I also saw Toy Story II at this theater. However my experience was a bit different because I had the bad luck to see the analog print. (They are showing on two screens, only one is digital, no way to tell which is which from the movie listings.) After the (excellent!) movie was over, I hung around until the next showing in the other theater and then snuck in for the first 20 minutes or so. So I had a chance to directly compare the analog and digital systems.
The first thing you see in the digital print is the Pixar logo screen -- the word "Pixar" centered on a solid white background. I was stunned by how good it looked. I couldn't figure out why at first, but then I realized you never see a solid background like that on regular film. There's jitter, there are scratches, the illumination is uneven... it just doesn't look "solid" in the same way. The Pixar logo didn't look like it was being projected, it looked like someone had painted it onto the theater wall. Granted this is a best-case scenario for digital projection (artificial scene, no motion, solid background), but it dramatically hilighted that even a first-generation digital system can do things that analog can't. (The system Ebert talks about might solve the jitter problem, but I don't see what it can do about the other problems.)
As the movie played, two things struck me. The first is that rock-steady quality: whenever the camera isn't moving, the background just looks much more solid than on traditional film. The second is that the colors were much stronger. I'm not an expert, but I assume that the additive RGB display system has a better range than traditional (subtractive) film -- I know that monitors (which are also additive RGB) have a better gamut than most (all?) printers. Anyway, the color looked much better than on the film print (which already looked very good).
I had read about the 1280x1024 resolution of the TI system (which was used in this theater), and like many of the people posting here I was surprised that it was so low. So I expected to see a loss of detail in the digital display. I sat near the front and was looking hard for evidence of this, but couldn't find any -- detailed objects looked just as clear as I remembered from the first screening. However, I'm not sure this is a trustworthy comparison -- the brain is good at filling in detail, and so you tend to not notice what's missing. I think a simultaneous (side-by-side or flipping A/B) comparison would be needed. Given that the movie was digitally rendered in the first place, there is also the question of how much resolution was available for the analog print -- maybe they only rendered at 1280x1024 in the first place. I suspect they used a higher resolution, because I know how fanatic the Pixar people are about image quality (back when I used to go to the SIGGRAPH film show, the Pixar clip would always be shown on 35mm film while everything else was done on some lower-quality electronic system, videotape maybe).
Some negative artifacts of the digital system were occasionally visible. I never really saw any direct evidence of pixellation (such as jagged diagonals), but sometimes in a moving scene there would be a sort of subtle rippling effect that must have been a beat pattern between the moving image and the fixed pixel grid.
My feeling is that the current digital system is already better than the crappy projection you often see in the smaller screens at a multiplex, but it would be sad if it replaced film without further improvement. In the long run, digital has fundamental benefits over analog: steady image, no scratches, better color range, no loss in quality during duplication. Maybe the MaxiVision48 system (which does sound cool!) solves the jitter problem, but I don't see what it can do about the others. But I do hope that they increase the resolution considerably before carving a standard into stone.
>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.
No doubt. Also note that the trailers were not using the digital system -- they switched projectors when the feature film started.
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I also saw Toy Story II at this theater. However my experience was a bit different because I had the bad luck to see the analog print. (They are showing on two screens, only one is digital, no way to tell which is which from the movie listings.) After the (excellent!) movie was over, I hung around until the next showing in the other theater and then snuck in for the first 20 minutes or so. So I had a chance to directly compare the analog and digital systems.
The first thing you see in the digital print is the Pixar logo screen -- the word "Pixar" centered on a solid white background. I was stunned by how good it looked. I couldn't figure out why at first, but then I realized you never see a solid background like that on regular film. There's jitter, there are scratches, the illumination is uneven... it just doesn't look "solid" in the same way. The Pixar logo didn't look like it was being projected, it looked like someone had painted it onto the theater wall. Granted this is a best-case scenario for digital projection (artificial scene, no motion, solid background), but it dramatically hilighted that even a first-generation digital system can do things that analog can't. (The system Ebert talks about might solve the jitter problem, but I don't see what it can do about the other problems.)
As the movie played, two things struck me. The first is that rock-steady quality: whenever the camera isn't moving, the background just looks much more solid than on traditional film. The second is that the colors were much stronger. I'm not an expert, but I assume that the additive RGB display system has a better range than traditional (subtractive) film -- I know that monitors (which are also additive RGB) have a better gamut than most (all?) printers. Anyway, the color looked much better than on the film print (which already looked very good).
I had read about the 1280x1024 resolution of the TI system (which was used in this theater), and like many of the people posting here I was surprised that it was so low. So I expected to see a loss of detail in the digital display. I sat near the front and was looking hard for evidence of this, but couldn't find any -- detailed objects looked just as clear as I remembered from the first screening. However, I'm not sure this is a trustworthy comparison -- the brain is good at filling in detail, and so you tend to not notice what's missing. I think a simultaneous (side-by-side or flipping A/B) comparison would be needed. Given that the movie was digitally rendered in the first place, there is also the question of how much resolution was available for the analog print -- maybe they only rendered at 1280x1024 in the first place. I suspect they used a higher resolution, because I know how fanatic the Pixar people are about image quality (back when I used to go to the SIGGRAPH film show, the Pixar clip would always be shown on 35mm film while everything else was done on some lower-quality electronic system, videotape maybe).
Some negative artifacts of the digital system were occasionally visible. I never really saw any direct evidence of pixellation (such as jagged diagonals), but sometimes in a moving scene there would be a sort of subtle rippling effect that must have been a beat pattern between the moving image and the fixed pixel grid.
My feeling is that the current digital system is already better than the crappy projection you often see in the smaller screens at a multiplex, but it would be sad if it replaced film without further improvement. In the long run, digital has fundamental benefits over analog: steady image, no scratches, better color range, no loss in quality during duplication. Maybe the MaxiVision48 system (which does sound cool!) solves the jitter problem, but I don't see what it can do about the others. But I do hope that they increase the resolution considerably before carving a standard into stone.
>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.
No doubt. Also note that the trailers were not using the digital system -- they switched projectors when the feature film started.