John E Clark

I was astonished as well. I was looking at digital conversions in the US last year, and then checked some 'large' international markets, and found that India was greater than the US at the time. I suspect that what will happen is a licensed service will make projection prints, and then rent those out to theaters that don't convert. But it looks like coversion will be the only way to be able to show films for most theaters.

The PDP-11 was one of the the last popular machines that used octal representation extensively. Most machines after 1980 used Hexadecimal, base 16, for convenient human readable represention of such things as addresses, and data values, unless there was a need to present them in base-10 representations. The use of powers of 2 as represented with base-10, leads to the convenience of such numbers as 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, 32768, 65536, which are the powers of 2 up to 2^16. This representation is useful for both 'addressing' of memory, as well as integer values, for example representing 'intensity'... Other considerations are sometime used to justify 'strange' numbers. In the case of say NTSC video, the digital resolution was 720x480, but the pixels where retangular with a .9 aspect ratio... in the computer memory addressing, the aspect ratio only figured into caluclating such things as 'circles' if one were to add graphics, or imagery that had been computed using 'square' pixels. For 'square' pixel represenation, NTSC had 640x480 'square' pixels. For HD and square pixels, it seems that 'round' numbers of powers of 2 for horizontal resolution, and some sort of compromize value for the vertical was the 'guiding' principle. Back in the olden days, one company I worked for adjusted their analog TV cameras' horizontal scan such that the digitizer produced a 512x480 'square' pixel digital image. Since the goal of the equipment was to analyze images with software, and not for 'broadcast TV', it didn't really matter that the camera was 'detuned' from broadcast standards...

Electricians usually are more familiar with house wiring, codes, and the like... at least that's the hope. Internal wiring of equipment is usually not something they do... Further, in the modern age, it seems toss and get a new one is the current option for more 'repair/service', for most items under $100-500 depending. This is especially true for 'electronics'. While getting in and 'fixing' things may be educational, it can also be dangerous, and lead to some number of problems... shock, fire... hey, but it could also fix the problem and allow you to use the equipment effectively until you can afford better. Don't know if there are others who have done the DIY fix it on the particular lights you have, but I'm sure there are many youtube or similar videos of people fixing their cheap lights, and so you can look at those and see if it is something you want to do. Personally... I'd fix the cheap lights, and have done so... the power cord was not strain relieved in one case, in another some epoxy was required for some part to hold together.

Why 'leds' may give a pulsing 'light' effect, is due to how LEDs are handled electronically. Usually a short high voltage pulse is applied, since that yields a higher lumen value, than a 'steady state' voltage. Provided the duty cycle is such that the LED does not burnout. However, this can produce problems in cameras that are scanning out regions of the sensor, depending. I've never tested this out, relative to effect on Digital film... but I have noticed that if I see brake lights that when I avert my eyes, I see a sort of 'pulse stutter', rather than a smooth blur (what else are you going to do at a traffic light...), that the brake light is most likely pulsed LED.

Outside of Hollywood, and any other country's 'studio system', the 'need' and appreciation of 'film school' becomes even less of an issue. In most cases, someone will end up doing commercial work, such as 'corporate video', 'wedding video', small regional advertisement work, etc. There are a few places outside of The Studios where narrative film work can be found. For example, Vancouver British Columbia has a 'film' industry, which does take on major Hollywood productions, but also produces smaller scale productions. Since I'm not familiar with the UK specifics in this regard, I suspect there are regional film making industries, that operate on a similar vein. But in any case, these are pretty limited. While the Digital Revolution has made significant changes, they have not settled out as to what activity would provide a career choice. In the 80's the print industry began to feel the effects of the rise of personal computers that had graphics capability. Careers in traditional print work, where one would go to a big building, work for 8 hours, get paycheck + benefits, and leave at 5 pm, began to dry up. What has taken its place is a large number of independent contractors, willing to work all hours of the day, night, weekends, holidays, small boutique commercial art companies, filled with similarly minded people, despite any 'labor' laws to the contrary, etc. which produce electronic 'media' which may happen to be printed out on actual paper, but more likely these days, end up on websites, and email. That same process is in progress in the 'moving pictures' business.

I live within 100 miles of Downtown Hollywood... I would not recommend putting your future into 'Filmmaking' unless you already have contacts in the industry. Of my highschool cohort that did go to such schools as UCLA for 'film' or 'scriptwriting' (I didn't travel inthe circles of people who could afford USC), none have ever been mentioned in IMDB. Others in the group were more into performance, and still none have even a 'bit' part mention in IMDB. Ok... I did live with the sister of a future Academy Award winner... but that guy was in to special effects and took his training at California Institute of the Arts (CIA...) and was founded with the idea of training people for the industry... Even the Wife's uncle who has been living in LA for now almost 65 years... has like 2 IMDB acting listings... I think he did stage more that TV/Film... The Wife use to do headshots for actors and actresses, and I think we've seen perhaps 3 or 4 who eventually made at least one national show, and none in film. The Film business as a career is very difficult. I do think some aspects will change, but I would not bet a 'career' choice on them at this point, there is too much fluctuation. My own personal story, was I entered college as an art major. I realized at some point, most of the people who were getting MFAs where either ending up as 'teachers', or finding work in such areas as government social services. Very few, in fact none of my peers, ended up in particularlly 'good' positions doing 'art'. So I got a computer science degree... that has paid the bills...

As I recall the Playboy centerfold was shot on 8x10 slide film for years. That and the twin lens "Gowlandflex" 8x10 camera... and your set..

I posted about this in another thread. But from the articles, Tarantino had bought the building of the theater some time ago, and had been 'helping' the theater operator for some before that to avoid having the theater close down. For some time he was 'just the landlord'. However, apparenlty the watershed moment occurred last June when as Tarantino was decrying 'digital projection' at Cannes of his "Pulp Fiction"(1994) 20th anniversary showing, when he could have been 'asked' to bring his own print... the theater operator had just purchased and installed a digital projection system in the New Beverly... My take away lesson is, if you have your own private vault, a big enough name in the industry to get prints from studio libraries (perhaps at some rental fee...), and one owns the building a theater is housed in, well one can continue to show Film film prints.

Now I'll have to watch this... but I would conjecture that the 'it' is refering to the original film, 'in the flesh', that is sitting in a theater, or renting a film, placing it in a projector, etc. While now, one can 'see' this formerly 'rare' film, anywhere, due to the Internet. On the other hand since the beginning of photography with Daguerrotypes, which were designated as The Real, vs. 'painted reality/falsity', where the painter could alter lines, tone, etc. at will, the photographic innovation has allowed everyone to experience as 'real' what was formerly only available by personal being 'there', in the flesh. Never mind that Vertov used any number of artifices to create his 'Camera Truth'... and the most obvious Elephant in the corner being that just setting the camera in a particular place, is 'taking a position' and fixing subsequent 'truths' only from that point of view...

I've not smoked enough cigarettes to engage in a Marshall McLuhan discussion... and unfortunately I gave up smoking years ago... But I think it is better for people to 'work out' their ways of seeing by interacting with others. There is a tendency in certain types of 'art' programs where there is an assigned reading (or viewing) to be given out, term papers written, and the 'student' moves on. Back in the olden days, that was not sufficient for myself and friends, so we would rent 16mm films, documentaries usually, and then have beer, bretzels, (wine for those who wanted to be more high brow), smoke packs of cigarettes and argue the merits of the film. These days the internet provides the media, but still the viewer has to massage that message into a personal workable form.

Ran out of 'edit time'... And needless to say we have the captioning on always... it use to be a real pain prior to the digital era. Until about 15 years ago, unless the film was non-English... forget it. Then various devices started being implemented, along with a caption 'track' (I think it was a player device that sync'd up with the movie run, but I never looked into the details much). During this period we would sometimes drive up to 100 miles to go to a theater that either had 'open caption' presentations at 'low audience' times like sunday morning, or to theaters that had installed the equipment. These days most first run movies have captions in the theaters near us. The only one in recent times that was not captioned was the 30th anniversary release of "Ghost Busters"(1984).

Well, one of the Clarks has 90 db of loss in one ear, and total loss in the other. So 5.1... is... well... useless... About the only thing I'd like is to be able to push dialog 'more out', since dialog is usually centered, and 'background/left/right/whatever' back... There is minor amount of control that the player has that suggests being able to 'enhance' dialog over effects... but it seems pretty limited.

This is a real problem when discussing technique details... Books with artworks, almost all never actually represent the image the same way that one sees it when standing in front of the work itself. In the case of 'restored' Film, one has to rely on some form of 'copy'. These days Bluray disks do offer the 'highest quality' that most people can afford, but still was the restored Film 'look' what was seen in theaters back in the olden days, even if they viewed the film in a pristine state of a Hollywood Premiere??? As a note, in the olden days, films were not released 'wide'. Most films traveled around the country, or the world, as a relatively small print set. So, if one lived in Los Angeles or New York, one perhaps say a pretty 'clean' print if one made it to theaters close to the first release date... if you lived in say, Cedar Rapids Iowa (ok, I never lived there just spent a sommer in my youth there, and noticed the films being shown in the theater had all been shown several months before in So. California...), you may be seeing a print that had been through a number of projectors, and could have a number of 'defects' just on the print alone, not to mention perhaps the projector was old and perhaps had had lax maintenance... In that regard, watch the 'comming attractions' bumper that is on the Rodriguez/Tarantino "Death Proof" and "Planet Terror", and note the 'crappy' look... that was more like what many people saw in theaters in the era. In addition, there were 25/50 cent theaters that took films that had been in circulation for years and presented them to an audience that was sleeping/puking, or whatever, because a 25 cent place to be late at night was cheaper than being on the streets... Anyway, it is sort of difficult to say, how much is 'restored' and how much is 'enhanced'. This is not just a 'film' problem but an artwork in general problem. Similar discussions have been held about the recent restorations of the Sistine Chapel, where part of the discussion, regarding Michaelangelo's "Last Judgement", was whether to remove the 'fig leaves' that were added after Michaelangel died, to assauge some viewer's 'moral outrage' in seeing naked men's 'package'. The decision was to keep the figleaves since they were added shortly after Michaelangelo's death, and so were nearly contemporary with the original work. For the ceiling, there were also discussions about 'how much' of the soot to remove, and especially, 'repaint', as the underlying fresco was too damaged to mearly just remove the soot and have the painting revealed.

While I usually state that I stopped watching broadcast TV when CBS cancelled the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, I did 'sin' and watch the last season of "Star Trek"... sure, since them, on random occasions, at friends' houses, etc. hotel rooms, waiting for Gudot... but otherwise I've pretty much maintained that 'goal'. Only recently have some of the 'cable' content providers, such as HBO, come up with interesting enough material, with production values that I like, have I looked at some of the popular shows... When the Wife and I took an American Sign Language sequence, we did watch an ABC show titled 'Switched At Birth', the story line involves two girls 'switched' at birth by hospital error, time passes, and now '15 years later' (despite the fact that the principle actresses are in the 20's...), one of the girls is deaf, living in the 'barrio', while the other has lived her life in upper middle class luxury... Ad breaks drove me nuts... even though we were watching the disks... the little 'petite mort climaxes' to lead up to the break were anoying... But I digress... As for film+digital combo, I don't see that as problematic since using digital means has allowed for 'matte' paintings to be more realistically composited into to the live action, set extensions, 'crowd replication', etc. have for me allowed for 'better' images. To be sure... those ancient ad campaigns of 'cast of thousands', may have given the director some 'boost' having marshalled such an army... but then again... digital means could have taken out the 'van' sitting in the shot of one of the battle scenes in 'Spartacus"(1960) which even escaped the notice of St. Kubrick of the Eternal Cinema. The problem I do have with some of the 'reasons for film', is that at this point, quite a bit of what is seen on screen, has been 'digitized', and 'augmented', with such cgi elements, and those purely digital elements have been processed to show no different visual effect than the original Film film portions of the frame. Of course if the composite is badly done... sure complain... but for many award winning films, I've never heard someone say, "Well I liked the bottom half of scene X, because the top half was clearly a digital extension'... If people are critiquing to that 'level'... I'm pretty sure they are bored with the story, acting, etc... and would rather be watching grass grow sipping some 'adult beverage', or the like.

The 'rule' for NTSC, and presumably PAL TV was 6-7 x the height of the TV screen. Which for old SD TV, for the 'family' sized screen, the viewing distance would be about 10-12 feet. I think for HD TV its about 3x the vertical height, and so, depending, 5 feet for a 32 inch screen. The Clarks tend to view between 6-7 feet from the 32 inch screen we have. Also, the Clarks when viewing DVDs on the 32 inch screen, will often set the 'zoom' mode to 1/2... The Clarks also sit in the back row of the theater, right under the projection booth window...

Pixel 'replication' to scale up leads to 'ugly' images... most 'better' scaling algoritms tend to attempt to interpolate the 'missing' values, given the values of the neighboring pixels. There are also methods which 'construct' detail by computed means that give the human viewer the 'impression' that this computed detail was in the original. For example, there are algorithmic methods to compute 'trees' viewed at various distance. A 'upscale' method would compute the 'trees' then blend those computed trees with higher detail, with the original captured trees...

On the topic of digital reconstructions, here's a 'creative' idea... what would "Star Trek: The Geritol Generation" look like in 'cinerama/cinemascope/vistavision', etc... There are stills constructed from a sequence of 4:3 TV frames... sort of the inverse of 'pan and scan' used to reduce wide screen to 4:3. And lest someone complain about how 'video' it looks... the 1960's TV show was shot on film, according to IMDB, Eastman 50T 5251, 100T 5254. I think the artist who put this together used remastered HD frame shots. http://cargocollective.com/nickacosta/Star-Trek-in-Cinerama

It is because of the digitization, and the ability to precisely align the 3 color 'layers' that one reveals more of the 'latent sharpness' (given the image was sharply focused in the first place.) On looking into how one would find examples of 'real' 2 and 3 color samples... I was directed to one of the movie libraries in LA. Unfortunately the pursuit of common lucre does not allow me to go up to LA often, so perhaps one of these days. I think Eastman Color was competing against 3 strip Technicolor which was the 'gold' standard at the time, and obviously, was much more expensive, and I belive there were no 'wide' screen 3 stip Technicolor movies made, which the Eastman Color product could support. Here's an article with some pictures of the 3 strips using the filme "Becky Sharp(1935) as an example. (The article mentions that the film stock was derated to ASA 5... I've also read that some actors/actresses suffered some sort of eye damage due to the use of intense lighting to over come the low speed...). http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicolor6.htm The Wife had a project for making lare 20x30 decals... talk about pain in the ass of registration, and that was just to about 1/4 inch was 'good enough'... I can't imagine doing that for a 35mm film frame...

The 3 color 'sandwich' that became the standard color negative is a compromise. In the case of 3 color Technicolor, each strip of film was exposed to only the color of interest(*). Then for 'printing' the process used 'dye transfer', which allowed for 'better color' than the 3 color sandwich compromize, as the dyes can be more saturated, or purer. For the Scorsese film "The Aviator"(2006), Scorsese attempted to give a feel for 2 stripe and 3 stripe processes in the first and second halves of the film. *Unfortunately due to the filtering of the light in to R, G, B... more illumination was required for the then current ASA of the film, and early 3-Color cameras were 'huge'... part of which is 'blimping'... but still huge... as in...

What I have seen is 'most' cinematographers that one can name, do 2 things. 1) develop a style that some set of directors feel will 'tell' their film story visually. 2) use a variety of methods to effect that visual story telling. 'grain' aside... why would some one use 'smoke' to the point were most of the crew needs lung protection, and the actors need a oxygen 'boost' after performance (ok a little extreme...), but the point is, it had better be for 'the story'. Why would someone take the coating off a modern lens... if not to get a specific look... in the case of "Saving Private Ryan"(1998)... it was for that period look. And there were shutter spead manipulations also, as I recall. Digital film has allowed far more people to become in visual story telling. Unlike almost all 8mm film, or even much 16mm, of the olden days, I think people have proved that if one takes care in production, one can create films that are watchable and tell stories, which is the point of 'filmmaking' in my book. The fact that it has allowed a gazillion happy shooters to upload their '8mm film/35mm travel slides', these ancient methods to bore one's friends and neighbors with, to the world, is immaterial. A woman from a local filmmaking group is putting together a promo for her book idea. She would never have done this, were it not for the Digital Revolution. I think that is a 'benefit'. One consequence is the 'ease' of entry. For Film there was the cost of stock + processing, and where to show one's work... even if one had bought the Bolex watchworks 16mm camera... for $300 or so in 1970... But I do see cinematographers who one can name, at least those who are inclined to teach, doing general seminars. Or some have websites and do interact with people via their fora. In the olden days, I don't recall cinematographers doing that ever, with the exception of presentations at say USC in LA... ok... friends of mine use to go over to Ed Wood's house and talk to him about making movies... I don't know if it was to learn anything, or just find out about this guy who made some of the 'worst' films that any one could imagine, yet get some sort of cult following... but I digress...

I prefer to use the term Digital Film rather than video. 'video' for me is an imaging system that use such signal specifications as RS-170/170a, or color spaces such as Rec 601 or a mild up grade of 709. Cameras used for 'video' tend to maintain the previous analog conventions such as 'db gain' rather than ISO values, many of the 'low end' versions have fixed lenses, etc. at higher costs per unit that removable lens DSLR with 'moving picture capability'. I do use an IRE display these days, but I definitely want to make sure my data for an 8 bit device ranges 0-255 and not 16-235 per 'video/broadcast' specs. And I really never worry about 7.5 IRE setup... ever...

Well, unfortunately that could still lead to some confusion. Don't know if there is any grain involved... but, probably is not organic.

Yes, he called it 'corpuscle'. Photons are a modernized form of the concept of 'light as particle'. As for the second paragraph.... It would seem that some think that the result of light impinging on silver halide does 'more' than just have a physical effect, and that effect creates some 'soul', or something more that a physical phenomenon that humans take advantage of for some purpose. It is the human observer that applies any 'soul' attribute to an image, not the image having some 'soul' of which the human some how 'senses'.

Actually the 'photon' idea has been around a lot longer than that. Newton proposed the idea of 'corpuscle', which held for 100 years till it did not explain certain experiments that strongly suggested wave like characteristics. Modern optics holds both wave and particle that is 'photon' characteristics are useful, depending, in explaing observations about 'light'. In any case, no matter the path of the photon through space, or its interaction with silver or compounds of silver, nor the processing of these compounds to reveal a latent image, imbue upon that physical artifact, any form of 'soul', or 'life'. The human observer projects what ever attribute, value, etc. upon the physical result.

If you own a theater, and have a private film vault, with either your own work, or prints you have purchased over the years... from the wiki article on the Los Angeles "New Beverly" theater. ---- In September 2014, seven years after acquiring the theater, Quentin Tarantino took over the programming duties. The cinema will continue showing double features from Tarantino´s 35 mm private collection. ---- Further article: http://www.laweekly.com/publicspectacle/2014/09/05/quentin-tarantino-on-his-new-role-running-the-shows-at-new-beverly-cinema