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Topic: What process does a movie go through?
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 06-20-2007 07:39 AM
It would also close down most, I would guess at least 80% if the small independant cinemas in Britain, not forgetting all of the multi-purpose venus which run film occasionally, many of them in locations which couldn't support a full-time cinema; I'm sure just about all of those would go.
That's one of the problems I have with the Arts Alliance Digital Screen Network scheme; it seems unreasonable to supply shiny new digital projectors to over 200 screens in over 100 cinemas, while not supplying them to others who applied to join the scheme. Runing a small scale trial scheme could probably be justified, as could providing the equipment to anybody who wanted it, but the scheme as it exists at present does seem rather unfair.
The answer which is usually given seems to be to lease the equipment, but it is more expensive than film equipment, and is expectd to have a shorter life; there are printy og fifty year old film projectors still running. For the leasing company to recover their costs, and make a profit, over the life of the equipment, the leasing costs are going to have to be high.
If I was building a cinema today the situation still remains that I would not install digital, though if I was desinging a cinema today I would make provision for the the installation of a digital projector at some time in the future.
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Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster
Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 06-20-2007 08:28 AM
I agree Steve there will be those that do with the lamps what they want but they will also eventually pay the price like they have by pushing them around here. When his 2100.00 lamp pops and he has to buy a $4000.00 plus reflector he won't be pushing his lamps very much any longer and by then the folks ne normally sees will be down the street watching brighter images somewhere else. Places like that sometimes disentegrate on their own unless they are the only game in town. If you think about it though thats about all they can really get away with. I suppose they can ignore other maintainance but film people already do that in abundance. With D-Cinema the old lenses will be gone as will the Super Platters, and the theaters running old type A or clone type noise reduction. They will at last have decent sound and sharp pictures some for the first time ever. The 16 year olds that don't know head from tail and scratch prints before they're shown the first time will no longer be able to scratch em.
Realistically there will not be any LCD projetors running D-Cinema in theaters in the very near future and if they do go that route down the rad a ways by then LCD's may very well be far ahead of DLP technology. I can guarantee you there is tons more research going on with LCD techniology than in DLP and at a very steady and fast rate. Some high end LCD projectors look very good today but still unacceptable for D.C., but they're getting close. I can certainly see the ability not far into the future to manufacture 4K lcd panels as well. The dispute here is not the resolution or comparison of D-Cinema as it is today to film capabilities as they are now and never has been... you know and I know film right now is more capable but neither Tom down the street from you nor Harry down the street from me really give a crap about what format they're seeing. But they do notice the absence of scratches and dust immediately when they go see a film in DLP. We also foget the fast pace of technology as regards to electronics which has always been at a snails pace in film. Then there is the 4K realm and as soon as the 2K manufacturers start loosing sales they too will have to build 4K projectors.
Out of the theaters I service there are but a handful that truely care... even if half of them cared thats still an unacceptable number. Like Louius mentioned in the other thread most owners would rather by new cars every year than upgrade their lively hood. Sad indeed! So yes, in this sort of situation digital will take care of alot of long extant problems.
Will the small theater owner be able to afford it? Certainly! Any financially minded theater owner will be able to deal with the costs through smart banking, write offs, other financial options, or through leasing. I personally see leasing as the very best option for the owner that does not want to sign on with the likes of the Christies for the rediclous long term. Leasing affords payment options galore so you can afford it and it doesn't stick you with a pile of old gear at the end of the lease. Interest rates are also quite reasonable. And down the road there will be other options for buisnesses to purchase leased or older gear as equipment is pulled out just like leased cars when they go back to the dealer. Like film, Radio, television, and the Compact Disk D-Cinema will evolve, improve and eventually win out. But there are always going to be those that just can't see or accept that becauase they see what they have better today is not as good as the other... what they fail to see is that tommrrow it will be better than what they have today. In the end when they are 60 plus years old and climbing the booth stairs with a small perhaps 1 pound package of disks or a by then some sort of solid state memory device with the new release print on it they will think back and remember how archaic carrying those heavy film boxes up the same stairs was and how rediclous and time consumming putting films together was. By then D-Cinema will have way surpassed film in all aspects.
Mark
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 06-20-2007 01:26 PM
The only way the movie distributors can get digital projection systems into a lot of smaller theater chains and independent locations is by getting them involved in agreements similar to those the big theater chains are getting.
In short, the studios have to band together and pay out of their pockets for this hardware -not the movie theaters. The theaters have such narrow profit margins there's just no way very many of them at all will ever afford to buy that equipment outright. The studios are getting ALL of the cost savings and business advantages of this technology. Not the theaters. So it's only fair for the studios to pay for the gear. Theaters can pay for "virtual print fees" and service contracts, so long as the cost of those two things isn't a business killer either.
quote: Steve Guttag
LCD definately continues to look better and better...it will always have a issues with color fade due to its technology as well as the screen-door effect again due to how the light goes through the panel versus reflects off the panel. However, they are getting much better at hiding the screen door.
Running the HDTV displays at higher native resolutions, like true 1920 X 1080 does a lot to fight the screen door effect and other jaggy looking problems. The ones running at lower resolutions like 720p definitely do look coarse.
As far as LCD or LCOS D-cinema projectors go, I'm sure there will be more challengers to DLP, even at the high end. I don't expect to see any true 4K DLP chips from Texas Instruments any time within the next several years at the earliest (or ever). Hardware companies who want to do things on the cheap, giving theaters what they feel is "good enough" in quality will do so at their peril. I think the quality differences will be pretty obvious.
On the subject of D-cinema "cleaning up" the theater industry, I don't think it will be that simple. For one, it's not doing a great deal to improve the audio end of things. Sure, a new 24-bit 48kHz 5.1 LPCM audio track is getting delivered. But often it's being played through whatever 5.1 audio system the theater already had and how ever it was adjusted.
Even on the actual movie production end of things the quality level is trying very hard to back-slide further into muddy mediocrity. A growing number of major releases are being shot on video rather than film and have the final result suffer for it.
Lots of independent productions are shot on mere NTSC DV video, not even high def -and then the people who shot the work gush about "digital" and what a revolutionary tool they found. Here's an observation about that revolutionary tool: the results look like shit.
The typical analog film printing step on the video material adds nothing either, it just worsens the video quality further. It's like someone taking a JPEG photo from a digital camera, printing it out on paper and then scanning it in a flatbed scanner back into the computer and expecting to get some improved level of quality. I would have more respect for those people if they left the video signal looking like video.
And that raises another controversial matter. Video content that is allowed to remain looking like video will really look like video when shown on any D-cinema projector. It will have that "live TV" look to it. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing from the standpoint of trying to preserve HD video quality. But it will throw some customers for a loop. If they thought D-cinema looked kind of like watching TV before, true unaltered video content will get the TV feeling all the way there.
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