The end of film for TV production?

[Dominic Case]

0.0125 ln is about 1/16 the color drift I've seen in release prints. The "grey" patches on the Shirleys were consistently grey-magenta patches.

Now we are getting closer to an understanding. 0.0125logE is half a printer point in exposure terms. One printer pont is therefore 0.025logE. Multiply that by the gamma of colour print film (these days a bit over 3.0) and you are up to a density shift, per printer point, of 0.07 or 0.08.

 

If prints start to drift off, and the smallest trim correction is one point (not all labs have half-point light vanes in their printers), then the least tolerance you can expect is +/-0.07. So at an extreme, one reel may differ from another by 0.14.

 

If you say 0.0125 is one sixteenth of colour drift you've seen, then you've seen a drift of 0.20. I'd be unhappy if I was in a lab that routinely shipped copies with that variability, but it's not so far from the theoretical limit.

 

On the other question - correcting at each step of the process. Yes, you can: but ultimately, the end result is the combination of all the errors, so for small variations, it doesn't matter where you make the correction. So as lamps gradually fade with age, you can increase the voltage to compensate, or alter the printer trims by an equivalent amount. If a batch of stcok is different, you can't change it - but you can alter the printer trims to balance it. If the chemistry in the processing machine drifts, you can usually pick up the changes by chemical analysis: but it is often more convenient to compensate for the change by altering the running speed of the processing machine, or adjusting printer trims.

 

I often explain the control process in terms of driving a car. In theory, on a straight and empty road, you could just lock the steering wheel and go to sleep. In practice, a gust of cross-wind or a slight tilt in the road will send you off course. You can't prevent the wind, but you can correct for it by steering to one side. If one tyre is slightly deflated or out of alignment, you will also have a sideways pull: long-term you look for a service station and adjust the pressure, but meanwhile you will, once again, turn the steering wheel a bit, even though that isn't the root of the problem.

[Terry Mester]

Ah, but a film print *is* a dye filter -- or a combination of dye filters. Three different dyes in varying amounts and locations make the picture. ...

One big advantage for Film is that there is only one clear surface suffering minimal reflection loss, and then the back surface suffering refraction. With three-chip DLP you basically have five surfaces suffering reflection, and then six surfaces suffering refraction.

Film Projection could be improved by simply getting rid of that stupid projection room window. To provide soundproofing, an open-ended wooden box could be fit into the window frame, and extend just behind the Projector's Lens. Styrofoam could then seal up the box end around the Lens. This would eliminate all of the extensive refraction caused by that window.

 

Film color gamut is limited by those dyes. Dichroics can give you a wider gamut, but there's not much outside the existing film color gamut that you'd want to see.

If movie makers used 50 & 100 ISO Film a whole lot more instead of 250 & 500 ISO, you wouldn't see this great push towards Digital Projection. The colour and resolution quality of Film is directly related to the Speed. If I were directing a movie, it would be very hard to convince me to use 500T.

[Terry Mester]

... So as lamps gradually fade with age, you can increase the voltage to compensate, or alter the printer trims by an equivalent amount. If a batch of stcok is different, you can't change it - but you can alter the printer trims to balance it. ...

Do the lamps use AC or DC Current? There definitely would be quality loss consequences from using AC powered light.

[Robert Houllahan]

Do the lamps use AC or DC Current? There definitely would be quality loss consequences from using AC powered light.

 

 

Do I dare step foot in this pond?

 

Printers use DC for illumination.....

 

DLP Cinema has many good attributes, a contrast ratio anywhere near film prints is not one which I think is one of the biggest problems for D-Cine projection it's flat.

 

My Girlfriend and I went to see "Bright Star" night before last at the local art house cinema and all through the film (Which was a DI by EFILM) I was looking at the high contrast interiors with allot of subtle detail in the shadows and allot of detail in the full daylight outdoor highlights in the windows and thinking that I do not see this in a 2K projection nor do I see it in the HD DLP projector I have at home. Digital display devices have gotten better and I see much of the detail and color at home with my projector but it is still not as revealing as a print.

 

I personally do not mind a bit of weave, some dirt and the flicker of prints I find it much more soothing than the cold pseudo perfection of current digital projection however if the contrast issue and color problems are solved the projection may become more transparent in the future and thus less objectionable to film jerks et. all.

 

-Rob-

[K Borowski]

Film Projection could be improved by simply getting rid of that stupid projection room window. To provide soundproofing, an open-ended wooden box could be fit into the window frame, and extend just behind the Projector's Lens. Styrofoam could then seal up the box end around the Lens. This would eliminate all of the extensive refraction caused by that window.

 

That window isn't going anywhere. I am pretty sure it is still required due to old laws trying to minimize the risk of harm to an audience in a nitrate film fire.

 

Besides, if you didn't have a window, the booth (and prints) would constantly be inundated with dust that rises up through the air.

 

And DLP projectors are all getting projected through glass too. Problem isn't so much the glass it is improper cleaning or overcleaning which will ultimately just scratch the glass and permanently degrade the surface.

 

 

@Dominic:

 

Yeah, I would say, unfortunately, that 0.20 ln is common. Want to say, though it has been a while, I've seen values in excess of a stop. At least it is always timed on the warm side. To use the car analogy, it's akin to where a senile driver will often steer the car excessively far to the right (or left depending on national preference) to make absolutely sure of not crossing over the center line. This is sometimes at the expense of crossing the shoulder line.

 

You would think since the vast majority of films are DI and the volume on prints is down that color correction would be getting *better* not worse.

 

After all, it is in the release labs' best interest to produce the highest-quality product as possible to stave of digitization of the theatrical distribution industry as long as possible.

 

Still confused what you are saying about the nature of timing errors: Obviously, if you have a density variation you're going to loose detail in the highlights and shadows, but am I correct in saying that, barring an extreme error at some step in the process where there is gross over-/underexposure, you can fix multiple errors in the IP and IN stages with the timing of the print?

 

I am pretty sure this is all, more or less, additive when it comes to color correction, but when you start to talk about gamma I am not sure how that would play in to things. I know higher gamma materials need more color correction for the same perceived change in color, and that is where things get tricky as I don't have any on-the-job experience making release prints. I would think that color control is finer on a print than it would be on the lower-contrast IN and IP materials, even if the lab only has the same eighth-stop color controls.

[K Borowski]

DLP Cinema has many good attributes, a contrast ratio anywhere near film prints is not one which I think is one of the biggest problems for D-Cine projection it's flat.

 

This is what I like about film prints, even though they are at a lower spatial resolution than DLP straight from a 2K file.

 

Colors are richer to my eye too.

 

 

Do you know, though if there is an actual color advantage with film over DLP when you are coming from a digital file anyway?

 

I hear a lot of talk on here about using compromised color spaces making DIs.

[John Sprung]

(not all labs have half-point light vanes in their printers), ....

 

Aha -- I bet that's what I was sorta remembering.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[John Sprung]

One big advantage for Film is that there is only one clear surface suffering minimal reflection loss, and then the back surface suffering refraction. With three-chip DLP you basically have five surfaces suffering reflection, and then six surfaces suffering refraction.

Film Projection could be improved by simply getting rid of that stupid projection room window. To provide soundproofing, an open-ended wooden box could be fit into the window frame, and extend just behind the Projector's Lens. Styrofoam could then seal up the box end around the Lens. This would eliminate all of the extensive refraction caused by that window.

 

 

If movie makers used 50 & 100 ISO Film a whole lot more instead of 250 & 500 ISO, you wouldn't see this great push towards Digital Projection. The colour and resolution quality of Film is directly related to the Speed. If I were directing a movie, it would be very hard to convince me to use 500T.

 

Refraction and reflection really aren't that big a deal. You lose a little light, so you just start with a little more to get the 16 foot Lamberts you're supposed to have (for film). (Or with digital it's some other number, IIRC, 14?) Proper water white plate port glasses are really no problem. The only stupid thing that happened once was an attempt by a well known theater setup outfit to use expensive coatings on the ports. The late Bob Miller of Paramount's projection department showed me one of those. It was so damn blue that it obviously changed the color of the picture. You could prove this to yourself just by hand holding a spare port glass and moving it in and out of the projected light. Or even stack up two or three....

 

Film speed affects grain size (actually the other way around, you need big grains to have a higher probability of getting hit by enough photons), but film speed has basically nothing to do with color. Shoot ASA 50 and 500 side by side, with an ND filter (N9) on the 500, and you can readily time them to match.

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[John Sprung]

That window isn't going anywhere. I am pretty sure it is still required due to old laws trying to minimize the risk of harm to an audience in a nitrate film fire.

 

It's needed to block the sound of the projector. Usually there are two pieces of glass with an air space between them. 35mm film projectors are quite loud.

 

In a nitrate booth, you have to have steel drop shutters to cover all the ports, both projection and viewing, and a crapper within sight of the projectors. You're supposed to be able to take a leak during the show and still watch to see if the film's on fire. There are a few nitrate rated booths around -- Paramount, UCLA, and the Academy come to mind. At least they were nitrate rated way back when....

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[K Borowski]

In a nitrate booth, you have to have steel drop shutters to cover all the ports, both projection and viewing, and a crapper within sight of the projectors. You're supposed to be able to take a leak during the show and still watch to see if the film's on fire. There are a few nitrate rated booths around -- Paramount, UCLA, and the Academy come to mind. At least they were nitrate rated way back when....

 

Even the bathroom facilities are still required in some states (not sure which ones, but I know there are still a few with booth fire laws on the book that require this).

 

There was a nitrate fire I read about recently (last one I heard about was in 1975), so some nitrate projection is still going on. . .

 

 

As for the window, its primary purpose is sound dampening, but it is just like the booth restroom. I don't see them disappearing just because of DLP, at least not immediately.

 

Also, why take out that window when you can have some jackass in the audience jump up from the last row of seats and into the booth?

[Paul Bruening]

Since this thread went heavy in the projection direction, I have been going more to matinees at the local Malco theater and doing casual interviews with audience members while the 1K and digital slide ad reels were running before the 2Ks fired up. The Malco went 2K DLP a few months ago as a way to kill a reopened, competing theater in town. Not only is it cheaper to do the matinees, I found that the die hard, single movie goers with a better eye and more enthusiasm were readily available to talk to.

 

What I was fishing for was whether they could really tell if 2K DLP was any better or worse of an experience. Of course, enough time had passed that I couldn't expect them to make an objective comparison since their film projection information was all only memories mostly at that theater. As well, they had no side-by-side to go on. I was obliged to ask questions that could fit into their most current experiences. I interviewed something around or under a dozen people, both men and women, mostly around my age or so, at varying depths of conversation.

 

My sad reports are:

 

These interviewees couldn't discriminate color beyond a low to middle threshold. If it is in the ball park and natural looking enough (faces aren't oddly purple for example) they accept it as reality. I suspect that TV with all of it's nearly infinite manifestations has contributed to peoples' tolerance of poor color. Then again, sunlight and artificial light values are so varied color wise that we'd probably go friggin' bonkers if our brains were naturally hyper critical of color. Some of the interviewees could recall what color they thought was too low under their threshold. But, those memories were of film festival fare or other people's home video. In their defense, I am confident that what they were detecting was poor production value.

 

These interviewees did have a threshold for the edginess of picture elements. None of the interviewees could detect, notable to their sense, edginess in these 2k DLPs.

 

These interviewees could not detect any factors of latitude, crushed blacks or blown highs. At best some of them could sense those elements as stylistic.

 

None of these interviewees could make an observation on whether the DLP image seemed oddly sterile compared to film.

 

Something around half of the interviewees recalled film's jitter and flicker (lamp flicker for our reference) and were glad to not have to put up with it anymore. The other interviewees had never made notice.

 

Even though I have defended projected film for it's aesthetic strengths and continue to think that we, as image makers, should know those differences, I, now, am reasonably confident it doesn't add up to a hill of beans out there in the movie going trenches,

[John Sprung]

As for the window, its primary purpose is sound dampening, but it is just like the booth restroom. I don't see them disappearing just because of DLP, at least not immediately.

 

Also, why take out that window when you can have some jackass in the audience jump up from the last row of seats and into the booth?

 

Doing previews back in my feature days, I saw a lot of booths where you could find the round patch in the floor over the closet flange, where the toilet used to be. Often there's a bump. (Mostly you're very busy setting up for previews, but once in a while you get some down time.... ;-) ) They were giving up their nitrate rating for a little more storage space.

 

In a well designed theater, there should be two ports for each projector. One just big enough to project the image, the other just big enough to see the screen to frame, focus, and change over. Ideally, they should be too small for even the skinniest of jackasses -- not just to keep the jackasses out, but more to keep bounce light from the booth walls from getting into the house and onto the screen. Especially working changeovers, you need to see to rewind and thread.

 

Another way to look at it: Any projectionist capable of lifting a pair of Goldbergs should be strong enough to whup any jackass small enough to fit thru a port.... ;-)

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Thomas James]

The article was probably reffering to that of all the television shows that were traditionally shot on film 70% of these shows are now shot on digital.

[Dominic Case]

You lose a little light, so you just start with a little more to get the 16 foot Lamberts you're supposed to have (for film). (Or with digital it's some other number, IIRC, 14?)

In fact the 16 ftL for film is measured with an open gate. If you measured it while running clear film through the projector, you'd probably get around 14 ftL (as film isn't entirely clear - and of course it presents a front and a back surface for loss by reflection ;) ). So the digital projection standard is effectively the same as the film standard.

[Dominic Case]

I know higher gamma materials need more color correction for the same perceived change in color,

No. My point about gamma is to do with the relationship between exposure change and resultant density (or colour) change. Which is essentially what gamma is.

 

When making an IP or IN, the intermediate stock has a gamma of 1.0. So when you change the exposure (in the printer trims or lights) by one point (0.025logE) then the density of the resultant IP or IN will change by 0.025 x 1.0. That is, the same amount, 0.025.

 

Print stock has a gamma of 3.0 or more, so when you make the same correction to make a print, you will get a density shift of 0.025logE x 3.0, or 0.07.

 

I suspect you may be saying that a small colour shift in a low contrast print may be more noticeable than the same shift in a very contrasty image on a high contrast print.

[K Borowski]

Honestly, as I continue watching, the 35mm B&W footage looks worse, heavily pixelated.

 

I am also disappointed by the 16:9 crop onto the old footage and photos, rather than pillar-boxing them.

 

 

As for the interviews, they appear to be shot on video, couldn't hazard a guess as to which camera, probably an HD broadcast camera.

[Michael Most]

The article was probably reffering to that of all the television shows that were traditionally shot on film 70% of these shows are now shot on digital.

 

That's either a bit of an exaggeration, or requires a bit of explanation.

 

Comedies have been shot primarily on video for a number of years now, basically since the advent of the Sony F900 back in the late 90's. Dramas have been the mainstay of film for television since that time. For the current season, the film/digital split on dramas is about 50/50. There are more dramas that are still on film than everyone seems to think these days.

[K Borowski]

Even with the gloomiest of scenarios, the list I had was a 55%-45% tilt in favor of digital for dramatic TV shows.

 

Unless you are talking about TV as a whole (commercials notwithstanding), where it is probably far far far far lower than 3% let alone 30%, I have no idea where those numbers are coming from. . .

[Michael Most]

Even with the gloomiest of scenarios, the list I had was a 55%-45% tilt in favor of digital for dramatic TV shows.

 

I said ABOUT 50/50. That doesn't imply perfect mathematical precision.

 

A list has been compiled on CML based on input from a number of informed parties including myself. Since shows get cancelled quickly these days (CW has already cancelled "The Beautiful Life" after 2 airings) the exact number will change. I don't care about exact numbers. I care about trends. The trend is towards digital shooting, for many reasons - some logical, some artificial, some sensible, some not - but film still has a more significant presence than many seem to currently believe. How long that lasts only time will tell.

[Gary Lemson]

...confident it doesn't add up to a hill of beans out there in the movie going trenches.

 

I think you have hit the nail on the head. :(

 

Does the general public really care how the image is originated or projected?

[K Borowski]

I said ABOUT 50/50. That doesn't imply perfect mathematical precision.

 

Was I quoting you when I said that? I'm pretty sure my intentions were to address what Thomas had said, not your statements.

[Michael Most]

I think you have hit the nail on the head. :(

 

Does the general public really care how the image is originated or projected?

 

No. But I think there is an expectation of a certain level of quality on the part of the audience. If the material meets or exceeds that level - which it generally does, at least in theatrically released product and network television programs - it's a non-issue. If it doesn't, it becomes an issue. This also doesn't absolve those of us involved in its creation from the responsibility of creating a product with a quality level that can hold up in future mediums and with future audiences, because that is where a lot of the long term value of the product lies.

[Michael Most]

Was I quoting you when I said that? I'm pretty sure my intentions were to address what Thomas had said, not your statements.

 

No. You weren't quoting anybody. So the only thing I have to go on is to read the previous messages - which aren't always posted in order - to figure it out. Since I had posted something that directly related to what you were saying, I perhaps falsely assumed it was referring to what I had said. Sorry if I guessed wrong. Having said that, I don't think it invalidates what I posted regarding paying attention to trends rather than exact numbers.

[Paul Bruening]

Can Tim or a moderator rate this thread in posts and views counts? Where does it rank in relation to the highest count threads of all time on C.com?