B) There is so much talk about studio's installing TI's DLP projectors into their theatres. I have to ask, WHY??? Why not go with the solid-state D-ILA from JVC (which, btw, can support the full 1080p res and will soon have QUXGA res (4K by 2K) which is getting very close to film-quality res. Intstead you are using millions of tiny mirrors with large gaps between the mirrors (which means less gets reflected) at a lower res than true 1080p.

Correct me if I am wrong, but what is the big deal going with TI when JVC requires less light and provides a larger res?

Like you, many (most?) film-techers are wondering the same thing. Why such a big rush? I'm far from an expert, but from what I've read, I think the reasons include: 1) TI-based 1280x1024 DLP systems are available now; 2) They more or less work; 3) The DLP proponents want to seed the market with as many units as possible to establish DLP as the benchmark and beat the competition; 4) It seems as though theaters are not paying for the DLP hardware -- they may be getting DLP for free right now or at least they are heavily subsidized for being early adopters. This goes back to seeding the market. 5) And of course the proponents say DLP & 1280x1024 is "good enough" and there's no need for higher resolution.

Have you read about Kodak's digital system? It's D-ILA and seems to have a lot of promise: Kodak Digital

Hmm, if there are higher res telecline machines wouldn't it be best to store the film digitally so there is little chance of the film degrading? Figure 6000K Silver Atoms, doesn't seem like it would be that hard to get all of that into digital form for long-term storage.

 |  IP: Logged

 |  IP: Logged

 |  IP: Logged

This is a long-term major problem for all digital archiving including films.

Even if a physical storage medium carrying digital data survives over time without damage, it remains essentially useless without a) hardware to read it and b) documentation of the file format of its contents. One of the disadvantages of the rapid advances in computer technology is that hardware becomes obsolete very quickly, including storage devices. Think about how hard it would be to find something to read 8" floppy disks (a common format 20 years ago); this should give some idea of how hard it might be to find a DLT drive in twenty years.

The file format issue is also critical, since digital data will still be useless without the knowledge needed to write software which is capable of interpreting the data and turning it into pictures, sound, etc. This is why the use of proprietary (and, almost by definition, undocumented) file formats and, worse, encryption schemes to store information of long-term significance (e.g. movies, photographs, music, etc.) scares me. It's safe to assume that whatever hardware and software is being used to encode the data will not exist in the medium-term future (20 years or so), and we will need both talented programmers and file-format documentation in order to make any sense out of whatever digital data may survive from the present time. These data will then need to be converted to suit whatever type of display device is in use in the future; conversion often causes degredation in digital images, and will definitely cause degradation if lossy compression techniques are used at any stage.

All of these issues are serious and are mostly avoided by using standard 16mm and 35mm film formats. The format is essentially self-documenting (you can hold it up to a light source and see an image; an optical soundtrack is a depiction of the sound waveform) and the guages have been standardized for years (and won't change anytime soon). Further, it is very simple to convert film to nearly any display or storage format which might be needed in the future, with minimal quality loss. Film also has the advantage that it degrades slowly in easily identifiable stages, so that, with care (a big assumption, admittedly), it can be preserved before it is lost completely. By contrast, most digital formats will degrade suddenly and go straight from giving great quality to a complete loss of information.

No matter what happens with DLP on the exhibition side, I sincerely hope that filmmakers and photographers have the foresight to preserve physical copies of their work on film for the long-term future, as it is the only format which has proven itself to be recoverable a full century after it was produced. Contrast this with the many reels of 7-track and 9-track computer tape of data which NASA collected in the 1960s and 1970s which are all but unusable today due to either tape degradation or (more significantly) the lack of hardware and software capable of reading the data stored on them. The same situation exists with 2" quad videotape--a common format through the 1970s--which is very difficulat and expensive to view today on the limited number of machines which still exist in working order.

Maybe John P. can give some insight on the long-term storage characteristics of film. The good thing is that most of the major historical issues with film storage (nitrate decomposition, vinegar syndrome, and color fading) seem to have been significantly reduced in the current generation of film stocks.

Note that I'm saying all this as one who works with computers and data storage on a daily basis. I do attempt to ensure long-term data stability by using standard tape formats (dump and tar, mostly), standard physical media with a history of long-term (which, in the computer industry, generally means more than a year or two) storage ability (DLT tape), and regularly attempting to read older tapes to ensure readability. Having said that, I'd be amazed if tonight's backup tapes will be readable in ten years.

The digital-storage proponents like to perpetuate a lovely myth that as long as someone makes bit-for-bit copies of the recording every few years, digital storage is "perfect." The problem is that a) this doesn't happen (look at all the nitrate film that we still have that has yet to be preserved--and that is a format which has not been manufactured for fifty years) and b) file formats change and information is almost always lost (or new information is artifically introduced) in the conversion.

 |  IP: Logged

quote:

---

The problem of disappearing playback hardware is one that is often cited but really seems rather silly.

---

quote:

---

That said, I do question the longevity of CD-R's given their dye-based technology.

---

Printed CDs will last about as long as the disc itself stays whole. They don't degrade the same way that CD-Rs do...