Bad Projection Is Ruining the Movie Theater Experience

[Mike Blakesley]

Well now you know I was at the Coke booth since that's where we ran into each other!

You're right about ICTA not getting the word out enough. There is a lot of the content at the convention that is (by necessity) geared toward the bigger players, which is to be expected, so I probably don't pay as much attention to that aspect of it as I could -- figuring that most of it will be beyond our needs anyhow. Although this year I paid more attention than usual to projectors since that'll probably be the next big thing we have to buy. I always come away with about a half million dollars worth of stuff on my "I wish we could..." list.

[Steve Guttag]

That's because CinemaCon is not a tech convention. They don't give presentations on how to properly brix a soda machine either.

Jeeze Mike, you didn't make it down to the Coke booth either? They were covering how to brix for the perfect mix

In all seriousness, CinemaCon (like Show West before it) had indeed, had technical seminars geared for various levels. Those of us on the tech side have often had activities outside of what the delegates attend. Remember too, Cinema Con has been sponsored by ICTA as well as NATO, so there is tech in there. The tech in the ICTA presentations was geared for the lower-end tech and for exhibitors more than for any advanced technician. You had speakers from QSC (various aspects of sound), Sharp/NEC and Chase Taylor this year go over some IT stuff. Sure, ICTA could have done a better job of getting the word out but I think it was more of a taste for how well it would be received. The session I attended was reasonably full and engaging.

[Mike Blakesley]

I didn't even know about those seminars - were they a "member only" event? We went to the 3:00 keynote on Monday and just about everything after that, well until I got sick on Wednesday night, after that I was down for the count for the most part.

So CinemaCon hosts seminars about "how to promote attendance" but "the proper projection of a movie" isn't the sort of topic they cover in those seminars?

Makes perfect sense.

That's because CinemaCon is not a tech convention. They don't give presentations on how to properly brix a soda machine either.

[Steve Guttag]

The target audience of the ICTA seminars was towards the lower-end tech and upper-end GM on technical aspects of cinemas. I'd say, for the size of the room they were in, they were well attended. I only sat in on one of them and it was the second of two on the same topics that day (they ran a morning and an afternoon session on Monday).

[Harold Hallikainen]

At an ICTA years ago, I saw a presentation on ROI of recliner seats versus other possible things to spend money on. This particular chain found a higher ROI on seats. I think, though, that it depends on where you start. If you already have good picture and sound, new seats may be a good idea. If picture or sound are not great, they would get a higher ROI.

[Leo Enticknap]

In addition to the seminars, there was a large hall full of booths in which vendors were trying to sell the latest and greatest cinema projection and audio technology to theater owners. We will always be starting with a slight handicap compared to those selling reclining seats, popcorn, and other things that the movie theater customer comes into direct contact with, because most are not very critical when it comes to pix and sound. Only in a few arthouses and cinematheques will the average patron care if the image hits 14ft-l with good convergence, illumination uniformity, and focus uniformity more than they care if the seats are comfy and the popcorn tastes good. The selling points that exhibitors are really interested in are reliability and lower running costs, and the trick is to build improvements in projection and audio quality into those.

[Geoff Jones]

I'd love to hear more about those seminars. Were they geared toward higher end implementations or just trying to get the basics right? Or something else? Were they well attended? How did the material go over?

[Steve Guttag]

ICTA did a couple of seminars at Cinema Con promoting better presentations (picture and sound).

[Geoff Jones]

So CinemaCon hosts seminars about "how to promote attendance" but "the proper projection of a movie" isn't the sort of topic they cover in those seminars?

Makes perfect sense.

[Mike Blakesley]

CinemaCon is really more about the movies themselves, specifically upcoming movies. Seminars are more about events and how to promote attendance.

[Geoff Jones]

I’m curious to know if the sorts of issues discussed in the Vulture article are being tackled in any way at CinemaCon.

[Brad Miller]

You're definitely not kidding about Barco's joke of a backplane. That we can agree on. Sadly (but as expected) the more times cards are reseated in a Barco to get it to behave, the worse the backplane connectors get and as such the more troublesome the machine becomes. It is so much of a problem, I can't imagine any manager at theater with Barcos not knowing how to reseat the boards and re-marry.

I still have no idea why you see so many Christie problems. I'm racking my brain trying to figure out why those machines apparently hate you as much as they do because that is absolutely not the case here (and by here I mean we have theaters all over the US and into Canada and these findings are across the board, not just in a certain geographical area). That being said we don't have many locations near your part of the country and most of your locations are near you I assume, so maybe there IS something about your general physical area and Christies. After all you used to say you had to run emulsion in to keep stability in your focus and another very respected friend of mine near you is hardcore pro-emulsion in saying the same thing, but emulsion in definitely does NOT make for happy film down in the yee-hah state of Texas. It causes all kinds of problems.

[Steve Guttag]

The only unexpected lamp offs I've had out of a Barco are lamp related. If the failure was the LPS or the SPG, then that lamp is not coming back on. Christie's on the other hand, their lamps will unexpectedly go off, primarily, due to interlocks or ballast communication (internal to the projector itself) and are known issues that the projector should self-heal from. The bottom line, the number of unexpected lamp offs from Christie projectors, as compared to NEC or Barco are on the order of 100:1. It is sort of like Barco's signal backplane issues and the need to "reseat" or change the backplane.

[Brad Miller]

And no, I don't want the audience/show to suffer because of a flutter in exhaust. Did you not state that with your automation system that you overcome the Christie shortcoming by looking to see of the light turned off? Sounds like a workaround to a flawed design.

Yes, our automations actually look for the light, and if the light disappears when it is supposed to be on, it will attempt to restrike the lamp. That wasn't something we added for Christies though. We have seen more than our fair share of Barco lamps just turn off for no reason, and no they do not re-ignite themselves either. Our automation will get the lamp back on after however many seconds or pause the movie and alarm the NOC. Generally when there has been a problem (often at the end of a bulb's life) the system will have already restored the light and resumed the show, or the NOC will have manually intervened before the theater staff even realizes there was an issue. It's very similar to the AC power monitoring in our automations for automatic restore.

As for barco, they will shut down if things get too hot.

That's what is called a critical shutdown. If you're fine cooking your equipment to death, more power to you.

[Bobby Henderson]

I've seen the setup up-close. It's not really LED sticks, like in the Coldplay video, but still a somewhat custom solution. Let's call it a LED mesh, the pixel pitch is about 1.5 cm both horizontally and vertically, which is sufficient for the average viewing distance between stage and the audience.

That's still not an acceptable solution for the purpose of showing movies to a paying audience in a commercial cinema. A pitch of 1.5 centimeters, or 15 millimeters, is pretty coarse. That kind of pitch is common on modest outdoor LED signs showing low resolution imagery, basically simple text messages and very simple graphical images.

IMHO, an indoor self-emitting LED cinema screen needs to have a native 4096 X 2160 or higher picture. Otherwise the effort would be a waste of time and money. No one is impressed by 2K imagery anymore.

My guess is a cinema boasting a LED-based screen would probably charge a ticket price premium for it. A 15mm LED display would need to be nearly 202' wide to show a 4K image; or over 100' wide for a 2K image. A 4K LED cinema screen would have to get down to 8mm, 6mm and 4mm pitch levels to hit normal size ranges for giant to medium sized cinema screens (90' wide or less).

SMD LEDs are pretty small on their own. They typically look like a single white, square dot rather than a cluster of separate red, green and blue LEDs. But the louvers and black plastic around those little LED dots are mandatory to preserve contrast. That's not going to leave a lot of room for "pores" to allow sound to pass through. It might be more do-able for a LED board with a more coarse pitch between 8mm and 10mm. I've seen a lot of these higher resolution boards in person before. Those pixels get spaced pretty tightly together.

Companies like Samsung, Daktronics, etc would have to create an entirely different product line of LED boards for cinema screen use if the goal was having audio pass through the boards.

The IC boards, power and data connectors for each tile would have to be dramatically miniaturized. There's none of that currently; you'll find ribbon cables and all sorts of other crap back behind the tile. They would have to figure out how to ventilate these tiles without needing fans. Because you really don't want sound waves from speakers passing through a bunch of little whirling fan blades. The goal would be eliminating as much electronic trash between the speaker drivers and the front face of the LED boards -all while preserving an extremely high contrast, deep color image. That's going to be very difficult to do. Even if they can reduce it down to where there's a really tight "grille" of black plastic in front of the speakers there could still be serious audio reflectivity issues. It's going to be a heavier physical object positioned in front of the stage speakers rather than just a porous thin projection screen.

If the major Hollywood studios allow the commercial cinema industry to properly rebound there might be some business play for the leading LED display companies to tackle the cinema screen challenge. Right now I think they're just looking at all sorts of other commercial markets where the displays can show advertising and/or video without having to worry about incorporating speakers behind the display.

If the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas is a big success it might help create more interest to develop LED-based cinema screens. It doesn't look like the projector manufacturers are ever going to move beyond the 4K level. That could be a long term opening for LED display companies. But the Hollywood movie studios would also have to move beyond that 4K level too. I don't think they're going to bother doing that until 8K TV sets are common in homes.