the record that the future of cinema is digital, and in a very big way. The digital projection system of the future will blow today's technology away -- and yes, that includes Ebert's precious MaxiVision48 system.
This "future" may not be as close as the hype has been leading some of us to believe, but it is there, and it will be waiting for us once the technology matures. Anyone who doesn't see this as self-evident must be unbelievably myopic when it comes to technology.
begin 644
but rather an evolution. Mr. Ebert seems to think the first digital projector will be the only one ever to come out and give the best possible results. But I figure he'll find out in a couple of years that you can't push old technology forever and that the digital projectors have come a long way by then. But the concept of competition is always good. This will make both Maxivision and TI work harder :)
It's the same as most billboards you see these days. View any of them up close and you can see a series of dots, depending on the intended viewing distance these dots could be the size of your fist. However, walk back a few metres and suddenly the dots aren't as noticable as they once were
So long as the minimum intended viewing distance (the closest anyone will be to the screen) is scaled in proportion to the the dot pitch there will be no problem. With most cinemas I've been to recently here (Australia) the screens are at least a good 2-3 metres above the ground, with the first row of seats at least 10 metres back from the screen. So I couldn't imagine any problems using the screens as suggested in this post in most modern theatres. Any closer than that though and things may need to be reviewed.
What I cant understand though is why would a director/producer/whatever ONLY create the movie for this resolution? It seems far more logical to me to create it at a much higher resolution (well slightly higher than HDTV will require) so that in situations where I higher resolution is possible, it can be fully utilised. I can think of nothing worse than having this HDTV become widespread, but being wasted because of a few shortsighted people in the film industry.
Glenn
The Smrt way to trade CFDs on the ASX
When I first heard of digital movie theatres I wondered how they managed it. It looks like they didn't. It seams they have a bit of a ways to go yet before it's realistic. Something tells me they will have to quadruple the resolution before they get good enough images. They also still have the data nightmare to solve.
On the other hand I'm intrigued by the MaxiVision48 mentioned. That sounds promicing. It's still film, but it gets past the 24 frames per second flicker problem that keeps me out of the theatres.
Well filmmakers have been pushing for film obsolecence for years but this time it looks like it may actually happen. George Lucas is shooting Star Wars II entirely in HD. Most indy films are now shot in standard definition DV. The projection quality at most theaters these days is more like 640x480 on the first day, when they don't get it halfway up the screen so HD wouldn't hurt anything. HD is 1920x1080 so let's see, 1920*1080 / 640*480 = 675% improvement so there goes the argument for film. Current projector costs may exceed film but current DV stock is far cheaper than film stock. The digital projection technology can only surpass film sooner than you think.
Remember hard disks, and what was told about them a long time ago: 'Don't worry about that mechanical crap, we'll have ultrafast RAM storage in no time, and there is Moore's Law to prove it!'
What happened? Analog kept improving. And RAM mass storage do exist, but almost nobody can afford them.
It can project film at 48 frames per second, twice the existing 24-fps rate.
NTSC does 60 fields per second when it's the evening news or a soap you're watching. Doesn't make much of a difference, does it?
MV48 uses a new system to pull the film past the projector bulb without any jitter or bounce.
Electronic systems don't jitter or bounce either. They also don't have scratches or dust, unlike film.
The source of their signal is an array of 20 prerecorded 18-gigabyte hard drives, trucked to each theater. This array costs an additional $75,000, apart from the cost of trucking and installation.
$75,000 for a twenty disk raid array? That's pretty damn expensive. And has he never heard of tape? A new movie could fit on a couple of 70GB DLT tapes, no need to "truck" a new RAID array in.
1280x1024 is about 10mm dot pitch over what area? I mean, if you project 1280x1024 over a screen the size of North America, that's about a TWO MILE dot pitch.
I understand that I'm abusing the concept of 'dot pitch' a bit to make my example, but saying that a resolution necessarily equals a dot pitch is just incorrect.
--
I've heard a lot about this in the past year or so, and I don't think that digital movies will really ever make it. One thing is that there is a large risk of theft with the movies stored in digital form. It would ba a lot easier to obtain an "advanced copy" by simply dupin the drive with the film on it.
Second, some people have invented a method of filming where you remove the old analog sound strip off the side of the film and replace it with each individual frame being longer. For ease of speech i will call this "wide standard" (by no means is it the official name though). I've heard that this method makes for no film scratched, bubbles, etc... and there is no piracy risk there. Finially, if you are making a new theatre, the least expensive of these three (standard, digital, and wide standard) is the wide standard, with digital projectors being by far the most expensive
Quite franly, I think that if we are gonna see any new technology in the theaters, it will be the afforementioned wide standard.
---------------
---------------
CoyboyNeal is God
Roger mentioned 4:1 compression, im assuming that is a lossless compression. Wouldnt it make sence to use MPEG2 or even the brand spanking new MPEG4...
No I dont think D-Movies will go at that resolution...and speaking of MPEG2 and resolution, anyone know if there are plans to make DVD at HDTV resolutions? It seems like THE issue no one is talking about.
Digital video has crap resolution. Why? Because to achieve the same sort of resolution you get with film, you need to store enormous amounts of data.
You can't afford the required amount of memory/storage. So you use compression.
Which means you lose quality (because you certainly aren't using *lossless* compression -- not when you need huge compression ratios), which was what you were trying to gain in the first place.
Until multi-terabyte storage is fast, cheap, and small, film will continue to be superior. As is so clearly is now.
This is not a fair comparison. With DVD, the method to decode the signal must be somewhere on the user's (hence the potential pirate's) device in order to watch the movie. No such restriction is required when transmitting movies to theaters. The key does not have to be made available in any way, shape or form to potential line sniffers.
You simply give the theaters the decryption key, and send everything through the encrypted pipe. In the unlikely event that somebody does crack the key, simply switch keys and issue all the theaters a new one. (In fact, it would probably be a good idea to switch keys from time to time anyway, just to be safe. Not possible with DVD, cause that would break all the current players.)
Of course, he still has a valid point when it comes to bribing projectionists. Depending on how much access they have, that could present a risk of the key getting out too. But assuming they can trust the theaters to keep the keys safe, there is virtually no risk of piracy.
To be even more secure, give each theater a different key and encode a custom stream for each one. If one key gets compromised, the rest are still secure. The cost would be more processor time to encrypt a new stream for each target, and increased bandwidth usage because multicasting becomes impossible with this method. Probably overkill, but you know how paranoid the movie industry gets.
I disagree with Ebert: The future of cinema is digital. It this system won't cut it, someone will make one with 10k by 5k resolution, 60 fps, 12 sound chanels and so forth. Digital "film" offers some undisputed benefits over real film, and because of the allmost infinate flexibility of digital technology all the benefits of celluluid can be copied in to the new systems.
> It would ba a lot easier to obtain an "advanced
:)
> copy" by simply dupin the drive with the film
> on it.
What's worse? Duplicate a digital movie, or physically stealing the actual reels themselves?
At least you've saved some dough.
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
You could equally ridicule (for example, let's not get sidetracked) a suggestion that solar powered cars are the transport of the future, because obviously we'll be using cold fusion powered flying machines 'in the future'.
However, if you mean 'the near future' then from his description it sounds like this MaxiVision48 gear is pretty sweet and relatively inexpensive and worthy of promotion. I know I certainly don't want to be paying x times as much at the cinema just to see a little "Digital" logo at the beginning of the flick.
Physical film will obviously have it's limitations (scratching etc) and I agree that we will without a doubt see a decent digital solution as the expense of digital comes down.
In the mean time though (10-15 years?) it sounds like I'll be more than happy to sit down in front of one of those MaxiVision48 systems and pay a reasonable price for the privaledge.
Don't go cuckoo over the word 'digital', digital technologies should have to earn their place like any other.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
question: how exactly is improvement measured here? ebert keeps making reference to whatever type of projection being by 80% or 500% or whatever... is the number simply a ratio of resolution? because i would be perfectly happy if the current resolution was kept, but the media was digital, keeping the movie cleaner.
when i saw episode one the day it came out, the projection at the theater i went to (one of the best new jersey theaters) was great... but when i saw it again a few weeks ago when my college was playing it (obviously a used reel), it was downright grainy... if the movie was digital, degradation wouldn't be a problem, and i think that improving resolution isn't so important. quality would be great if you could just get rid of imperfections in film by going digital.
I remember when a 64MB hard disk was huge. Now most home computers come with that much or more ram. Compared to what existed 10 years ago, we do have RAM mass storage.
Film's resolution is considerably higher than HDTV's. This post is just plain false.
I saw a TI demo of their MEMS device to be used in digital projectors. This thing was amazing in every way. They put a million mirrors on a 2"x2" chip. The picture we saw was _huge_ and supersharp..
This essay is wrong. I've seen the future, and it _is_ digital.
We all know that, for games, 50-odd fps is way better than 25-odd fps (and many people are prepared to spend thousands of dollars on fast CPU's and graphics cards to achieve it). In addition, 8-mm film is generally shot at 18 fps and this definitely looks jerky.
Has anyone seen this system, and does the increased frame rate make a real difference in smoothness?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Why would 1280x1024 be the limit for cinema projections because of bandwidth limitations, but 1920x1080 be possible for home? That doesn't make sense at all.
All these bandwidth and storage problems will be solved in the very near future. Film has had 100 years to evolve, digital projection will take much much less.
The problem with the situation is that all the savings of digital filmmaking accrue to the producers while all of the costs of equipping digital theatres are borne by the exhibitors. And the initial costs are quite high. And a couple of years later, the first generation projectors will be as outdated as my old XT sitting in the corner of my living room (which my wife is currently using to write a screenplay BTW) and will need to be upgraded.
While the studios' and distributors' costs fall, the exhibutors' will cost rise dramatically and they will have to raise ticket prices to stay profitable. This will lead to a reduction in attendance and thus lower returns to the studios.
Also, since likely not all theatres willl change over simultaneously, patrons may have to choose between seeing the digital version of the movie for $20, or seeing the analog version for $8. This will further affect the short term profitability of the early adopting theatres.
I suppose they could strategize around this by releasing some movies as "digital only" and others as "analog only" during the transition phase or prereleasing the digital version a couple of weeks before the analog version. However the the other problem of digital theatres raising their prices to cover the equipment costs will likely be solved only if the studios subsidize the deployment.
Ideology is for ideots.
One big advantage of digital for those of us who don't live in the same country as Hollywood, would be the potential for simultanious world-wide releases of movies. The production cost of rolls of film is such that the studios wait until US cinemas have finished with the reels before releasing them overseas. This is the cause of the hated DVD regional encoding (to stop the home release version being mail ordered from the US by countries still viewing the celluloid version!) I would very much have liked that situation to end.
OTOH I want the best cinema experience possible, and if physical film offers that, then that's what I want.
Interestingly, the sale of APS (The new still film in the smaller cartrage, with the small data store for picture information) cameras vastly outstrips the sale of digital ones. Analogue has won here, despite the enormous digital camera hype (remember that?) so there's no reason why it shouldn't do so for motion film too.
Right off the bat, digital loses on price. The Maxi requires a 10k retrofit that is compatible with existing films (reruns), DV requires 100k. Projectionists are minimum wage hamburger flippers hired off the street. The DV setup will require a fire breathing sysadmin to keep it running, it'll easily double payroll costs of most theaters. What about the 12 and 24 screen Cineplexes? Man, your overhead just blew out of control, you'll need multiple sysdamins, good for me, bad for already thin margins.
Consistency? Remember, projectionists barely now how to adjust framing and bulb brightness. With DV, they get to fiddle with luminosity, saturation, and all sorts of other things almost no one understands. The last thing theaters want to start doing is advertising how much better the projection experience is better than their competitors. Not to mention the real life compression of more than 20:1.
Whose convenience? Certainly not the theater owners' or copyright holders'. This signal is going to be a snap to intercept. Theaters have a hard enough time hanging on to the cans. Offer an underpaid projectionist a few thousand dollars to look the other way while "some extra testing equipment is hooked up," and suddenly everybody has seen the movie before the main launch. You'll need an army of guards for this, see price.
It sounds like Maxi has made enough quick and dirty improvements today, to make it easier to wait for tomorrow's technology. It should raise the bar so high, we won't need DV until it's 100kx50k.
OK, so it'll probably be mostly hardware based but I thought it was a [not so very] amusing thought.
Do you have any better hostages?
as an audio/visual technician i get to see a lot of the cool sound and projection equipment long before j. random end-user. as of right now, the majority /. argument is correct, resolution from a digital projector is crap (i use them a lot to project full motion video in my line of work (as well as projecting /. onto the exterior walls of my hotel (i promise to post pictures soon))). they can handle the needed frame rates that i saw one or two posts worry about, however, the image is pixelisious. the other problem with these projectors is that they have a tendancy to 'wash' the image which means that every time a new movie is run, the settings must be re-calibrated to each particular screen (a very tedious process).
/. who was able to attend that here in orlando, fl. knows that digital movie projection is just over the horizon. i don't like to endorse items early, but at the moment, based on a demonstration of new projection technology by electrohome they are pretty close to getting what the public will expect: a crisp, clean, bright image.
on the bright side of things:
as i am also an theatrical sound designer/tech and audio engineering student i was able to get into 'ldi' this year. it's an annual trade show on professional lighting and sound equipment. anyone on
I've seen a new digital laser projector prototypes, and I'll tell you, its about the closest you can get to manipulating individual groups of photons on a screen. The biggest problem they have is getting a high enough resolution image to throw at it. I saw some D3 videos that were line doubled, and still these projectors can outperform the source image.
So why is everyone talking about compression, when you've got a new medium in itself? We should be using it to expand on film, to present motion pictures at even higher quality than before. And that's what its going to take, to keep people coming to theaters, rather than watching on home entertainment systems.
However, the Hollywood set is not driven by technology, but by greed. There are too many entrenched markets, and nobody wants to fight another destabilizing round of standards battles. They're too busy making sure they keep the dough rolling in. There is too much money at stake with conventional film distribution systems.
I'm an (amateur, but serious) photographer. I do indeed like using Fuji Velvia and other fine grained, high resolution films wherever practical. I use a tripod whenever I can. So why do I think that a resolution that would be unacceptable for me for serious photography would be just fine for movies?
Last night I printed one of our wedding photographs on my Epson Stylus Photo EX (and before anyone starts commenting on this gross violation of copyright, not to mention photographic etiquette, I'll point out that our deal with the photographer included throwing in the negatives and all that). This was a fairly low resolution scan (1280x1024, I did it for a screen background). The print is on an 11x17 piece of glossy film. It's using the Gimp's print plugin that Michael Sweet originally wrote that I've enhanced (URL below). I can see the pixelation -- if I look at it carefully from less than 12" away with my left eye, which has unusually acute close-in vision. Even then I can only see the pixelation in sharp transitions, such as between my tuxedo jacket and my shirt where the line is only about 15 degrees off parallel. It's obvious if I look reasonably carefully that it's not as sharp as a good quality photographic print, but it doesn't look pixelized.
And the point is? A movie theatre is not an optimal location for spotting imperfections. For one, it's in constant motion, so it's usually impossible to focus on any one spot for long enough to see any artifacts. Secondly, if the projector is even slightly out of focus, any pixelation will be blurred out of existence.
I'm not an expert on motion picture film, but the resolution enhancement over normal 35 mm film is not as great as the 70 mm format would lead one to believe. Taking into account the sprocket holes and the soundtrack, I'd be surprised if the actual frame width on 70 mm movie film is greater than 50 mm or thereabouts. If it's 50 mm wide, the length of a frame should be about 27 mm (at least if the depiction at http://www.theatres.sre.sony.com/imax/film.html is reasonably accurate -- the long side of the film stretches across the width, rather than the length). 35 mm still film is 24x36. So the movie frame is bigger than the 35 mm frame, but not spectacularly so (it's smaller than the smallest "medium format" photographic format, which is nominally 60x45 mm but actually a bit less). High end consumer digital cameras are currently in the range of 1800x1200 pixels, and they produce quite satisfactory non-critical prints.
2 Mp resolution might not be sufficient for Imax (very large format, with a huge screen), particularly at theatres such as the Omnimax at the Boston Science Museum), but I suspect that for most motion picture purposes, it's quite adequate.
I'm surprised at you people!
/. with 80% static content.
One of his comments struck a nerve with me - the fact that hollywood "suits" don't care about the technology. They just follow the hype like dogs in heat.
Sound familiar?
Our little clique isn't the only one that has shoddy solutions foisted upon it by clueless "suits." It sounds to me that Ebert, a flim geek of sorts, is pointing out a case just like this. He touches on the technical problems, the emotional ones, and how the solution works in practice. All arguments that one of us might use against a PHB advocating a 100 box nt cluster using VB scripts and MSSQL as a web solution for a site getting 1/100 the traffic of
Digital film will probably win in the end, but there's no reason to start hiking my ticket prices for the crappy quality we'll get now.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Analog works best for an analog medium. We all know this. Something is always lost in the translation of light moving through colored celluloid to a string of 1's and 0's. This has bben the case with CD-Rom's The good thing about CD's is that a cheap CD player is better than a cheap record player. The media is more convenient, more durable, and can be more reliably mass produced. These qualities make it perfect for home electronics.
The theatre business however will always tend towards whatever delivers the best picture quality, and that will continue to be film. With some of the higher end projectors that are coming out, one of which is mentioned in Ebert's article, will, as promised, maintain the preeminence of film as the distribution media. 10 years ago they were talking about Beta taking the place of film even in the theatres. It was not to be.
Beyond the technical hurdles, there is the romanticism still inherent in hollywood that demands that film be used. This will not die. Film has an inexplicable quality of tone in every image. Certain films for certain scenes will be a mainstay of directors who know the look of film.
~Jason Maggard
The projection quality at most theaters these days is more like 640x480...
This is just plain incorrect, and wildly misinformative.
The system used for the recent Phantom Menace digital projections was the Texas Instruments DLP system. The specs are here:
r wars.shtml
http://www.ti.com/dlp/products/cinema/specs_sta
Or here for more on the system:
http://www.ti.com/dlp/products/cinema/
Yes it only has a resolution of 1280 by 1024. HD systems at home do have more resolution than this, but the home HD systems are cathode rays not projection. It's much harder to make a projection system very high resolution than a tube system.
But the resolution will get even higher. Hughes has a system already the ILA-12K (http://www.hjt.com/products/ila12k.html) that does 2000 by 1280. It will keep increasing.
The effective resolution of film (ie. the analog messy strip of celluoid) is around 4000 by 3000 pixels. Digital special effects that are mixed with live film footage are rendered at aywhere from 2048x1550 to the above 4K rsolution.
But the advantage of digital is that the colour reproduction is much more accurate and when you project film, the film is moving at high speed and jitters from side to side so you get blurring.
I imagine only films that have a large proportion of their content created digitally will go with digital projection in the near future. Then there is a real advantage for the director that he knows the colours he sees on the computer screens when they are creating the effects are exactly what will be projected. When you shoot to film there are a huge array of isssues with film stock, look up tables, gamma curves and the only way to know what your colours will actually look like is do go out to film and do a test screening (expensive).
Digital projection is the future but the current systems will improve a lot before it becomes the only system used.
* The TI systems in the demo theaters bear no relationship to the real world. They're custom installations that do not address the problem of how a real film would get to a real theater. The source of their signal is an array of 20 prerecorded 18-gigabyte hard drives, trucked to each theater. This array costs an additional $75,000, apart from the cost of trucking and installation.
18 Gig is about $300 (at least here in the UK) giving a total cost of $6000 for 360 Gig. These prices are also falling continuely.
If you wanted to change the film once a week then you would need a 5Mbit/s connection to do it. Fast, but not that fast.
* Even so, a movie is so memory-intensive that these arrays must compress the digital signal by a ratio of 4-1. At a recent seminar at the Directors' Guild in Los Angeles, digital projection spokesmen said that in the real world, satellite downlinked movies would require 40-1 data compression. This level of compression in movie delivery has never been demonstrated publicly, by TI or anyone else.
Mpeg2 should be able to get close to this if you allow lossy compression. (I think, I'm not an expert).
* The picture on the screen would not be as good as the HDTV television sets now on sale in consumer electronics outlets! TI's MDD chip has specs of 1280 by 1024, while HDTV clocks at 1920 by 1080. For the first time in history, consumers could see a better picture at home than in a movie theater. A higher-quality digital picture would involve even more cost, compression and transmission challenges.
Now this is just plain stupid. If HDTV can be delivered at high resolution on the fly by cable, satellite or ariel, then why can't digital films? Distribution is just not a problem. If the figure of 360 Gig is correct then this is just a pack of DVD disks, total cost 100$?
1280x1024 sounds like its a bit too low resolution but this figure will be improved on. 2000x1000 or 4000x2000 maybe required but I doubt this is too far into the future. Look how far LCD displays have come (and come down in price).
* One advantage of a film print is that the director and cinematographer can "time" the print to be sure the colors and visual elements are right. In a digital theater, the projectionist would be free to adjust the color, tint and contrast according to his whims. Since many projectionists do not even know how to properly frame a picture or set the correct lamp brightness, this is a frightening prospect.
One disadvantage of film is that you can't adjust color, tint, contrast etc. Sure, projectionists may not be the correct people to make these adjustments but if the adjustments were made when the projector was installed and then locked into the machine, what is the problem?
* How much would the digital projection specialist be paid? The technicians operating the TI demo installations are paid more than the managers of most theaters. Hollywood is happy to save money, but are exhibitors happy to spend it
Digital projector specialists would be paid lots. However, how many would you need? Apart from a fan, there are no moving parts in a digital projector so the maintanance requirements should be far less. Also as you would not need a projectionist, the overall cost to the exibitor should be less.
* What about piracy? Movies will be downloaded just once, then stored in each theater. Thieves could try two approaches. They could grab the signal from the satellite and try to break the encryption (as DVD encryption has just been broken). But there is a more obvious security gap: At some point before it reaches the projector, the encrypted signal has to be decoded. Pirates could bribe a projectionist to let them intercept the decoded signal. Result: a perfect digital copy of the new movie. When the next "Star Wars" movie opens in 4,000 theaters, how many armed guard will 20th Century Fox have to assign to the projection booths?
Piracy would be a problem. I would guess the best way around it would be to put the decode into LCD drivers. This would make it very difficult to tap into, though not imposible.
* Film is harder to pirate than digital video because a physical film print must be stolen and copied. An MV48 print would be even harder to pirate than current films; it would not fit the equipment in any pirate lab. Those fly-by-night operations, which use ancient equipment cannibalized over the decades, would have to find expensive new machines.
This would only occur in the short term whilst MV48 was non standard. Once it became a standard the pirates would be able to get hold of cheap second hand equipment.
The same logic goes for the digital equipement. To start with, pirates would have difficulty in getting hold of projection equipment to hack. Once it became a standard though, this would be a lot easier for them.
However, one of the main advantages of digital is that you do not need multiple (read expensive) copies of the film to distribute. Therefore, the film could be distributed to the whole world in one go rather than the current mess of US first, then Europe, then the rest of the world. This means the current market in Europe for pirated US films would be less as the Europeans would be able to see the film at the same time as the US. They would have no need to wait for the film and it might get rid of the DVD region encoding as well. Sure there might be reasons why Hollywood would not want to distribute the whole world in one go, but at least digital gives them the option.
Colin
wot no sig
What happens when the plug gets pulled?
Where into the ether does all this information go?
How do we get it back?
Where's our legacy then?
The reason DVD (and most DV formats) look better than the analog equivalant is becuase of noise. It is the same reason that your compact disc sounds "better" than your LPs. The noise floor is SO much lower on a digital signal. If you do critical viewing on just about any consumer digital video format, you will see motion and color artifacts all over the place.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
There are so many ill-informed claims and errors in this post , I don't know where to begin.
1. the fastest tapes are not around 1MB/s. In the low-medium price range, there is DDS-4, AIT, and other tape technologies: Size: upto 40Gb, 3MB/s (sustained,uncompressed) Let's spec out a DDS-4 solution: 20Gb,3MB/s native. Street price $1300. Hook up 20 of those in a library and you have 400Gb capacity with 60Mb/s throughput.
2. Same price range as the RAID array, there are tape drives (AMPEX) that go to 15Mb/s (sustained,uncompressed) with sizes upto 330Gb.
3. You are getting 50MB/s from an EIDE drive? Last time I looked, a high-end SCSI drive had only 300+ Mbit/s internal transfer rate with sustained transfers of round 20MB/s. And you have an EIDE drive that goes up to 400Mbit/s internal?????
What I know of this comes from still photography, but its also at 35mm (i.e. a negative 24x36mm), so I can say something intelligent.
If you do the sums for a 35mm still, it is considered "sharp" if a single point on the object maps to a cirlce of diameter less than 0.004 inches on the negative (known as the "circle of confusion"). That corresponds to a digital resolution of around 3000x2000. Of course you can go finer. But that is roughly the best performance you can expect from a 35mm film.
Now, whether this makes any difference depends on whether you can see such a small object. The question is: given two small dots in the scene, can you see whether there is one dot or two in the projected image? The point at which the two dots merge into one is the resolution, and the angle subtended by the two dots is the angular resolution. I'll dodge the difference between angle for the camera and angle for the viewer: projection systems are designed so that the middle seats get the right perspective.
The angular resolution of a good human eye is 1/60th of a degree (1 arc minute). So an ideal cinema screen would need to match that with around 60 pixels per degree. Right now I'm wearing spectacles, and without moving my head they put a frame on my vision about 80 degrees wide. I haven't measured a cinema screen from the centre seat, but I'd expect something nearer 40 degrees. 40 degrees times 60 pixels per degree gives 2400 pixels. Which is not too far off what 35mm film gives (at its theoretical best).
So current XVGA systems are not up to the job of replacing film, but give us a 3000x2000 pixel screen and it will look better. And Moore's Law suggests that we will be able to do that fairly soon.
Of course there are other issues. As others have noted you have the problems of physical wear and dirt getting onto film, and the costs of printing, versus the 100% reproducability of digital and the costs of piping all that data around. But you can bet that the studios have looked at these numbers and figured that the lifecycle costs look interesting. And no doubt someone has told them of Moore's Law too.
I remember the same argument in the early days of digital audio. The first CD players sounded harsh in the high treble thanks to the steep filters required. Analogue purists declared that digital would never replace analogue. But where is analogue now? A niche split between rich die-hards and poor elderly people who can't afford to replace their existing LPs. Physical analogue film will go the same way.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/print-3.0.2.tar.gz
Particularly if you have an Epson Stylus printer (vintage Photo EX or older), and you're running the Gimp 1.1, you might want to give this a try.
Ebert also mentions Douglas Trumbull's Showscan process, which if I remember rightly is another faster (than 24fps) film system. As I remember, Trumbull was working from research that showed that just on the high side of 30fps is a perceptual threshold for human vision. Once you move past that threshold (as TV almost does) images often are percieved as being much clearer and more realistic. With a 48fps system you get that additional clarity, with the steadiness you get from the (alleged - I have not seen it yet) better film transport system and slight additional sharpness required of the higher "shutter" speeds required by the 48fps in some situations. There may be something here.
I think Roger Ebert is wrong on this.
There is a simple reason why: a digitally-encoded movie for theater projection will easily fit on a 12" (305 mm) optical disk (if we're using the same pit size as those on DVD discs). It's a LOT easier to handle a single 12" optical disc than several big cans of 35 mm or 70 mm film.
Also, because the disc is 305 mm in diameter, you can encode easily things like multi-language spoken audio tracks separate from the rest of the soundtrack (and even more, multi-language subtitling on the same disc!). Let's take for example the second Star Wars "prequel" movie due in May 2002. For the European market, the optical disc for digital projection systems will have separate spoken soundtracks in English, French, Castillian Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese plus subtitling in Catalan, Arabic, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Hungarian, Romanian, and Bulgarian. It's vastly cheaper to do it ONCE so the movie can be simultaneously released to just about all of Europe at the same time.
Also, with digital projection, the complete lack of film "jittering," the total lack of scratches and dust, and superb color saturation means visual quality will of course be superb.
In short, once the cost of digital projectors start coming down (and given the rapid development in the computer industry, they will come down very rapidly), future movie theaters will no longer need the extra space needed to store the large bulk of film; it'll all be reduced to 305 mm optical discs.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
A couple of things. It's sad to see digital movie projection being pushed at a laughable 1280x1024 resolution -- surely that is doomed to fail. A more accurate conclusion for Ebert would be that "I have seen the future of cinema, and it is not Texas Instruments."
First of all, considering that most of new motion pictures are delivered with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, the effective resolution would be 1280x545 (assuming square pixels). I've heard of other up-and-coming digital projection systems, and they have at least three times more pixels.
Second, contrary to popular belief, most frames, if not yet all, of a modern cinematic experience have been stored digitally at some point on their path from the camera to the silver screen. The motion pictures are printed to the celluloid film from this digital master data.
Needless to say, elimination of this last conversion phase is the holy grail of digital movie projection and IT WILL ARRIVE when the projectors get closer to the native resolution of the master data.
Everything that can be digital will be. I'm betting my ass on it.
Marko Karppinen
I'm part of a listserv for visual fx that includes people who worked on star wars and pretty much every other movie we've seen with fx. The consensus of the dozen people who work with scanned film at both 2k and 4k (pixels wide), was that because the digital camera doesn't shake when projecting, and film shakes substantially which blurs the image, the digital at lower than 2k res was sharper than the film version at Mann's Chinese (the best theater around). Everyone said they saw tons of details in the Phantom Menace that they hadn't seen in multiple viewings on film. Among others, this was the opinion of the senior fx person from Sony Pictures Imageworks who watched side by side comparisons of a film print and digital. Everybody said it was as substantial a difference as VHS -> DVD. Also, Toy Story was rendered at something very low like 1600 pixels wide, AND distributed on film. Did anybody notice or complain? With all the visual cues of a bad print missing, I think you'll never hear a viewer complain about it. In any case, the average viewer has been conditioned to watch Beta SP quality video broadcast in NTSC (ouch!), and doesn't seem capable of noticing compression or virtually any of these details, including letterbox, which is a huge part of the image itself! So it'll be the bottom line, as always. The masses won't know or care.
A few examples:
I was in Brazil during the '94 World Cup and you wouldn't believe the masses of people gathered at big screen televisions in every city park in the country. Literally millions of people went to see EVERY GAME that Brazil played on the big screen. I was in France during the cup in '98 and it was a similar scene, except they had stadiums built around the TVs and it was a high definition widescreen TV.
I was also in Salt Lake the two times the Jazz played the Bulls for the NBA championship. Thousands of people gathered outside the stadium each game and watched the game on a big-screen TV.
Now imagine that when you wanted to see a sold-out, important game instead of fighting for space at your local park and seeing a poor image on a conventional big-screen you could go to the local theater and watch the game sitting on a decent chair, seeing a crisp, unobstructed image, and getting great sound. Now lots of people would still prefer their local park, but you can bet that the theaters would sell a lot of tickets. I can think of some people that would actually prefer the theater to actually attending the event!
I haven't even mentioned traditional pay-per-view events like boxing matches, concerts, or (gag) wrestling.
Digital will take over, but for a lot of reasons that Rodger hasn't even mentioned.
As much as I respect Roger Ebert, I have to say that he's just missing the point completely here.
Ebert contends that film-based systems will be better than digital in the future because film will provide a better-quality image than digital can; and on this count, I think he's absolutely right. Even uncompressed DV lacks the "warmth" (for lack of a better term) of film, and the MaxiVision system he touts sounds like it provides an image that nobody in the DV world can hope to match.
The problem is, image quality is unimportant. Now, before everyone gets up in arms here, think for a second. Who is clamoring for image quality that is better than today's films? General audiences? Nope, they are happy with the cruddy image from a poorly set up projector in a shoebox theater in their shopping mall. Theater owners? Nope, they make more money by dividing their space into multiple small, low-tech screens rather than lovingly setting up one beautiful screen and cutting the number of movies they can show by 11/12ths. Studios? Nope, they know that what makes them money: formulaic movies with name stars presented on as many screens as possible. If they could make money presenting more striking images, they'd all be doing IMAX films by now.
So where it counts -- money -- MaxiVision & other advanced film systems are irrelevant, because nobody wants them bad enough to pay for them. Digital, however, is a different story. Digital offers a big money benefit to one of these players -- the studios -- because it cuts dramatically one of the biggest cost in distributing a film: prints & advertising.
P&A is one of the biggest line items on a film's budget, running into millions of dollars. Each theater which is going to show your film needs a "print" (an analog dupe of the film) to run through their projector. In fact, they need more than one, because prints wear out or get scratched or otherwise start to die after awhile. When you consider that each print is absurdly expensive, and that a movie that "opens wide" goes to 2,500+ theaters, you can see how this gets expensive quick.
Digital changes all this. Suddenly you can stop sending reels of film around (which are expensive) and start sending around magnetic disks (which aren't). Even better, you could conceivably ship the image via a fiber optic cable or satellite connection and avoid "prints" altogether. Then "P&A" just becomes "A" and you've just saved millions, which to a Hollywood executive means that his project is that much more likely to be profitable and thus advance his career.
So, while I understand Ebert's position and wish that we lived in a world where he was right, where the quality of the experience was the prime factor, we don't, and he's wrong. Digital will overtake film, not because it's better, but because it's cheaper -- and even the most beautiful MaxiVision 48 images won't convince the Hollywood moneymen to ignore that math.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Read my blog.
Of course, this film was entirely computer graphics and if the projected resolution matched the resolution of the images when they were generated, you can't do any better. (Does anyone know if that's true?)
The one bit which didn't work was the credits crawl at the end. It looked to me like the speed chosen for scrolling the credits lead to an interference pattern with the frame rate of the projector, so they had a jittery effect.
All but one of the trailers I saw were for animated films, so I little no idea how it would work for live action. I suspect you need significantly higher resolution and frame rates to do as well as they did with TS2.
The future of the cinema is cinema! Arguing about different formats and technologies is generally fruitless and useless.
Besides, the chase for more clarity and better resolution is a bit absurd. The thing is, celluloid film (with all it's pros and cons) is an integral part of cinema, and the things it brings to the screen (apart from the actual moving pictures) is a big part of the movie experience just like brushstrokes and the pattern of the canvas are a part of experiencing a painting. Imagine watching Chaplins "The Gold Rush" in a computer colorized, digitally cleansed version where no signs of aging can be observed in the picture on the screen. Kind of takes away the atmosphere, doesn't it? "The Gold Rush" is an old movie, made with celluloid that takes on an aging process just like any other earthly material. It gives the movie an earthbound connection that tells us that this movie was made at a given point in time quite a long time ago, gives us a sense of its history, so to speak.
Digital of course takes that away. Not necessarily a bad thing in itself, it just depends on what the moviemaker wants to get across. This is kind of like the movement in art that came (I think) out of the pop-art movement, where painters started to paint pictures that looked like photographs with amazing clarity and it takes a bit of time for laymen to determine wether it is an actual painting or not. Anyway, that method never caught on and hardly anybody paints that way anymore because the material (canvas, paint, brushes) are as much a part of a painting as the actual picture. Some painters go through a long and painstaking process in their work to get the effect of an aging Rembrandt painting. Another example would be all the computer-colorized versions of "Casablanca" and various other movies that were all the craze in the eighties but no-one even thinks twice about doing this anymore. That was an experiment in taking old movies and trying to recreate them the way their directors supposedly would have wanted to see them had they had colour film to begin with (colour was already an option at the time Casablanca was made, I think). By doing that their connection with time and space was altered and skewed and these versions never did seem right and never caught on. And the colours were a bit shitty, too.
The thing I'm trying to get across is that the material is an inseperable part of the film. Why do so many independent filmmakers still use 8mm or 16mm celluloid film (although they may use digital for editing and sound)? And look at the video-revolution. It isn't until now that you see videotape used for making movies, and that is because the filmmakers have learned how to use the material to their advantage. In films like "Blair Witch Project" or the danish Dogme movies ("The Celabration", "the Idiots") video was used most of the time and the directors did not try to hide technical faults but used them to their advantage ("The Blair WP" is quite an interesting example in the way it uses video tape for realism but distances the audience from the action with b/w film). If you want to see an interesting example of use of videotape the try to find Lars Von Triers "The Kingdom". Filmed on video, transferred to 16mm film and then transferred back to video! Trying to eliminate the feel for the material from the moviegoing experience is a bit like producing tasteless pop-corn so it won't interrupt the audience while it's watching the movie.
Digital screening will eventually catch on. It serves its purpose, esp. (like Ebert points out) in computer generated s.fx. scenes. Imax hasn't caught on, but it serves it's purpose in showing dazzling movies about the wonders of the pyramids or life and death in Serengeti. But the question is: when is digital ready for the big time. I say it's ready when one can seamlessly switch between film and digital projectors at screening time. Or when digital tech. can actually imitate exactly all the faults of celluloid film or videotape.
Or I may be totally wrong:-)
There is a big difference between 30 frames per second and 60 fields per second. This is most apparent if you've ever done any animation work for layoff to video. Most animation software makes the common mistake that 30 fps is the same as 60 fields per second and renders animations this way. Good software does 'field rendering' where each frame is rendered as two interlaced fields. The difference in this approach is that each field is rendered 1/60th of a second apart on the timeline. When played back, this results in much smoother and more natural motion.
The AMC 30 theater in South Barrington, Illinois is testing the TI system in theater 17. (Bicentennial Man is playing 5 theaters now, but only 17 is Digital).
:)
I saw it Friday night. Unless they had made a big deal about passing around survey cards about how what we thought of the picture quality, I *might* not have noticed the difference. Yes, it was brighter, and things were much clearer (especially while moving).
What bothered me were visable compression artifacts, especially in smooth gradients. One scene with a sunset in the background was particularly noisy. Anything with large amounts of bright blue also seemed full of digital noise. The people I was with didn't notice at all, but perhaps since my job is deeply involved in digital video, I can't help looking at it.
There were also some specks that appeared that *looked* like film specks. The intro TI had at the beginning of the movie said that it was pure digital, but perhaps some scenes were done on film?
The biggest thing I noticed was that bright objects didn't bleed all around them. Everything always stayed sharp. It wasn't an enormous change like I was expecting, though.
Kevin
They use the same amount of bandwidth, but 60 fields per second looks much better than 30 frames per second.
When Phantom Menace came out, it was released in two theatres with digital projectors. I happened to be near the Paramus, NJ theatre doing so, and we went to see it. Before the show, there was a THX guy who came out with a microphone to talk about the technology. I think they said it was on a 350G raid array, though maybe it was 700G. Anyway, the technology was very similar to watching a DVD on a projection TV--you could look back and see the separate red, green, and blue lights. Of course, it was in far higher resolution than you would get with DVD--the image was perfect. Normally with film, the film wears and you get a scratch here and there on the screen, or the audio will have hiss if the print is old. With digital, it is like always having a perfect print.
Sure, the technology is expensive now, but the quality is there. So in a few years when the next highly-anticipated movie comes out, instead of just putting restrictions on the sound systems, they may require digital projectors.
I, for one, give all my thumbs up to digital projection in theatres.
I wonder who stuffed his pockets with cash to get him to write that essay?
No man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft.
The reason you saw artifacts was that "Bicentennial Man" was shot and edited on film, then scanned. A pure-digital film like "Toy Story 2" wouldn't have any.
I haven't seen a digital movie in the theatre to comment on it, and I think that what we have now is "good enough" quality wise until digital is a cheaper and better alternative.
What I don't like about going to the theatre is the framerate (something I've never liked). I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that today's movies run at 24fps in the theatres. While that's fine for most things, when a movie does a very fast action scene or pans over very fast, it's hard to tell what's going on. There's just not enough data there for your eyes to catch up with. To me, the real achievment would be to get this number up to 60fps, which seems to be a standard for truely fluid realistic movement (at least in video games). I can see the limitation now with film, because the reels would have to be about 3 times the size, and we'd need different projectors (probably), but with digital, as it progresses, I can see this coming a reality. It would probably make for some truely breathtaking films.
... and it is great. I saw Toy Story 2 digitally projected at a Disney/AMC theater here in Orlando (1 of 3 in the country, I hear) and it was excellent. Along with enjoying the movie, I was looking closely for pixels. They were noticable in the opening and closing credits (bright diagonal lines on pure black) but otherwise, I only saw them *once* during the whole thing. Here's what was so great: there were absolutely no instances of dust, scratches, splices, hair, fuzz, etc. hanging over the frame, and of course no pops in the audio. It was the best presentation I have ever seen at a theater, and I worked in them for five years. Of course, it was a digital production, created on and optimized for illuminated projection. I would be interesting to see how a regulat movie would look. And that 48 fps sounds pretty good, to be honest.
I was there for the first ever digital showing of Phantom Menace. I saw it in Seacaucus NJ and the theater was using Texas Instruments' DLP Technology.
They ran a few DLP trailers before the movie, and people were knocked over. The difference was amazing. Even the familiar green "this preview has been whatever for all ages" screen was a brilliant, even, scratch free green. The lack of scratches is what noticed the most. In one or two scenes you could see the limitations of the resolution, but overall -- it was much, much more impressive than a regular film. (It was also in Dolby Digital EX -- 6.1 channels)
I can only imagine what things would look like if actually shot digitally.
Yes, Ive seen both versions of Toy Story 2. As luck has it I live less than a mile from Cinemark @ Legacy in Plano Texas, one of six digital theaters in the nation. I went to see Toy Story 2 for the second time this past weekend and made sure to check out the DLP version. The digital version of TS 2 was awesome. It certainly does make a difference but.... TS 2 was all digital to begin with. I honestly couldnt tell you if "Bridges of Madison County" would any better with DLP. There are some things I did notice about the movie and projection. First being, all scenes where crisp, colorful, and very clear. Second, the was some dithering so to speak on very small objects or text (such as credits) if you really looked. And lastly there was some sore of image all over the screen. I cant really describe it, but it looked like a very slight amount of heat from the projecter (like the heat from a barbecue, how it distorts vision when you look through it) was appearing on the screen if you looked hard enough (no, my eyeballs werent popping out). All in all, movies like TS2 and Star Wars that are mostly or all digital will look great. Sure, its not as big a differnce as with VHS and DVD, but it is a step forward, and face it... we will be going there. With all that said, my final thoughts on it are... cool, maybe I wont even have to watch the film boy melt the film 4 times during the first run of X-Files ever again, so much so I had to see it in another theater so other day. Cheers, Chad
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
Yes, Ive seen both versions of Toy Story 2. As luck has it I live less than a mile from Cinemark @ Legacy in Plano Texas, one of six digital theaters in the nation. I went to see Toy Story 2 for the second time this past weekend and made sure to check out the DLP version. The digital version of TS 2 was awesome. It certainly does make a difference but.... TS 2 was all digital to begin with. I honestly couldnt tell you if "Bridges of Madison County" would any better with DLP. There are some things I did notice about the movie and projection. First being, all scenes where crisp, colorful, and very clear. Second, the was some dithering so to speak on very small objects or text (such as credits) if you really looked. And lastly there was some sore of image all over the screen. I cant really describe it, but it looked like a very slight amount of heat from the projecter (like the heat from a barbecue, how it distorts vision when you look through it) was appearing on the screen if you looked hard enough (no, my eyeballs werent popping out).
All in all, movies like TS2 and Star Wars that are mostly or all digital will look great. Sure, its not as big a differnce as with VHS and DVD, but it is a step forward, and face it... we will be going there.
With all that said, my final thoughts on it are... cool, maybe I wont even have to watch the film boy melt the film 4 times during the first run of X-Files ever again, so much so I had to see it in another theater so other day. Cheers, Chad
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
Read the article and take note: Here is a man who knows the difference between "its" and "it's".
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Sounds to me like Ebert is scared of the future of film. He's spent his whole life watching movies on film and doesn't believe it can be done any other way. Well, he's not going to be around forever, nor are the directors he mentioned (Spielburg, Scorsese). In twenty years, they'll be remembered for the greats they were, but a new era of digital film will exist. Embrace change, don't fight it.
They did a special one-time show here in Atlanta. Now the quality of the footage wasn't tops to begin with, but what there was looked great on the big screen. Maybe not this generation of projectors, but the next should be more than capable.
Also, isn't AVID editing all digital? What's the resolution there? Good enough to make the film, apparently.
Ok, the one thing the Ebert article has done for me is make me want to check out a digital showing myself. Are there any cinemas in the Boston area showing TS2 or Bicentennial Man in digital? Are there any web listings of cinemas that have digital facilities?
I recently went to a brand spankin' new theatre in Plano, Texas (just north of Dallas) which uses the Texas Instruments DLP technology.
While there are advantages to digital projection (no scratches for one, no skips in the sound, etc.), the picture quality IS NOT as good as film. I saw "jaggies" on the credits. Imagine a 1280 x 1024 LCD projector shown on a 40 foot screen and that's what the screen looked like. I could see the individual pixels on a solid white screen!
If digital is the future, the resolution will have to be much higher and the frame rate will have to approach 48, 60, or 72 frames per second. I'm not real happy about the prospect of high compression either; the less compression, the better.
In my mind, film still provides a better experience at this time.
A little numerical experiment to demonstrate: at 1900x1200, that's 2.28 million "dots" per frame. Assuming true color (24 bit), that's 6.84 million bytes (not mega bytes!) per frame. Ebert mentioned that existing projectors display about 24 frames per second, so that's 164 million bytes per second (about 156 or so megabytes). Now, for a two hour movie, that adds up to about 1.18 trillion (yes, with a 't') bytes for one movie. That's just a bit over one terabyte for a movie. Starting to see, now, why in the article as Roger Ebert mentioned TI had to have an array of 20 18GB hard drives to store the movie?
Now, you could cut this by a factor of three if you settle for old-fashioned VGA quality color, and you could cut it by a factor of between 2 and 5 with some moderate lossy compression (that much compression won't see much loss), and there are other clever ways to compress a motion picture, besides that might contribute to that. You could cut the resolution down, as well. But now what you have is hundreds of gigabytes for one 2 hour movie of not very good quality. Given that the theatres are getting the ass-end of this deal anyhow (given how expensive the technology is, that is--and how much it saves hollywood), and that theatres still have a choice, I wonder about which way this will go. If there was a real gain in quality here (like with THX, for instance) then Mr. Ebert might well be wrong, but that's not the case at all. There is a loss in quality for the sake of hollywood's convenience.
--- I've been in school *way* too long....
First of all, like a few others here, I was lucky enough to see Toy Story II in full digital projection at plasure island here in Orlando. I also saw it on film projection at a theater closer to my house.
And I have to say, digital wins hands down. No comparison, digital has ALREADY overtaken celluloid. The only place I could detect ANY digital anomolys was in the closing credits. But that is more than made up for, by the absolute clarity of the picture, perfect sound, no scratches, pits, or other defects on the film, and absolutely NO jitter.
But let's give Ebert the benefit of the doubt, and assume that, AS IT STANDS NOW, digital projection only EQUALS celluloid quality, and that this 48fps thing offers 5x standard quality.
Remember Morres law? I know it refers only to transistors on a CPU, but, given an observation of the advances in the last decade, I think we can reasonably extrapolate it into digital storage, DSP, and digital tellecommunication.
Now, Star Wars Ep II is scheduled for releast three years from TPM, yes? That's enough time for Morres law to act twice. So the digital projections we'll be watching for Ep2 will be @ 4x the quality of traditional celluliod. Just short of the 5x that Eberts 48fps system can deliver, and will that system even be in use in three years?
Episode III is due three more years after that. Time for Morres law to act twice more. So the projections we're watching of Ep3 will have 16x the quality of film, triple that of Ebert's 48fps system.
This is, of course, discounting any releases by other digital-enlightened studios like Pixar.
Has ANY other industry in the world EVER kept up with the exponential advance ment of computer technology? I can't think of one. What hubris is it that Ebert imagines that the film industry can not only keep up, but surpass, the efforts of the millions of computer geeks building the world of tomorrow?
(oh, and based on seeing *the same movie* in both digital AND analog recently, I can say, IMO, that digital projection has ALREADY won, making the whole arguement moot, even if Morres law *doesn't* extrapolate nicely into my point)
john
Imagine all the people...
Think they'd need some sort of high-bandwidth extra-large platter laser/DVD disk type of system for practical, robust & economical distribution. That or massive download... Either way, a long time for them to match the resolution per second of something like MV48...
Tom (Cookies made me an AC!)
Yep. On my TV set.
If the cineplexes etc can't do better than DVD+TV then they're in big trouble.
Film is better than digital for now. Wait till its 4Kx3K.
$9 for a single movie? *#&@! I hate paying $6. Are these people really out to totally friggin RUIN movies? I'm a huge movie freak. I'm in the theatres at least once a week to see a movie,. Many weeks I see two movies. Obviously I don't just stick to the big blockblusters but dammit, movies are good entertainment. I love the whole popcorn, coke, box of milk duds and staring at the big screen experience. Digital? Sounds kinda scary to me. I want the best digital TV technology can deliver, but I prefer film in the theatres. There's just something about film that digital can't replace. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe some day with higher resolutions and less-lossy compressions it wont matter, but Id have to experience it to believe it. But back to the price... dammit I'm not going to pay $9 for a movie. Never. Ever. Screw everything responsible for such ridiculous prices. Id rather watch bread mold than pay so funkin' much for a movie. Profit margins are damn good enough Hollywood. Dont piss us off! Then again, the world is so full of lemmings, that I doubt movie profits will drop if they just keep slowly raising prices as they have been. Only a few people seem to really mind. Everybody else just laughs and says 'that's how it goes...'
One of the more intelligent responses on this topic. Incredible how people will discount the main thrust of the article just to push technology as if it is always correct.
'til dawn...
Silver Surfer
Moo Ving Pick Churs
Talkies
Technicolor
Wide Screen
Stereo
Digital Audio
No where in the equation is Digital video not allowed.
Also, every limitation mentioned about bandwidth or pixel resolution will be swallowed up by Moores law.
On encryption, I don't know enough to say. There is something to be said for requiring people to steal wagonwheel sized cans to make a decent copy.
In twenty years movies will be beamed directly to you home theatre.
All you will need is the time to download (for a price) a one-view copy of the movie to your home computer (the amount of time will vary by your bandwidth, obviously).
I think this entire debate is off - you all seem to assume that there will be a pressing need for theatres to exist.
I notice that most "future forecasting" on slashdot is like the old "future" movies of the thirties - In the future, everyone will have a biplane - not just airlines!
Most people here seem incapable of thinking outside their assumptions.
Anyone here know anything about CMOS based (as opposed to CCD) imaging technology, the specks i have seen were 1027x768 at 500fps(!!)in B/W only for now. Ofcourse storing all of those frames would be sligthly impractical, ahem.
In other words, while I do think that the poster having been an officer of the LSC qualifies him to make such an informed statement, he/she should not assume the world at large knows what the hell the LSC does.
It's not contest. Maxivision BLOWS away digital. I have seen both Toy Story II and Phantom Menance on a digital theater and I've seen several Maxivision demonstrations. There is simply no contest here. If any of you computer nerds were to leave the "theory" and get out there to see both for yourselves you'd say the same thing. But of course, I think most of you are suffering from "well, it's says Digital, so it must be better.." syndrome. But who are we kidding, the theater owners are NOT going to cough up any money for Maxivision OR digital. If you want to see the largest group of money-grubbing weasels, look no further than theater owners.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned much in any of the discussions is - what standards will digital projection be based on? Until digital prjection is standard everywhere, there is still time to improve the baseline standard for what you'll be projecting.
That's where Ebert's vision of the future is compelling - a technology that works at higher framerate (40 fps instead of 24). Sure the detail of the prjection being jitter-free doesn't apply to a digital projector that doesn't need to move film past an element.
I think a great comparison here is APS vs. digital cameras. Sure you can get some nice digital cameras now. but if you want a really good quality photograh that exceeds a digital vesion, APS makes a great intermediate step until digital cameras really become the equal of film based cameras - in terms of resolution and storage.
Similarily, MaxiVision48 makes is a great intermediate step to use before it's practical to go with digital projection, and may as a side effect raise the bar for what we see from now on.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ala Brainstorm.
> Remember that one of the things we're getting back from using Digital is less generation loss
:)
> along the path to the finished product
Um, no, not with compression at least. When you store digital video with lossy compression, you take the effect of a 'generation loss' every time it is decoded and re-encoded. That is, every time you composite it, every time you add a special effect, every time you add a title, every time you transfer it to a different digital format (with a different compression algorithim!)
> it's often staggering how many generations a film print can be from the original negative, and
> none of that loss applies to digital.
Actually, a lot of films are printed digitally nowadays, so they are only one generation from the original negative
This has nothing to do with using digital projection or not...
Since "its" is possessive and "it's" is a contraction? Pretty please?
"I think analog will always be an alternative that people will chose."
... now we're moving on
It will be an alternative, yes. But not the
format of choice. We have plenty of examples to
back this up. First there was records and analog tapes, now everyone chooses to use CD and DAT.
Then there was VHS and BetaMax; now everyone is
moving to DVD.
We've had analog TV for awhile, and now we're
all moving to HDTV.
Extrapolate.
We've had film forever
to digital projection.
Sure, you can still find (and will always
be able to find) records, cassettes, VHS tapes, and analog TV broadcasts. But the preferred and most widespread formats are digital because it
offers improved image/sound quality, framerates,
interactivity, storage capacity, maintainability,
usability, transferability, ease of manipulation,
and compactness. Versus the one good thing about
analog, in that it is a true recording... since
sound and vision are both analog in nature.
The problem is that the analog devices can seldom
maintain that "perfect" recording, perhaps even on
the first playback.
-thomas
Finally, a topic on /. I actually know something about. I was hoping this article of Ebert's would turn up, cause it pissed me off and thrilled me at the same time. And please, if any you know Ebert's public email (he does have one at compuserve) address, please post it.
First I'd like to discuss Ebert's misconceptions.
They were computer-generated in the first place, so they arrived at the screen without stepping down a generation to film. And because they depicted imaginary places, it was impossible to judge them on the basis of how we know the real world looks.
This is not true at all. The film was scanned into the digital medium for digital projection from film (analogue) negative. Even the effects shots. See American Cinematographer, Sep 1999. In fact, one shot in the film - a non effects shot - was shot on a prototype digital camera. It's when Anakin talks to Qui Gonn outside his house in the desert at night. No effects in that shot, just an unpublicized ruse to see if anyone would notice.
* It can project film at 48 frames per second, twice the existing 24-fps rate. At 48 frames, it uses 50 percent more film than at present. But MV48 also has an "economy mode" that uses that offers low-budget filmmakers savings of up to 25 percent on film.
He doesn't detail this saving problem. The fact is, for independent filmmakers, the prohibitive cost is film, the raw stock and processing and development of negative. It's why so many have turned to digital. Shoot an hour for ten U.S. dollars on Mini DV. Shoot an hour on 35 mm film at 24 fps works out to roughly $4000. Now, at 48 fps, this cost doubles. So what's the "economy" mode here? As well, he completely skirts the issue of the fact that the system's vibration free tech would need to be implemented on nearly every camera in Hollywood. The main mechanism for filming today is the claw / registration pin system. Filming in the analogue sense is really a matter of taking 24 still photographs per second. A claw pulls down a perforation in the film, aligining it into the picture gate, while a registration pin aligns the perf so the film remains within the register of this gate. 24 fps is the standard, and running at higher speeds often needs serious maintenance and reengineering. As well, running at higher speeds = more light. The faster your framerate, the more light you need. This increases costs on film.
And it can handle any existing 35mm film format--unlike digital projection, which would obsolete a century of old prints.
And how good have those prints been maintained? The fact is, such classic immortal films as Vertigo needed extensive digital restoration work in order to present it as it was seen in its year of release. Thousands of films have been lost forever. Earlier this year Ebert even mentioned that there might not be an existing print of Robert Altman's Nashville - a film from the 70s. Classic films now are safer as digital masters.
One advantage of a film print is that the director and cinematographer can "time" the print to be sure the colors and visual elements are right. In a digital theater, the projectionist would be free to adjust the color, tint and contrast according to his whims. Since many projectionists do not even know how to properly frame a picture or set the correct lamp brightness, this is a frightening prospect.
And at the same time - most films shown in cinemas are underpar to the cinematographers wish. A recent popular technique, known as many things but basically silver retention, desaturates color and creates bolder contrast. These prints are more expensive and as a result only a few prints are shipped utilizing this tecnique - which the film was shot for - so that the majority of viewers never see the film as intended. Seven is a particular case of this.
Add to this the fact that Kodak themselves, and Martin Scorcese has campaigned against this, have found that most cinemas dim their projector bulbs under the misguided idea that it extends the bulb's life. It flat out doesn't. It just leads to a muddy, darker picture. Kodak sent technicians to several theaters armed with light meters and found most films projected at a full stop or two under their proper foot candle level. Add to this variations in print reels - and films are on several differnt ones - and you have a subpar projection process. Many cinematographers love the process of approving a DVD transfer because they can properly time the entire film - and a helluva lot of color timing is done digitally now. The cinematographer of The Full Monty shot a film called Hideous Kinky in Morocco, and he told me that he could've turned shots in daylight in the desert into midnight blue using new digital color timing tecniques. The digital projection tecnique could have s locked down system approved by the filmmakers so that the projector is rigged to only show it at their levels of choice - thereby making sure that there is an optimal standard for all showings of the film.
* What about piracy? Movies will be downloaded just once, then stored in each theater. Thieves could try two approaches. They could grab the signal from the satellite and try to break the encryption (as DVD encryption has just been broken).
Digital projection is not MPEG or MJPEG. The compression algorithim is 50:1 - adaptive block size rather than fixed block size. It compresses frames without regard to one or the next, whereas MPEG and MJPEG compress the information that is the same in each subsequent frame. This leads to picture artificating, which the digital projection system does not have. In other words, it is a proprietry, high storage medium with its own compression algorithim at a high cost. Pirates would need more than a simple telecine (transferring film to video) to pirate the film - first they'd have to break the encryption, which would be vastly superior to DVD's pathetic 48 bit, then they'd need the extremely expensive tech to decode that signal to a low fi master for pirating. Good luck, pirates.
As for the image recording itself - we do not know what system it will utilize. Sony and Panavision have yet to elaborate on what test shots for Ep. 2 have turned out as - nor what compression or resolution etc. it will use. It will not be an existing format like DV or DigiBeta or MPEG.
Hollywood has not spent a dime, for example, to research the intriguing question, do film and digital create different brain states? Some theoreticians believe that film creates reverie, video creates hypnosis; wouldn't it be ironic if digital audiences found they were missing an ineffable part of the moviegoing experience?
Umm, which is why video rental is such a huge business? The fact is, for the most part, the audience just doesn't care. And I have experienced states of emotional reverie from movies watched on DVD rather than a cinema. I went to see the IMAX film Everest during which a hair ended up in the gate of the projector. The result - during an emotional moment- an enormous tentacle from space lashed out at our heroes, and continued to do so until the end of the film - was hugely annoying. I complained to the manager. He told me I was the first, indignant, and rude, customer to complain about their high standards. The amount of misconception that still exists about letterboxing is insane. Letterboxing means you see more of the picture as intended. It's as simple as that. How many DVD users know what 16x9 anamorphic means, despite attempts by the DVD community to educate them?
There are issues here. For instance, watching a film projected means that you spend, during a two hour long film, an hour in darkness - maybe creating a dream like state. Digital projection does remove this flicker effect. But this is esoteric, and I doubt audiences even care.
As for questions raised here in slashdot:
The resolution in the TI system doesn't fit the width of films shot in a widescreen aspect ratio.
There are many different ways to make a film have a wider picture. Super 35mm, for example, utilizes the area in a frame that an optical sound wave is normally stored on, creating a fuller frame image. This is usually cropped down to 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 for a widescreen film, chopping off the top and bottom of the recorded image. This is great for effects people because they can reframe shots in the post production process. There is also anamorphic, which uses lenses which squeeze onto a standard frame a wider image and projection uses a lens which unsquezes the image. Star Wars was projected in this manner - the raw image was compressed horizontally, and a lens was put on the projector which expanded it to a full widescreen image, no black bars.
The resolution is nothing near that of analogue film
Absolutely true, but it is improving. The TI system cannot be considered as a dot matrix field of pixels in the standard LCD projection or monitor sense. It uses a system of dichroic mirrors to relay each beam of light representing a pixel. The resulting pixels do not have a stacked, square relation to one another. What it cannot reproduce is that film does have a resolution. It's determined by the number of silver halide crystals in the emulsion. But these crystals are of a random shape and size, and do not conform to pixels. It's messy, chaotic, and gorgeous. Picture grain (on analogue) is the result of seeing these crystals in the image, when a film is underexposed. It is true that digital projection cannot match this chaotic aspect of the film picture.
HOWEVER - as much as you read about the digital revolution, I've seen it. I've seen effects technicians working on major Hollywood films. And the amount of work they're doing that is invisible and are not for show - reframing shots, eliminating a modern car in a peroid film - is stunning. And when these are projected on film integrated into picture that hasn't been messed with digitally, at a 2000 line resolution, you do not notice. What you do notice about effects that give away bad effects are lighting discrepancies and bad rendering or false, too smooth movement. Think of Toy Story - which went from 4k line picture in a digital medium onto film - thereby it was sourced at those 4k lines. Did you notice it came from a pixelated source? No. Bottom line: you are already viewing in your cinema images that have less resoultion than real film.
Wow! Higher framerate for film. Just as good as getting 60 fps in Q3A rather than 30!
This gets into theoretical doctrine, which is messy. Film has been, for the past 70 years, a 24 fps medium. No one has complained that Lawrence of Arabia sucks because of 24 fps. 60 fps is more important in virtual point of view exercises because it better replicates real vision and the subsitution for mouse scrolling for your viewpoint. Undoubtedly, I agree with Ebert, the Maxi Vision system must look great. However - when a filmmaker doesn't shoot in the standard, normal 1/60th of a second shutter speed at 24 fps, the result is noticeable and unusual for audiences - such as the battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan, which were shot at a faster shutter speed, removing motion blur in images.
The projection of film is an optical illusion utilizing the perception of persistence. Most film frames individually with movement have motion blur. Persist this image one after the next, and the brain interprets it as movement. This is a huge debate about perception and so on, which I shouldn't get into here - but the fact is, cinema is so old as a standard, that 24 fps is what people almost expect when they see a movie.
The digital revolution is on, and its gonna crush film, Ebert is a Luddite - or - Hollywood is just hung up on buzzwords and trends and thus this system.
Which is why I was so stunned at his article. He is anything but a Luddite. He was one of the first critics to use the Net, and often writes about tech issues. Yes, the digital revolution is on, and there are going to be huge problems. James Cameron, who does know a helluva lot about this, has said the problem is that Hollywood will go for the cheapest, and therefore nastiest, system. Whatever system they get so they can maintain control of distribution even greater. Imagine if the studios were hooked up to every projector and ran them from their HQ - yeah, it's not a pleasant idea is it? Two weeks into a films release and a scene is causing a media uproar - HQ deletes it from every projector in the world. Etc, etc.
Likewise, the digital revolution is on - and it's not just a buzzword. The fact is, 90% of all films go through some form of digital process now, be it in editing or corrective opticals (traditionally done with an optical printer) or FX. This often entails painful procedures to get film to match the framerate of video systems (30 fps or 60hz NTSC) - 48 fps will make it even worse. There is so much money squandered getting film from one analogue medium into a digital one then back to analogue - that in the long run it's more effective for all parties concerned to move entirely digital. I'm telling you, here at ground zero, as a film student who has managed to see the new tech - that filmmaking in the traditional sense is undergoing a massive change - and it is unstoppable. What astonishes me is butting heads with traditionalists who believe everything must be done to stop filmmaking going digital - but haven't realized it already has - and that this new tech is liberating in that the real indie filmmaker can really make something for cheap, really cheap. Films that would never get made otherwise have been done on DV.
We are getting to the point of - if you can imagine it - you can show it. Which I find personally liberating. Especially if I can do it faster and cheaper - or if a kid in Kansas in his basement can. I own, in my PC, for less than a really cheap car, the equivalent to a mid 90s TV station's image processing and editing capabilites. At the same time, too much content is now being produced - too many crap webcam soap operas, the Truman Show made real but in an almost more craven manner. The many headed Hydra that digital has brought to image capturing and editing has only just appeared, and none of us knows where it will really take us, or what the future of filmmaking will be. But it's better to be informed of the truth of the situation than to give into preferences for more familiar formats - because of some kind of notion of "purity". Filmmaking is the manipulation of time, space, and emotion. It is an optical illusion. Nothing more, nothing less.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
The reason MV48 is being pushed by DPs (cinematographers) is because they can become obsolete in the filmmaking process. Once you have a color-correct HD monitor connected to a digital camera, why would you need a DP? The DP just becomes a "lighting supervisor", which I'm sure gaffers can handle. No need to worry about what you'll see in dailies tomorrow... that playback will be your final image.
Digital is inevitable because it simplifies the process. MV48 just makes it more complex. Like Linux or Blair Witch Project, eventually a cheap, high quality digital film will be made and make a lot of money.
I know from a panel I sat in on that Toy Story (1) was all done at 1500x1000 resolution. When I asked why such a strange resolution, ie non standard, and listened to a long argument about HDTV res VS. PC res. I finally was given the answer that 1500x1000 was indead the resolution of any big screen based on the PPI (pixels per inch, of digital)vs GPI (grains per inch, of film). I may not convey it as well as they did but it made sence to me. Besides, Minolta now has that new CCD technology that is 2x finer then 35mm film.
The TI projector uses a tech called DMD. The digital projection works by flipping array of tiny mirrors on the chip. The freq of the on/off determins light intensity and it reflects colored lights to make full color.
The mirrors are basically fabricated on the chip using VLSI technology, so, it follows Moore's law quite well.
Search DMD on TI website and you will find more.
Hollywood has not spent a dime, for example, to research the intriguing question, do film and digital create different brain states? Some theoreticians believe that film creates reverie, video creates hypnosis;
If Ebert had taken the time to read some of these studies, he would have found that the difference in brain-wave patterns is caused by the effect of light on the retininas: Monitors (and TV) are back-lit while film is projected. This creates two very different mental pictures, TV seem brighter and more active, which causes the brain to switch to a more passive mode; while film is softer and more subtle, making the brain become more active.
TOTAL control by the content provider.
A movie studio can track EXACTLY how many times a movie has been view, revoke a theatres key to decode the film if they dont meet the political demands of the studio (DISNEY), make changes (CENSOR) a film while its still in theatres, rotate ADVERTISING before, after and DURING the film, etc.
Its DIVX on a larger, creepier scale.
I have no doubt that large, high resolution displays for the home will become common. However, I seriously doubt walls within the home will grow to allow for a large enough display to satisfy my desire for the cinema experience.
No, please, NO more confusion about NTSC and S-Video. Even my satellite company lies like a rug when it comes to S-Video being a "totally different" standard than NTSC (they say this: A better picture than any NTSC source such as cable or VHS can provide. I say: Wow, if it isn't NTSC, how can I display it on my NTSC TV? Will I need a "magic box"?).
:-)
S-Video _IS_ NTSC, only they separate the luminance and chroma (color)... Hell, my C64 did S-Video (This is no joke, that's why the C64 monitors had Chroma/Luma and Audio connections)!
Why is this better? I don't remember the details (but I did read them at one point), but it seems that the colour information in an NTSC signal was a "afterthought" - NTSC was never designed for colour. The colour simply takes a ride with the luminance and degrades it a bit. Separate them right from the start and you have a clearer picture, as good as NTSC can get (525 Lines).
There ya go...
I like my video the way my music is played, analog all the way.
This is a pretty ignorant comment.
DPs will be hardly obsolete with WYSIWYG filmmaking. DPs are more responsible today for almost painting with light - composition, given the worship of the director - has become a directorial, camera operator realm. To light well on any sort of video system, and do it well, is much more difficult than on film. Gaffers do not just set lights where they feel they should or is necessary. They do it under the supervision of the DP who knows that this light will fill out the key light coming from the overhead 10k which has been diffused in order to make it feel more like early evening. By using a Kino Flo as the fill light, they will get a clean, soft white light, leading to a more radiant face in close up. But if they tilt the Kino Flo so, which the gaffer doesn't know, they'll put the left eye of the actor into shadow, etc. None of this will change on video.
Just because a person can see what they're filming does not mean they have a trained or intuitive eye to subconsciously alter a picture using lights - where you put darkness and light, what colors will pop out and which won't, where the depth of field is and where that draws the viewers eye. Look at your average, say, television soap opera shot on video. Now look at the video segments of Run Lola Run. Both shot on WYSIWYG video, but entirely different in tone and mood. Because of the DOP.
Having worked with DPs, and met and talked with some of the greatest in the world, this tech will not make them obsolete. It will make them even more vital. What's difficult for them is adjusting to the fact that most of the time they are dictating, and sometimes hoping, that what they imagine will end up on film. But there is no way a gaffer can match say, the images in The Thin Red Line on video, without the eye of John Toll. Much of what you think is natural filming, where you just point the camera and shoot, is a carefully maintained illusion. There are diffusion nets and silks up and maybe even a 10k HMI in broad daylight.
I'm sorry, having worked on films, I have to say, you're just plain wrong. The reason films look different, and feel different, and have different textures, and tones, and emotions - is often the result of light, and the DOP who understood to combine this light would result in that. And the reason why Sony Imageworks has leading DPs come to lecture the effects designers is so that they understand this process of painting with light when they do effects.
As for dailies, a HD monitor does not for one moment replicate what its like to see dailies on a cinema screen. Having edited in analog and digital formats - a good Steenbeck or Avid with the best monitor system will not show you what something is like when it's blown up to ten feet high. Ever seen the Pixar crew watching their all digital films at sessions on lil monitors, everyone huddled around? No, they all sit in a traditional cinema.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
Expect to see reflective LCD display technology come out in the near future. Reflective LCD is not at all like your standard LCD, but is basically an LCD built over a semiconductor. Reflective LCDs can handle higher resolutions than DLP and should be cheaper to manufacture. In addition, they don't suffer from the annoying artifacts of DLP (i.e. color separation).
Film won't be used much in 10 years. HDTV actually has higher resolution than 35mm film and can have a higher frame rate. The 24fps HDTV standard came about not only to show films on HDTV, but for producers to record directly at 24fps. 24fps suffers during high motion scenes, but many film directors insist that they must have the properties of film (i.e. 24fps, grain, etc.)
One other advantage of using all digital is that currently there is degradation when digitizing film to add effects and going back to film.
HDTV also has a higher dynamic range than film. The new CCDs can handle darker material better.
In addition, within the next few years it will be less expensive to use tape instead of film. There's virtually no time spent on development, and if a shot is messed up, just rewind and start again.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Nahh, you are looking at 19 MB per second for 704x480 lossless resolution (according to my Matrox Rainbow Runner anyways). Now, since film is linear when played back, and if you are using 18 gig drives, you need 20 of them, and they would be raided linearly (unless you haven't a clue, in which case, why would you care about digital video?).
:-)
This means a sustained data rate of just under 1 MB per second. Ummm, like IDE Mode 0 can handle that. Udma 66 can do sooooo much more... maybe even 19 MB per second (cant be sure though).
Remember - seek times, etc... don't matter, the heads will be progressing up the drive in a nice linear fashion!
Well, lets pump that up to 1280x1024 - about 4x the resolution of 704x480.
Thats a data rate of 80 MB/s. Divided by 20: 4 MB/s. Perhaps now we are looking at a mode 2 or 3 IDE drive, but it wouldn't max out any UDMA drives...
I've done a lot of digital video stuff, so I have been well "trained" in noticing all the various artifacting that can be caused with lossy compression and all the other things that go along with digital video. I'm also a movie snob, so I'm also well "trained" in noticing all the little niggly things that can screw up a movie for me that the "normal" movie viewer may not notice.
I was pleasantly surprised.
I noticed *no* pixelation, I noticed *no* artifacting of any sort. The two major concerns I had with image quality simply failed to materialize.
Now, what I *did* get was the best color I've ever seen on a movie screen. Bright blues, deep greens, vivid reds, etc. If you've seen any Pixar movies (TS, ABL, TS2...) you know their opening scene with the rendered Disney castle against the sky blue background, well, I've never seen that blue sharper and the image look more crisp than I did in the DLP theatre in Orlando.
PLUS, as an added bonus, since there were none of the typical film flaws or frame jitter normally associated with 35mm film projection, the film was overall more *enjoyable* to watch because there were no distracting 1/30sec bits of dust or scratches or annoying little blips on the screen to have to tune out and the image was ROCK STEADY for the entire film.
So, all I have to say: don't even try to judge the technology until you have actually SEEN it in action.
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
My mom's going to kick you in the face!
the best overall must be used not what you are told is the best by some company using fud.
--
How Big Was Bugs, Really!?
A movie is 24 frames per second so a 90 minute movie is 129,600 frames. In our case, each frame was 2048 X 872 pixels by 4 bytes of color information. This means each frame is 7,143,424 bytes of data. Multiplying 129,600 X 7.1MB/frame is roughly 925GB of storage for the film frames. However, there are many first attempts at frames and also video resolution frames that have to be stored as well. On A Bug's Life, we had about 2TB of storage, even though the actual final frames only took up .925TB.
--
(Above quote copyright Pixar Animation Studios)
Maybe by looking at current digitally-produced films, we could determine what works for resolution, and what doesn't.
Good point - but
- you haven't seen MaxiVision, so you've got nothing to compare it with,
- the film you did see in digital happens not only to be 100% computer-generated, but the third full-length attempt at a 100% digital feature by the undisputed industry leaders.
So let's call your experience best-possible-case. Sure, it's impressive, but we can take it as a given that both sides of this debate at least bring that much to the table.bumppo
I think we are all forgetting something important. When digital projection becomes standard will the system be open and will we be able to run linux on the projectors???????
TARZAN-- Entirely animated (computer, but traditional cell-style) THIS WAS INCREDIBLE. I didn't notice the pixelization, except during terribly bright scenes, but this was the first movie I saw w/o any kind of grain at all (It went straight to digital, without any intermediate film). It was INCREDIBLE.
TOY STORY 2-- GREAT as well. This movie I saw twice. Once in digital in Burbank and then again in regular ol' film. Big difference.
Even cinematographer friends of mine have to agree that it's INCREDIBLE and I don't see any reason why it won't be the de facto standard in another 5-10 years. Cheaper, nicer-looking, and easier.
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Xerox has already demosntrated this on a small scale.
Dot pitch only makes sense with respect to systems projected from masked CRT's. These new digital projectors project an image derived from LCD's or those reflective chip-piggyback things (can't remember the name) which both have a fixed 1:1 dot:pixel ratio.
10 mm would be the pixel (or cell) height.
Hands in my pocket
I also don't mind the artifacts that sneek into MP3s - In fact, much of the stuff I listen to you can't tell what is compression artifact and what is created by the artist (too much electronica).
Why do we go out to restaurants when we can cook a better meal at home, or to bar when we can drink alone. The natural laughter of viewers during a comedy is certainly better than the canned sound track. It's the experience that makes theater what it is.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Haven't seen this one, but one you can see (at places like the MOMA and some Hollywood reissue houses) is the 30-Frame Per Second TODD-AO system that was developed in the 1950s. This used 70mm film with a wide-aspect ratio frame (2.something : 1, IIRC... don't have my references here) with 6 channel (analog, duh!) magnetic sound. Frame was projected flat (no anamorphic lens so simpler optics --> less degradation) and originally at 30 FPS. (Norelco built the original projectors, which were dual-speed so they could handle standard 24 fps prints as well.) Only a few films were made with the higher speed, since they had to use two cameras during shooting in order to have a standard-speed print available for theaters without Todd-AO gear. Some were: Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, and (again IIRC) Lawrence of Arabia. I've seen the first with a 30 FPS print, and the difference is astounding. Almost like looking at the scene through a window, rather than on a screen. It's especially noticable with moving objects (remember the backward-turning wagon wheels in the old westerns?).
BTW, item of technical trivia for those interested: When you see a film in a theater, you're actually seeing each frame twice. Somebody early on determinded that this reduced the apparant flicker. So the actual display is:
Perhaps someone could address how the 24 film frames --> 30 TV frames issue is addressed when making transfers. I've heard about something on the order of doubling up every 4th frame to get the count right, but I've never examined a TV film chain, and so can't speak from experience.Unfortunately, your reasoning is just as flawed as you claim Ebert's to be: "The digital projection systems of the future will blow today's technology away - and yes, that includes Ebert's precious MaxiVision48 system." If you take the time to read some technical articles about projection systems (both analog and digital) you will realize that every projection system has, and will continue have, fundamental limitations regardless of refinements to manufacturing. Film and liquid crystal have limitations as to percentage of light transferred through the control element. It's not as simple as using a brighter light source as a brighter lamp means more heat which means potentially destroying the control element or melting the film. Liquid crystal and vibrating mirror systems have limitations as to how small you can make a single control element. This is not just about limits of manufacturing - when you decrease the size of the control element beyond a certain point they no longer function effectively as such. You might think a solution is to increase the overall control element dimensions but you run into optics problems - how do you effectively light a larger element and/or effectively focus that larger element onto the projection screen. Laser projection systems have limitations related both to the control elements (usually a high speed rotating drum) and they have extreme cooling requirements (usually continuous running water through the power supplies and laser tubes.) CRT based systems have limitations as to light output - if you increase the electron beam intensity, you get higher light output at the expense of picture tube life - you end up "burning out" the phosphor. Though I certainly believe both analog and digital projection systems can be improved over their current state, you would be fooling to make such broad statements that one will "blow away" the other. Ebert's prediction may be entirely correct if, in the end, it comes down to cost.
Film is still going to be used in time to come - but as a distribution medium for mass, popular visual storytelling, probably not. For once I agree with Peter Greenaway who believes film as an analogue medium will become like comissioned painting - regarded as a medium more for "fine art".
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
Native format of DLT 7000's is 35GB - 40GB for DLT 8000's. The compressed format is 70 and 80GB respectively. However, you will never achieve those compressed storage rates if the data written to the tape is already in compressed format (which it would be for this application.) Also, while fast for tape backup, DLT is still relatively slow in the broad scheme of things. You would need to shut your theatre down for a few hours every time you want to switch to a new movie to allow time for restoring the DLT's of that movie to the RAID array. It's also interesting that you would suggest replacing film with magnetic tape - if I were to wager a bet, the information storage density of 35mm film is probably quite a bit higher than magnetic tape. Think about that one for a minute!
I'll address his points one by one, pointing out the errors.
Here's the first and probably biggest mistake. He doesn't realize that technology is changing. The proper question is, "How good is digital projection NOW?" In a few years, it'll be bigger, better, and cheaper.
One wonders how they came up with this number. Is watching a movie five times better on their system?
Here's a pointless and barely accurate statement. How often does a theatre show a print that's twenty years old? Very rarely, because by that age they're brittle and faded. This is if the prints happen to be lying around. It's very unlikely there'd be many old films for a projector to display.
Sure, the upfront cost of a new system is higher. So we should never upgrade anything by this logic. I mean, fixing an old car is almost always cheaper than getting a new one, even if it'll break down sooner and cost tons more to run.
Digital systems are prototypes now, and are thus more expensive, but they'll get cheaper, and promise free or very nearly free delivery. The updated film system requires more film, making shipping even costlier and doesn't offer a future reduction in cost, like digital does.
A 400GB array costs $75k? Well, even assuming this was true, the cost would come down drastically over the next few years. Twenty drives and a server will end up being two drives, easily shipped.
And the promlem with compressing the signal is?? 4:1 compression with a decent algorithm is barely noticable, especially if you don't have a hard limit of 1/4 the uncompressed bandwidth to stay under. (If the film is 100MB/sec, 25MB/sec is trivial to attain, if you can hit peaks of 50MB/sec... If 25MB/sec is the hard limit, as in, downloading over a link offering only that much bandwidth, it's a little bit harder.)
This actually seems fairly accurate, but I don't imagine they'd use satellite downlinks, it doesn't make sense when they could simply run fiber to the theatre for a higher upfront, but negligible ongoing cost.
Here he compares the prototype systems with HDTV of the future, and the best HDTV of the future, 1920 being the highest of the resolutions, not the one that most broacasts will be in.
And then he misses the obvious point... If can can broadcast this HDTV signal, in higher quality than the digital projection, you'll probably have the technology for a higher resolution digital projection.
And here we have the famous "Customizability is bad, because you're not as smart as we are, and if we say it's best this way, then don't fiddle."
Sure, some projectionist are probably color blind, but there are two things he missed, one is that the digital projector and the digital signal don't degrade or change, so you won't have to constantly fiddle to keep it in focus and bright enough. And if there are color controls, what's to keep them from sticking a sensor behind the screen to read the displayed colors and making the adjustments automatically?
A technology isn't bad if it can be misused, his "tweaks are bad, because people have less taste than me" argument is like saying cars are bad because you can get them painted in ugly colors.
No, really? The engineers travelling with the prototype systems are more highly paid than a young kid? Sheesh.
This assumes that the system need be so complex to operate that it requires a trained engineer. I can't imagine it being more complex than modern home-theatre... "Press this button to start it, and use these controls to tweak it. Hit this button to stop it if the bulb burns out." Do TV's require electrical-engineers with specialization in antenna theory to operate them?
If it does have any complex theatre-servicable parts, one technician could service the whole theatre, and would probably do something closer to swapping out a dead unit for later repair, than on-site service.
This also ignores the benefits of having only one projectionist instead of one per machine. When you have to fiddle with film, and be on hand to fix problems that crop up, you need one person per machine. When you simply press 'Start' and watch the screen on a video pickup watching for problems, you don't need to be right there, and can hit 'Start' on many movies at the same time.
One 'projectionist' (VJ?) and one tech would have to be cheaper than eight-ten projectionists as are required now.
This show's he doesn't understand the technology. DVD encryption has fundamentally flawed because it was relying on untrusted (and untrustable) hardware to decrypt the DVD. It was only a matter of time before a key was grabbed, the Xing accident only made it easier.
A digital projector on the other hand, being manufactured by the movie industry, could be 'trusted', because it's the last step in the chain before shining the movie on the screen, and because they could use crypto in the only way it can really work, from one trusted and secure machine to another.
Actually, no. The projector itself would probably be the decryptor, and would be a sealed black-box (basically) given to the theatre by the movie companies, with which the transmission systems would communicate and agree upon a session key with public-key crypto. I doubt these would have an output labelled 'Dub pirate copy to disk'. And it's unlikely a trained tech, let alone a projectionist, could jury-rig one.
Didn't he just finish telling us how you had to store this on a $75k system of 20 18GB HDs?
Either he expects the average pirate to carry around these huge $75k disk systems, or he expects the storage to get cheaper.
So, by this logic, a digital system would be perfect. With trusted machines at both ends, with huge storage requirements, and with no similarity to custom hardware, the digital system should be much more resistant to piracy.
Wow, a refinement of an old technology, using special film, gives better quality than a prototype of a new technology. I'm in shock.
It's actually interesting to note that he does subscribe to the, 24fps is only good enough, not great, school of thought. Someone should transfer this to the undying "How many FPS are enough?" threads...
Could it be because the costs of film reproduction and distribution and so high that avoiding this is well worth subsidising the theatre's purchase a new hardware?
Wouldn't it be great if first-run movies came out across the world at the same time, instead of other continents having to wait for North America to be done with the film before getting it, and even then, getting the used and scratched film, after months of use? Actually, this might partially solve the DVD region code problem, if movies could reasonably be played worldwide at the same time, they wouldn't need to restrict region 1 DVDs from working in foreign players just to artificially create an audience for the big-screen version.
This assumes that these companies can spare the space for a projection system, which requires having a unobstructed area between the projector and the wall... And that they can afford the film costs, with a projectionist the run the whole thing...
A wall of LCD screens will soon be incredibly cheap by comparison, especially because this application doesn't have problems with small join marks between screens, or higher number of dead pixels than would be salable on a laptop.
But, if you accept the word of a technology pundit with no technology skills, who urges you to buy into a dying system with incredibly high upkeep costs instead of looking to the future...
damn so and sos, I submitted this story last week. Anyways, the REASON I submitted it last week was I think Ebert hit the nail on the head. Digital projection is NOT all it's cracked up to be. It's got pretty crappy resolution and is limited by the 24fps framerate which is a POS. Anyone who plays any game knows that the higher the framerate the smoother the motion looks. 24fps was originally used because it was the LOWEST framerate that could fool the brain into perceiving motion to save money on film prints. People have just stuck with it. One of the biggest problems with digital is the cost. I mean how many of your local 4 screen theaters are going to fork over 150k for a new digital projector when their old film one works fine. Digital movie projectors are just glorified presentation projectors whose resolutiopn isn't the greatest in the world. Or so it goes.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Two points here: one is that didn't I hear something about plasma screens eing on their way for home use? I know they're incredibly flat, and can do HDTV specs easily, but what resolution do they normally function at?
The other point: blur is not always a bad thing. A friend of mine saw the Phantom Menace in on film and then on digital projection, and he said that the special effects looked more "fake" on digital, because it was sharp enough to see that they weren't "perfectly" blended into their scenes.
First, let me say that I agree with Roger Ebert that high-temporal-fidelity film is great. The comment that it looks '3D' is what everybody says; it's that different from normal 24 fps film. Douglass Trumbull, of early special effects (2001, Silent Running) fame has spent the last 15 years trying to get a technology called Showscan off the ground. Showscan used 60 fps film, and can be seen at a couple of Las Vegas 'ride films'.
Unfortunately for Trumbull, MaxiVision48, and other advocates of high-frame-rate film; people see high-frame-rate moving pictures every day; TV is 60 fps. Now, most people say think that TV is 30 frames per second, but each frame is made from two fields, each offset by 1/60th of a second, so the net result truly is 60 fields per second. The motion of TV is incredibly smooth compared to film. Anybody can tell this difference, although few people know what they are seeing. As an example, look at a daytime soap opera, compared to a prime-time show. One of the biggest differences that you see is the frame rate, as all prime-time shows are filmed on film, and then transfered to video. This distance from reality, filtering the time more coarsely, is what we see as 'film look', and is perceived as higher quality.
At my previous company, Pacific Data Images, I was a strong proponent of doing animation at 60 fps. We did mostly 'broadcast' animation, things like show titles. But when we started doing commercials, we found that we had to work at 24 or 30 fps; as that was what was expected. You could talk until you were blue in the face that 60 fps was 'better', and you couldn't sway anybody -- because it was perceived as worse by viewers.
I've seen the digital projections of both Star Wars and Toy Story. I went to Star Wars in a very dubious frame of mind, based on my previous experience that 'better' was seen as 'worse'. I thought that people would miss the flicker, and would even miss the grain and scratches. I left the theater completely convinced that this would succeed, though.
Digital projection mimics film in many ways; but it really does seem that just the annoying flaws are removed. Nobody really likes scratches or splices or even film-gate jitter. I did perceive the loss of flicker -- a film projection is completely black half the time; and the digital projection isn't. Not yet, anyway. This lack of flicker grabs your eyeballs in a different way; I'm not sure how to describe it...but it's a little more immediate; a little less separated from reality.
As for the other parts of Ebert's article -- he saw a prototype. The resolution will go up, soon to 1920x1024. The problem of transporting the date will go away with better technology (for instance, the transparent flourescent CD-size disks pointed at by Slashdot recently). The ability to 'color time' films is actually a huge win for digital projection; you will be able to do much more powerful color manipulation digitally than you ever could striking prints from analog film. The piracy issue can be avoided somewhat -- I agree with earlier posters that the decryption can happen in the light-modulator itself; so that you wouldn't have to ever have a decrypted signal.
Roger also claims that studio people don't care about technology. I completely disagree; we have a thriving technology-of-film community here in LA, and we have been discussing all of the issues that he has brought up here, in wretchedly thorough detail, for the last few years.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
This may be a very uninformed question, but what about LCDs? Instead of projection, is it at all possible to simply replace theater screens with giant LCDs?
Now, don't laugh - I'm sure that fifteen years ago the idea of a 17" full color LCD screen was laughable as well.
It seems as though you should be able to make one that is a very high resolution (3000x2000 or whatever) and you would save space dramatically (no projection, just a large box next to the screen).
We'd be seeing thirty and forty plexes. Wait a minute, maybe this isn't such a good idea... .
A rolled up screen gives you nothing that a wall painted white won't. So why don't we just use a wall painted white? IT'S NOT FUCKING BIG ENOUGH, JUST LIKE THE ORIGINAL POSTER SAID!
Film, though can survive quite a few decades and still be viewable. I'm still scratching my head at how to get data off of an 8inch TRS-80 format floppy.
And watch your language while you're at it.
It might be difficult to do a good D-A conversion, but you only have to do it once per film. It doesn't really matter if the converter costs $10 million or so, because there only needs to be one in existance. (unless you need to convert a lot, fast.)
This is resoundingly like the analog vs. digital debate in the pro audio world. And, most people in the audio world realize that, while analog provides a warmer, richer sound, digital's got the greatest ease of use and best longevity.
;-)
With advances like higher bit-rate, higher sampling rate, etc., digital is becoming the successor to analog audio.
I don't see any difference in this discussion. Sure, right now digital projection technologies suck. The image quality doesn't quite live up to what everybody wants, but I can't wait for the day when I can go to a digital theater and see a picutre that has NO scratches, no green lines running down the middle of the screen for minutes on end, or pops and cracks in the audio track because some idiot projectionist decided to cover up the audio track with splicing tape.
And, everything in sync! For instance, DTS is an audio format that runs on CD-ROM and is sync'ed with a track on the film print. Unfortunately, if there's a problem with the sync track on the film, DTS loses its sync. And, don't get me started about problems with Dolby Digital. It sucked watching Waterworld with only the left audio tracks working because the Dolby Digital audio track (which is located in between the sprocket holes) was scratched.
And, has anybody ever experienced a celluloid fire while the film's in the projector? Not a pretty experience, and the audience certainly doesn't like the time it takes to cut the affected frames out of the print. (Sure, the film makes a nice decoration, but that's beside the point.)
So, eventually digital WILL compete with normal film, and one day it'll be better. Now, if there was only something I could do about the people talking behind me though every movie I go to
--Bernie
MaxiVision? I'm feeling dijected.
Work together for the Common Geek Good:
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
Movie on the Largest screen to date. It took two
projectors to achieve enough brightness.(see pics)
'The Most Significant Journey' is a Promotional
movie about the Baylor Experiance. It is first
such HDTV movie shot for a University.
Movie Site:
http://www.significantjourney.baylor.edu/
Shot of Projector set-up:
http://pr.baylor.edu/journeypics/
Cliff Cheney
Baylor Univ. PR - Photography
From what I've heard, display resolution for digital movie theater presentation will be 4Kx2K, the same resolution digital retouching is done in. Refresh rate is quadruple the standard frame rate, at 96fps.
I've enjoyed Mr. Ebert's commentary on movies for years, but in this matter I feel he's revealing a certain degree of "fuddy-duddy-ism".
By way of disclosure, I work for Pixar Animation Studios, but I do not speak for them.
By means of an informal poll, I have yet to meet a single person who saw Toy Story 2 on a digital projector and thought it looked worse than ANY print of the same movie. The lack of dust, film scratches, sprocket jitter and generational loss are CLEARLY apparent, and quite striking. To be fair, Toy Story was mastered directly from the original digital source, and we have some pretty talented engineers and DPs who worked to make that look good. I have not had the chance to view other films like The Phantom Menace in such a theater, so I won't say that digital projection makes for a uniformly better picture, but TS2 is a good technology demonstration that remarkable things are possible.
Right now digital projection systems are rather expensive: of course, there are only a couple of dozen theater ready ones in the world, so perhaps that's not too surprising. The interesting this is that virtually everything in a digital projector will benefit from Moore's law kind of price/performance drops. So it takes 100gb of disk to store a movie. The disks are getting cheaper, and what's remarkable: they are REUSEABLE. Ever price what a 35mm film print costs? Try multiplying those by the 3000 theaters that a major release might have, and you run into some serious money. Digital projectors have MUCH fewer moving parts than a conventional projector, because they have no film transport and no shutter.
Costs aside, it is my firm belief that digital theaters will deliver a better LOOKING picture as well. The resolution of current projectors (1280x1024) is thought to be 'low' but in fact, when done properly, they can look amazingly good. The typical film projector has several pixels worth of sprocket jitter, so the imagined higher resolution of film isn't usually delivered to the screen, also being eaten up in generational loss, aging of film pigments, scratches and dust. Some of you may recall the television special detailing the remastering of Star Wars. The original film required LARGE amounts of work to correct for the terrible aging of the pigments involved. Digital projection means that 30 or 300 years from now, you will be able to show the film EXACTLY as it appears today. That's a pretty strong selling point in my book.
As a brief aside addressing the choice of resolution and compression ratios, let me just point out that first of all, costs for disks is dropping, while the resolution that people want to view things at is pretty much fixed. This means that the entire issue of compression will become a moot point anyway. If you assume 2M pixels per frame, 24fps, 12 bits per color channel, and a 90 minute movie, the uncompressed data storage is about 1 TB. That's admittedly a lot of storage, but it isn't infinite, and its becoming easier to do as time goes on. Current (lossy) compression technology can easily cut that down by a factor of more than ten, even without using frame/frame coherence. Forget MPEG, state of the art leaves that stuff in the dust. 100gb disk arrays aren't particularly expensive, and next year they'll be half as expensive as they are this year. In three to five years, we probably wouldn't even need to compress at all.
I saw Ebert on television claim that when he went to a theater, he wants to see light coming through celluloid. Well, he's entitled to watch whatever he likes however he likes, but I think I've seen the future, and it isn't far off. I'm waiting eagerly for the next installment of Star Wars. I suspect it will turn a few heads.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
Hrm I dunno, all of the audio in a DTS, THX or SDDS film come off 1 to 3 cd-roms so there's 650 to almost 2 gigs off right there. a 20 minute film reel is about 18" in diameter..
It is true that a negative is higher resolution than HDTV, HOWEVER, after all the mastering is done and the film is duplicated the resolution is lost. My information comes from SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) at a persentation done a few weeks ago at Sony in San Jose. Yes, film is higher resolution, but once it has been processed the advantage is lost. HDTV maintains its resolution throughout. Also, a CCD has higher resolution in low light levels than film since fast film must be used. In addition, the CCD has a higher dynamic range, i.e. there is much more low-level detail in dark areas with a CCD than is possible with film.
As far as grain, there currently is work progressing on digitally adding "film" grain to HDTV recorded video.
According to the SMPTE presentation, once the film is scanned to digital and goes back to film, the resolution is lost. The best film scanners cannot match what a good CCD can do at this time.
It's like photocopying a 1200 dpi grey-scale laser-printer image with a 1200 dpi scanner. Since the dots likely won't match up exactly the scanned image will not look as sharp or as good as the original. The same sort of thing happens with film. Let's face it, there are multiple generations of film to film transfers done before the film reaches the theaters. My guess is that there are a minimum of 3-4 film-film transfers. The first would be from the original film copied to a new film, since it has to be cut and edited. This would go from a negative to a positive. Now, this golden tape isn't about to be used to make duplicates for the theaters (unless somebody is really stupid) so this positive is duplicated again into one or more negatives. These negatives are then used to copy to the film that goes out to the theater. Now, that's four copies made. If the original resolution was 4000x2000 you're now probably down to 1500x800. If digital processing is done between the original film and the film that goes out to the theater then the resolution is probably higher, more likely around 2000x1000. This isn't far from HDTV which is 1920x1080. Not only that, but the HDTV can easily be recorded at 30FPS progressive or 60FPS interlaced. For the die-hard film bufs it can also be recorded at 24FPS progressive.
At the SMPTE presentation some A/B footage was shown with footage taken with an HDTV 24FPS camera and a 35mm film camera. The HDTV looked very close, except where there was a lot of contrast in which case it looked BETTER since there was more detail in the dark areas.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Ok, I'm by far not an expert on this subject, but some of the good home theaters I've seen have had some sort of filtering (optical or digital, I'm not sure) but it seemed to improve the overall image quality imensely. It was almost to the point that you lost pixelization at all but the closest distance. It was my thinking that perhaps a filter like the ones used in home theaters could be applied and may help a great deal, especially considering the distance the audience would be from the screen. I've done no research on this, but it seems practical to me...
Slayback
I've posted elsewhere the same point - you're absolutely correct that that as far as digital effects ending up in film goes - you're at a lower rez than pure HDTV. But as for going from negative to theatrical print, there's all sorts of variations on this - Interpositives, Internegatives, answer prints, Neg Cutting, silver retention processes - there's also reversal stock, which two major features have been shot on recently. But by going to a dupe print or dupe neg - you are not going down in resolution - the same number of viable silver halide crystals are present in the print film. You may, depending on your color timing, trigger less crystals. Most prints are done on quite slow stock as it is, in order to make it finer, with less grain.
As far as scanning / recording goes, you're dead on. I've posted about that elsewhere.
But my real point is that there isn't, as such, a line or pixellated resolution to film because of its randomness. It's a chaotic, analog medium. It's like the hiss on old records that some people actually associate with having a mood. And there are also tones and moods to film, mostly to do with its arcane, random processes. At the end of the day, I know for a fact digital will win as a medium - but what I'm saying is that it is, like vinyl, an aged medium that will persist through certain romantic attatchments. It'll be like using one type of brush rather than another. It's why they're developing digital imitations of analog artifacts, like digital grain. But who wants to hear a CD being scratched when you're listening to hip hop?
The street finds its own uses for things - and overspecilization leads to extinction.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
I don't know, maybe I missed it but I don't remember seeing any other post about this. Everybody is arguing over the relative merits of digital and film reproductions. All the posts talk about how how print preparations are a major portion of film costs and digital could be a costs savings for the studios.
Uh, am I the only one who sees how this could in fact put the studios out of business? How it could revitalize small, independent film productions? Come on folks, if it has happened with independent music production (the "Indie" music scene) why couldn't it happen to the "film" scene 20 years down the road? Once the cameras are cheap enough, your major cost is going be crew/actor labor costs and film permits. If people in the film industry get paid huge amounts and spend lavishly because the print production and marketing costs are a very high barrier to entry then, once those barriers drop, EVERYTHING changes.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
I've seen "Phantom Menace," "Tarzan" and "Toy Story II" using Texas Instrument's DLP Cinema beta projectors in Burbank, California, and could not see a compression artifact anywhere -- just a rock solid, scratch free, bright and intense image. On a technological level, digital cinema is basically here, now.
.. and very quickly. Consider: "Phantom Menace," at 136 minutes, took up 20 18-Gigabyte drives using a HyperSPACE recorder and disk array back in May. By the time "Toy Story II" was presented in November, QuBit compression had squeezed the entire 92 minutes into just 32 Gigabytes stored on 4 hard disks.
As for Ebert's specific technical criticisms of digital cinema, here are my responses, in order:
* MaxiVision is currently just as much a prototype as the Texas Instruments installations, so any equipment cost comparisons are premature. And we all know digital means rapidly falling prices over the long term;
* The best compression and storage schemes for digital cinema are still evolving
* Comparing digital cinema to HDTV is an apples and oranges affair that misses many points. TI's DLP in fact uses three 1280x1024 "micromirrors," tripling the resolution of Ebert's sketchy, misinformed math. There is also the role of a theater-quality and sized reflective screen and the massively bright projector bulb in adding to the clarity of the projected image;
* Projectionists cannot (and can quite easily not be allowed) to "re-time" films in digital cinema projects, and don't need to, since the film itself would contain any specific projector settings;
* As for projectionist salaries, digital equipment could mostly handle and monitor itself. Even today's mechanical projectors are mostly turn on and forget propositions. Digital projectors could even be monitored remotely, on site or at the exhibitor's main office;
* Security is always an issue, but any stolen movie file could easily be watermarked to identify the offending (or offended) theater, and steps taken;
* For MaxiVision to be viable, there would have to be enough lab capacity to handle the tens of thousands of prints going out today (unless MaxiVision wants to monopolize that), which would create just as much pirate capacity.
I think Ebert's arguments suffer from his priveleged position as a film critic who doesn't appreciate the bulk of the theatrical exhibition industry and what digital cinema could mean beyond simply aesthetic considerations of the moment. This is, after all, a man who watches most films essentially alone in special studio screening rooms. But out in the real world, today's theatrical exhibition business is on a razor's edge. Three quarters of the boxoffice take in the first few weeks of a film's release goes right back to the studio, leaving theater owners to subsist on popcorn and Coke sales. Exhibition chains have rushed to build costly 18-, 20- and 24-screen megaplexes in heated competition, just to turn around and close the small 12-screen boxes. Home entertainment technology continues to gain ground. As a result, profits are thin, and stocks are down.
Why focus on economic considerations, rather than the aesthetic ones? Because money will make the decision. If purely aesthetic considerations ruled, we'd all be watching IMAX movies, or at least going to 70mm Sensurround theaters. On this note, consider some of the advantages for theater owners of digital projection systems:
* Lack of "prints" means no degradation of the image and no broken reels just when they're starting to keep most of the profits;
* Being able to "turn on" a movie on as many screens as they can sell tickets for, instead of the current system where they are locked in by the number of prints they're given, and have badly-performing movies taking up space while hot-selling movies send viewers home because of sold-out shows;
* Being able to book special screenings, from revivals to small-budget independents, with far less financial investment for all involved, increasing revenue opportunities;
* Even the ability to book non-theatrical fare like concerts and live sporting events.
* Pre-movie screen entertainment, so limited and sophmoric now, would become more competetive and consqeuently better in a nimble digital system -- not to mention much more local, a very important consideration for invidual theater owners.
More fundamentally (even revolutionarily), digital cinema would also lower the barrier to entry for smaller filmmakers and distributors whose tight budgets cannot afford current distribution costs. These independent filmmakers, working outside of Hollywood, are much admired by critics like Ebert for their alternative artistic vision, and many in fact are already turning to digital on the production side to get their visions made and seen. They understand the liberating effects of digital economies.
In an ironic twist, by insisting on the primacy of celluloid and the entire studio industrial infrastructure that comes along with it, Ebert is voting for the status quo in cinema art as it is currently constructed.
That's a good one. Should I place it in my gazebo, or on the fucking veranda?
Digital projection can be better than traditional film projection, but obviously not with the TI projection system and certainly not using sattelite downloads for the movie data.
The movie data will most likely have to be transported on a reliable medium, such as the tapes that are used for data backup.
The largest available backup tape today is 50Gb native and can transfer 6Mbyte/sec, with a 100Gb,12Mbyte/sec version on the way, which could easily be modified for realtime movie playback.
For example the current dvd mpeg2 technology is 720x480 at 10mbit/sec resulting in about 4500Mbyte per hour of data.
A theatre quality movie would have to be encoded at a resolution of at least 1920x1080 of which the reference bitrate is 80Mbit/sec, resulting in about 35Gb/hour of data.
For theatre like quality that would ofcourse have to be an even higher resulution and remember that this is all stil at the default 24fps.
So for something like 2500x1500 resolution with 48fps you would need a bitrate of about 200Mbit/sec, resulting in about 87GB per hour of movie data, which means that a 2.5 hour movie can be stored on 5 50Gb tapes or if 100Gb tapes would exist on 3 of those, which is perfectly acceptable.
Also the review only mentions equipment costs, but I don't think that traditional film is that cheap, while these tapes are.
And ofcourse having digital film at such a resolution and framerate WOULD be far superior to any analog or film solution.
Ofcourse equipment for this would be even more expensive, so we probably won't see high quality digital theatre anytime soon...
I saw Toy Story 2 on one of these at the Downtown Disney AMC theater. I can say that I was very impressed. The image quality can not be matched by normal film and the colors where beyond belief. It really doesn't matter if he likes it or not. It will take over the world. (It is quite a bit cheeper to do than film once the projectors are in place.)
1stly, thanks to all respondents so far for a VERY interesting discussion. I work in the presentation graphics business and we recently did a job that mixed a lot of different projection methods, that's wandering a bit off topic, but probably of interest if you have read this far down the thread... The venue was an brand new IMAX cinema, and the client was one of Britain's biggest TV channels. We ran a mix of digital TV footage (pal format) from the broadcast quality decks the client provided and stills from an 800x600 PowerPoint show (not my choice!) running from a laptop via a stack of 2 'money no object' data projectors (not the TI system, but the kind you would use for boardroom shows if your boardroom was really big), and followed it up with the IMAX showreel. As you can imagine everyone involved was worried about the picture quality... we quickly found that we couldn't use more than 30% of the IMAX screen for the powerpoint, because the front few rows of the audience would have had to turn their heads like a tennis crowd to read long lines of text if we did, and altering the scale for the video (through the same projector stack) was not technically do-able in the timescale, so the video shrank too. Oddly enough we saw NO pixels with the powerpoint, even when dropping to DOS text on a re-boot, because the projection system couldn't throw a sharp enough image that far. Editing text from my seat in the back row was VERY odd, because the depth of field was incredibly difficult to judge in a darkened cinema, it was quite possible to forget the screen was 100ft-ish rather than 14" when looking at it, because the percentage of the field of view it took up was abound the same. The 2 projectors were the highest luminance available commercially for data projection at the time (according to the hire company and their scary-sized invoice, at least), and we needed to stack 2 just to get enough brightness to fill 30% of the imax screen. No-one in the show audience of TV and advertising execs made adverse comments on the quality of the images from digital TV or powerpoint, and I think this had a lot to do with the amazing sound system (talking to the imax staff, this is where 40% of the budget for the cinema went) which in terms of pure volume and clarity did an amazing job of turning a lot of 'shot for tv' footage into a cinematic experience, mostly (I suspect) because the Imax staff provided an audio technician actively moving faders and playing with compression the whole time with a similar array of gear to what you would find at a big live music venue. We all thought the video and stills looked fine in the run-throughs too... until the imax showreel started, and it wiped the floor with our stuff (as you would expect). Seeing this as a problem, we talked the client into a 5 minute gap between the last of their video and the start of the imax, filled by a speech from the stage, which sorted the problem out, so the audience couldn't A/B the shows as easily, which worked well. There proved to be a couple of hours of down-time between client sign-off on the show and the actual event, so next time, I'm taking the playstation... Tekken on an imax anyone? FWIW I don't recall the exact screen measurements (or have an accurate guage of the area we used for that matter) but I do know the cards on m$ solitare projected well over 6ft wide and 10ft high, so I guess the BSOD I was scared of seeing during the show would have been well over 60ft wide, can anyone beat that? - Andy R.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I have seen the Phantom Menace digital presentation which was put on by Cinecom using Hughs/JVC equipment http://www.hjt.com/news/cinemahistory.html
Comparing to film without the benifit of an A/B comparison it's not truly valid but I can say that the image was at least as good as the best THX certified system I've seen. The lighting was uniform and bright and no pixilation was evident (~30' from the screen). The sound was clearly superior in the digital showing with 6.1 channels of 44K PCM that the THX reps set up themselves.
I forgot if the tech I talked to said it was 18GB or 30GB of data total but it makes me wonder how this is going to be delivered (RAID 5 HD packs ?)
It really pisses me off when there are scratches and sound dropouts on film that's only been shown for two weeks, this presentation looked pristine of course in it's forth week of showing.
Bottom Line: Digital is the future!
I saw a demonstration of a 1024x768 projector in September. The quality was impressive...impressive for video. There are many companies in the industry committed to switching to digital production and exhibition. But they are not taking this likely. There was much discussion that there will have to be a "noticable improvement" in quality over current film standards. At the demonstration, the audience's opinion was polarized. While there were many WOW's in the audience...those with a critical eye noticed the pixelation and contrast differences from film. I found myself overly downplaying the quality in reaction to the blind enthusiasts. I suspect that Ebert is taking the same position. New digital projection technology IS impressive, but it is a few years away from being of the quality to replace film. By the way, for those who are unimpressed with the monitor like resolutions, it makes a HUGE difference when this resolution is being presented as a moving picture. After all, 35mm projection uses HALF the area that 35mm stills do. It's the moving picture that adds the perception of greater clarity. The same rule applies for video.
The theater could also be rented out for video games and Power Point presentations! You could also watch old movies more easily.
I'm the Guy from Trust Automation In Eberts Articles. If you want information about what were thinking and anything else I can answer about this debate please ask away. I'm tired to everyone wondering about the pro's and con's and want to get correct information out to all.