"Club Penton" - Ask questions to Hollywood insider "Penton-Man"

[Oliver K]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

Well then, I would hope that you had the opportunity to attend at least some of this……………
http://www.berlinale.de/

I am not Torsten but I would like to say a few words about the Berlinale as this year they had for the first time for any festival a 70mm retrospective ! I was on a rather limited time budget, but still managed to catch a number of 70mm screenings and to see two guys that also matter to fans of Blu-Ray, namely Grover Crisp from Sony and Shawn Belston from Fox. I have to say that Shawn is looking so young that I kept thinking that he has a lot of luck (as well as ability I am certain) to have that great job at Fox at his age I got to talk to him a little about the new prints that have been done since he is handling these things at Fox and he seemed to be very enthusiastic about 70mm. Grover Crisp gave a short introduction before Lord Jim was screened and I have to say that print came out very nicely, a job well done.

So there were great new 70mm prints and also very nice vintage prints to be seen, my favourites among the new prints I saw being Hello Dolly !, Lord Jim and Khartoum (this one being shown anamorphic for maybe the first time in Europe). They also had two screenings of Lawrence but I had seen it twice in 70mm last year and there were scheduling conflicts so I deciced not to attend this time.

Oh, there were also new movies I am sure but I will be able to catch a lot of those on Blu-Ray in the near future, so I went for the older stuff that is still unbeatable in 70mm

[Jeff Kleist]

Wouldn't this mean that there would be a huge number of titles available very quickly on the Blu-ray format, all with a very high quality picture at minimum expense to the studios and would make the most profit?

Because

1- The capacity does not exist for mass scale production
2- Dumping discs on the market en masse didn't work out so well for HD DVD did it?
3- Business is about "what did you do for me this quarter?"
4- Titles are not chosen arbitrarlily, and you need to creat desire for titles. It's not about the capability of doing the releases, it's about there being an audience for them to see a profit now, not a year from now.

[Bobby Henderson]

Originally Posted by Doctorossi

Again, if your screen is displaying the entire picture information reasonably accurately, which a good 30" monitor should be able to do, the idea that any larger a screen would necessarily have any inherent advantage doesn't make any sense to me, relative viewing distances being equal. How could it?

The answer is very simple: when human eye sight focuses on something up close the quality of focus and convergence is very uneven.

The focal plane is really not a flat plane at all. It is really a sphere and the focal distance is a radius of that sphere. As the point of focus moves farther away the curve radius of that focal "plane" becomes more even and flat.

You might say that doesn't make any difference if the relationship of viewing distance and focal object size (the screen) are identical in terms of scale. The problem with that argument is we see with two eyes instead of just one.

Convergence screws up everything for objects viewed more closely. When you view a really large object from a farther distance the factors of convergence in human binocular vision are largely eliminated. The two images the brain sees are matching up far more evenly and are more evenly in focus.

We tend to get eye strain when looking at small screens at close distances for extended periods of time. We're only focusing on one object (or only part of that one object) and everything else farther in the background and foreground is out of focus and convergence. We don't like it. This is one of the main reasons why we should take breaks of a couple minutes or so when looking at computer monitors all day.

[sharkshark]

Originally Posted by Robert Harris

My eyes are reasonably well trained, but on my 30" Sony HD CRT, a very high quality piece of glass, it was very difficult to see the overall loss of resolution on the Patton Blu-ray. It was not until I viewed at around 50" that the problems came to light and became progressively worse as size advanced.

...especially when CRTs can mask resolution as they're a entirely different technology with its own pros/cons (I've got a Sony 30" myself in the bedroom, and a 60" Kuro... both of which look far more "filmlike" to me than many LCDs, but may not be as beneficial for pointing out problems than my 30" LCD computer monitor that I sit 1-2ft away from running 2k resolution.


I -THOUGHT- there was a 30" CRT in there somewhere...

So, what are we to test on? They're doing dirt removal on calibrated LCD, they're doing colour correction on the same, while screencaps are debated here and elsewhere on uncalibrated monitors of ever shape, size and quality... Just like, really, all those uncalibrated TV displays out there watching all these shiny discs!

Let's not even get into the fact that percieved resolution changes based on the motion of the image...

In the end, the question is what do you use to spot errors, versus what do you use to enjoy the damn film? Any serious music studio has those awful Yamaha monitors with the white cones, for the simple reason that due to a freak of nature and the weirdo wood they drew from some exotic tree, you mix on those to sound good, the mix will sound good on anything

No doubt the LCDs for colour correction and dirt/dust are cranked to hell, =well= outside the normal range for HD viewing so you can actually see the stuff to get rid of. But when playing back final test discs, what's the process? How are people making this call? 3 chip DLP projector? Plasma? 40" LCD? What's the process of final checking of a disc before it gets shipped out, and at what stage are errors like the one with Patton normally found?

[Jeff Kleist]

Panasonic has 50" plasmas at their compression and authoring stations, and check on a 60+

[sharkshark]

cool... just saw this after I posted (http://www.engadgethd.com/2009/02/18...ction-monitor/)

mmm....HD SDI...

supernerd time, got the models they use, and what (if any) modifications are done?

By what you're saying, they're not doing checking on a projection system...

[4K2K]

Is it true that all IMAX films are 24fps?

[Bobby Henderson]

A couple or so dabbled with the "IMAX-HD" format -which simply doubles the frame rate to 48fps.

[4K2K]

Originally Posted by Bobby Henderson

A couple or so dabbled with the "IMAX-HD" format -which simply doubles the frame rate to 48fps.

So they were shot like that not just projected like that? Do you know what films they were? But 99% of IMAX films will have been filmed or taped at 24fps right?

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Oliver K

I am not Torsten but I would like to say a few words about the Berlinale as this year they had for the first time for any festival a 70mm retrospective ! I was on a rather limited time budget, but still managed to catch a number of 70mm screenings and to see two guys that also matter to fans of Blu-Ray, namely Grover Crisp from Sony and Shawn Belston from Fox. I have to say that Shawn is looking so young that I kept thinking that he has a lot of luck (as well as ability I am certain) to have that great job at Fox at his age I got to talk to him a little about the new prints that have been done since he is handling these things at Fox and he seemed to be very enthusiastic about 70mm. Grover Crisp gave a short introduction before Lord Jim was screened and I have to say that print came out very nicely, a job well done.

So there were great new 70mm prints and also very nice vintage prints to be seen, my favourites among the new prints I saw being Hello Dolly !, Lord Jim and Khartoum (this one being shown anamorphic for maybe the first time in Europe). They also had two screenings of Lawrence but I had seen it twice in 70mm last year and there were scheduling conflicts so I deciced not to attend this time.

Oh, there were also new movies I am sure but I will be able to catch a lot of those on Blu-Ray in the near future, so I went for the older stuff that is still unbeatable in 70mm

Well, at least we can’t let them 65mm cameras be put out to pasture, just yet.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0963178/technical


http://www.everybodypays.com/

[Oliver K]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

Well, at least we can’t let them 65mm cameras be put out to pasture, just yet.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0963178/technical


http://www.everybodypays.com/

Cool !

I have to admit that I forgot to mention Tom Tykwer as at another panel he was together with somebody from Arri and talking about shooting and producing in 65mm today. He said he would have liked to shoot all of the movie that way but it was considered to be too expensive. And I can imagine you know one of the reasons why he shot at least some scenes in 65mm: Because he always wanted to and is a big fan of the format

So if his next movies are reasonably successful maybe he will be able to do a complete movie in 65mm, the cameras are light enough now to do that and the additional costs over 35mm get less problematic with bigger total budgets. In the meantime it will be interesting to see how good one can see the difference between the 35mm and 65mm footage on Blu-Ray

[Bobby Henderson]

Originally Posted by 4K2K

So they were shot like that not just projected like that? Do you know what films they were? But 99% of IMAX films will have been filmed or taped at 24fps right?

Some theaters retrofitted their IMAX projectors to handle the faster 48fps format. Very few movies were shot in the format. Momentum is the only one that comes to mind, and that's not exactly up there in terms of popularity with other IMAX films like Hail, Columbia!.

Outside of that, unless someone has done some odd experimentation, IMAX movies are typically filmed and projected at 24fps.

[GabrielB]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

Change often is a slow process, because there's always people in positions of power who don't see a reason, or feel they will be negatively affected by said change, despite the fact it's for the good of most or all.

So how far are we in the battle? Can you comment? Will it be a slow transition or a quick turnaround? How long do we still have??

Or that delicate cake is still cooking in the oven?

[Jeff Kleist]

The only thing I can say (and don't read anything into this, it's purely for illustrative purposes) is that if things changed today, to exactly what we want, you really wouldn't see the results until Christmas

[sharkshark]

Originally Posted by Oliver K

I have to admit that I forgot to mention Tom Tykwer as at another panel he was together with somebody from Arri and talking about shooting and producing in 65mm today. He said he would have liked to shoot all of the movie that way but it was considered to be too expensive. And I can imagine you know one of the reasons why he shot at least some scenes in 65mm: Because he always wanted to and is a big fan of the format

...you guys are nerdy enough to appreciate this. I interviewed David Gordon Green when he brought George Washington to TIFF back in 2000 or so. He was just a kid (not that I'm so much older), and penniless... I even forked out for him to have a bagel!

We talked about how I felt it was one of the most beautifully shot indies I'd ever seen, and he decried the state of low budget cinema, with its use of digital photography and shaky cam to take the place of craft. Apparently, he spent a considerable amount of his budget ensuring that he got the right lenses for his shoot - he said he was the next to use them after Parker shot Evita. They were 2.35 Research PLC, if I recall.

He also mentioned that one of the highlights for him was a meeting in Toronto with the Imax people, as he really wanted to shoot a drama on the format. I'm not sure that All the Real Girls or Undertow would have made a splash in Imax a la TDK, but maybe Pineapple Express could have been made into even more of a "trip" on the giant screen!

Hadn't ever written about this, so I thought you'd appreciate the tale...

[SquidPuppet]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

The only thing I can say (and don't read anything into this, it's purely for illustrative purposes) is that if things changed today, to exactly what we want, you really wouldn't see the results until Christmas

Wow. Pipeline/Chronologically informative.

[Penton-Man]

A lot of talk about IMAX and large format film on this page.
Anyone care to take a stab at how much the IMAX 3D camera rig weighed (including the underwater aluminum housing) to film this motion picture……..
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020876/releaseinfo

or, how much time they got out of a load of film?.........before necessitating resurfacing, cracking open the housing, reloading, etc.

P.S.
Highly recommended film ^ for those that never had the opportunity to scuba or, for those that have, who never dove Papua, Indonesia or around Australia.

For those that are/were divers (moi) and have dove Papua (moi) or, for those super smart well rounded folks out there.........what is the most notorious creature that inhabits the waters around Papua?

Hint: It has a long snout, and no I am not thinking about a "White Pointer" for those members who hail from Australia.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

The only thing I can say (and don't read anything into this, it's purely for illustrative purposes) is that if things changed today, to exactly what we want, you really wouldn't see the results until Christmas

Well hell, that’s pretty much analogous to the length of a pipeline from Siberia to Alaska………..but, of course I guess that aint too long, as Sarah Palin claimed she could see Russia from her home.

Attention:
Rob T. - and don't read anything into this ^, it's purely for illustrative purposes.

[SquidPuppet]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

A lot of talk about IMAX and large format film on this page.
Anyone care to take a stab at how much the IMAX 3D camera rig weighed (including the underwater aluminum housing) to film this motion picture……..
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020876/releaseinfo

or, how much time they got out of a load of film?.........before necessitating resurfacing, cracking open the housing, reloading, etc.

P.S.
Highly recommended film ^ for those that never had the opportunity to scuba or, for those that have, who never dove Papua, Indonesia or around Australia.

For those that are/were divers (moi) and have dove Papua (moi) or, for those super smart well rounded folks out there.........what is the most notorious creature that inhabits the waters around Papua?

Hint: It has a long snout, and no I am not thinking about a "White Pointer" for those members who hail from Australia.

1. 280 lbs
2. 3 minutes
3. Human beings

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by SquidPuppet

1. 280 lbs
2. 3 minutes
3. Human beings

1. You are waaaay off.
2. Exactly correct.
3. I like the metaphor, but, nope not "human" beings.