Viewing STAR WARS digitally and Ticket Information (2 Viewers)

[Charles Bober]

Bill,

Which theater are you attending?

 

[Jeff Williams]

Aaron,

Go to Ziegfeld. I just got back from the 12:15 show today; it's a 2 and a half hour drive and of course we had to journey around the city all day. OK, now back to the movie. Ziegfeld, without a doubt, is the best presentation of a movie I have ever seen, well other than IMAX. The DLP is unbelievable. I have never seen such a saturation of colors before. I went with 3 other friends who have no idea what DLP stands for, never mind how it works or it's benefits. Well when the previews started, they understood it's benefits. As soon as the first preview for Disney's new movie started, all I heard was "Holy sh*t, that picture is amazing!" My friends weren't the only ones who were blown away. You could hear others commenting on it too. It was even more than I had expected. I was truly floored by the clarity, depth, and colors. This is definitely the future. I also looked very, very hard to find pixels and came up with none. The film version I saw had more pixelation.

As for the sound, I give it a big thumbs up. It was a very nice balance between the fronts and the surrounds, which I have never found in any other theater. It was also extremely clean and dynamic.

The only flaw in the presentation was the DLP's lack of pure black. It just can't quite do it. It's a faded black, but not gray. In time, that'll be resolved and the presentation will be flawless.

I can't comment on the Edgewater, AMC, or Gardens theaters unfortunately, but I can't see how it could be any better.

An interesting side note, the DLP projector at Ziegfeld is way off center. It's on the left side when you are looking at the screen. Somehow though, there is no distortion on the screen. That puzzled me.

Jeff

 

[Derek Miner]

I have now seen both a 35mm and DLP presentation of Attack of the Clones.

I wasn't strongly impressed or bothered by the 35mm version. I did notice a handful of scenes with video noise, most noticeable in dark backgrounds. These artifacts, to me, were quite different from film grain.

For the DLP presentation, I unfortunately had to sit about six rows from the screen. The theater actually wasn't that big. It probably held about 1/3 of the people who would fit into the place where I saw the 35mm version.

The first thing I noticed about DLP was the line structure. Rather than horizontal lines as in NTSC video, this presentation had vertical lines. The point at which the resolution becomes inadequate for detail is pretty noticeable.

The trailers shown before the feature gave me a good comparison of how different quality images show up in DLP. A trailer for Austin Powers: Goldmember was very clean and almost video-like, with eye-popping colors that really show off the main advantage of DLP.

The trailer for Matrix: Reloaded really revealed the resolution limitations, with the scads of text and graphics all over the screen. The film's title at the end of the trailer came off with tons of jaggies. The little "THE" at the top of the title was most affected, as the narrow horizontal and vertical lines in the letters practically disappeared.

The best looking trailer was for Men In Black II, with some nice graphics, noise-free imaging and occasional bright colors.

A trailer for Like Mike looked different than these others. I'm guessing that production of the other trailers was optimized for DLP while this one was probably finished on film and then transferred to DLP a couple generations down. In fact, film dirt was visible in this trailer. A softer image fared pretty well on the DLP, lessening the loss of fine detail, but text still looked bad.

As for the feature itself, Attack of the Clones looked pretty good in DLP. When very bright skies or such things were shown (Tatooine skies, for instance), the lines of resolution were plain as day. But the darker action scenes on Geonosis later in the film looked really good. These blended in much better on DLP and were less distracting because they're always moving. As I mentioned with the Austin Powers trailer, the colors were amazing and are the prime asset to the DLP presentation, in my opinion. I still noticed some of the video noise that I saw in the 35mm version, but I did not notice it as often, due to the distracting elements of line structure and loud breathing from the man behind me. The issue of black level in the DLP picture just did not occur to me. The blackness of space looked appropriately black for my tastes, and my home viewing environment has a deep set black.

Many times during the film, I noticed the lack of detail in the DLP presentation. To start off, the Lucasfilm Ltd. logo looked atrocious and completely jagged. As the famous Star Wars logo flew away from me, it started to shimmer and shift as the resolution got lower. The text crawl coming up from the bottom of the screen looked very good until it got about halfway up the screen. Then the edges of "ATTACK OF THE CLONES" started to get jagged. Any long shot in the film was also subject to distort. The wide vistas of Naboo and Coruscant were slightly spoiled by this effect. During a long shot of the Lars homestead on Tatooine, the characters at the bottom of the screen were reduced to just a few lines of resolution to define them. Their heads appeared a few lines thick, with no facial detail at all. Another particular culprit is the big crowd scene on Geonosis, as Anakin and Amidala are brought out into the arena. Jaggy city as the many, many small bodies in the stands jumped around.

As the end credits rolled, I took the opportunity to go back about halfway into the theater to see how distance lessened the resolution problems. The line structure came close to disappearing (wish I could have seen some bright footage from this distance), but the text still suffered from horrible edginess, noticeable because of shifts in brightness and color around the curves of the letters.

Overall, I think there are certainly some advantages of DLP presentation, but the technology is still lacking. I hope advances in technology will help to make a much more acceptable image in the near future. In fact, if the vertical resolution lines of this presentation could be doubled, I think I would be much happier with it.

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

I saw it in both 35mm (Thursday evening at the AMC 20 in Livonia, MI) and digitally (at the Star theater in Southfield, Michigan yesterday morning on their brand spanking new "trial" Boeing installation). Both visual presentations were excellent, the Star Southfield had much better sound, but they always do and that's not what we are here to talk about, anyway.
The digital was not without some artifacts, but they were slight compared to the benefits. The color depth and contrast of the digital presentation appeared superior to the 35mm print I saw, and the image was rock solid throughout. The two most noticeable digital artifacts were the apparent limts of the resolution (You are asking for trouble when your digital movie begins with text becoming ever smaller as it scrolls to the background! ) and a very (very) slight fuzziness to edges suggesting some sort of alignment/convergence/registration type issue.
Give the 35mm prints another week or two subjected to high-school age popcorn vendor/projectionists, and I'm pretty sure that the digital will have created an even wider gap.
Regards,

 

[Dave H]

Ken,

I, too, saw Clones at AMC in Livonia. I am going Wed. night to view it digitally at Star in Southfield. My question is, is the screen pretty large? I was concerned because I heard the digital viewing only holds about 300 people.

Also, I thought the volume was too low at AMC (I saw it in theater 10). I hope Star is louder.

 

[Bill Buklis]

Charles,

Believe it or not I still haven't had time to go see it yet. I was totally busy last weekend. I'm going to try to see if I can squeeze it in Thursday night or Saturday afternoon.

Most likely, I'll either see it at the Crown Village 18 or Lowe's Streets of Woodfield. If tomorrow night then Crown Village. If I wait 'til Saturday then I may opt for Woodfield. As long as I can be assured of getting the right DLP screening, of course...

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

Dave,

The volume was quite low at the AMC Livonia 20. The Star Southfield was louder, but not necessarily as loud as I thought it would be. The screen at the Star is a decent size. It is theater 7, which is not one of their largest, but none of the Star screens are of the "postage stamp" variety. You will enjoy it.

Regards,

 

[Dave H]

Thanks, Ken. I'll post my thoughts about it all tonight... only around four more hours.

 

[Mike Broadman]

Has anyone seen Star Wars at the theater in Framingham, MA? I hear it's a really nice place, and I'm planning to take the girlfriend, sister, friends, etc this weekend.

 

[Dalton]

Mike,
I saw the DLP presentation there last Saturday and it was awesome Well worth seeing in DLP.

 

[Mike Broadman]

Thanks, Dalton. It makes me feel better making my sister come all the way from New York and keeping my girlfriend from seeing it with their deaf friends.

 

[Dave H]

Well, I got back from the digital presentation at Star in Southfield, MI.
Positives: The picture was perfect in terms of being clean. By that I mean no hair, specs, dirt, or black blobs that show up for half a second that is on every film I ever see - no matter how new it is. A perfectly clean picture it was tonight.
The colors seems a bit more vibrant and solid - though there wasn't a huge difference - it was noticable better.
Also, a bit less film grain was noticable - although I dont consider film grain bad really - it was less noticable.
Negatives: Scan lines. At least this is what I think I was seeing. They had the same look as when you are sitting too close to your computer monitor's screen. I assume these were coming from the projector. We really weren't sitting that close either, though we would have done better by sitting further back. I found these most annoying.
I also felt the picture was very slightly out of focus, or maybe a slight convergence issue. Images weren't as sharp as they should have been, and I noticed slight red or blue tinges on edges of some objects that I never saw on the regular print film.
Overall: Digital presentation defintely has the potential - and if these things I mentioned that were negative get corrected, you have a superior presentation with digital.

 

[Scott H]

Similar to sharpness, but distinctly different, is resolution - or the ability of an imaging system to sense and reproduce fine detail. Today's highest resolution motion picture film scanners are able to extract over 12 million pixels of information from just one frame of 35mm film...and this is limited only by the capability of the scanning device.
You can also examine this from a sort of a "z" direction, which is the bit depth of information. Film's tone scale is closely approximated in today's high-end digital scanners by 14 bits linear or 16k discrete levels.
On the other hand, even with the highest definition cameras available today, the chips in digital video cameras are offering something in the order of 1920 by 1080 or about two million pixels of information per frame. Sometimes this is translated as eight bits of information, sometimes as 10 bits representing tone scale or 1024 discrete levels. No matter what the formula, today's digital video image contains far fewer pixels, with a substantially restricted bit depth, translating into significantly lower resolution.
Thus film capture and high resolution scanning results in much more original scene detail and information than digital video capture systems today. Remember: sharpness does not equal resolution.

Regarding image data file size comparisons, this information is available from all manner of industry sources, and those numbers are referenced quite widely in articles and popular discussion. You are most likely to find image data file size information from post-production resources. A typical 35mm full aperture 4K resolution telecine scan is often in the 40MB range (limited by the scanner). It's a bit harder to find online information regarding the 1920 x 1080 HD frame equaling ~5MB, but here is one page with some correlating info:
http://www.accom.com/products/disk_capacity.html
Sony technical pages on the F900 may reference that as well.

 

[Tim Glover]

Well, after seeing this movie in DLP; I just can't watch it in film anymore. At least this movie. The image is just too clear, and when I saw it the last time in film, the print is too noisy. I realize the DLP presentation has limitations-the occasional jagged line etc...but it's such a clean image and the colors look vibrant.
It's not perfected yet and I'm sure it will only get better. At least where I have seen it, its like comparing DVD to vhs. (maybe since Texas Instruments is only about 10 miles away from the Cinemark in Plano could be the reason?)

 

[Mike Buckles]

Although a digital presentation is not available in my area (Omaha NE), I just saw the movie in a regular theater...the story and script were great...the picture was not what it should have been...a bit fuzzy, due in part to transferring the video to film, and I feel there was an effort to diffuse or soft focus everything, so that the viewer would have a hard time telling it was shot on video. I must admit, that the a fair number of the scenes looked like film...a few of the indoor council chamber scenes you could tell it was not filmed. Yes, video does have advantages as far as no scratches, dirt, etc...but fuzzing everything to make it look like film bugs me too! I hope the studios aren't planning to eliminate all productions in film...although LucasFilm holds itself to high standards to make this video a success, eventually you're going to see a slip in quality with some movies made by other production companies...and if they quit teaching film cinematography in schools, who would have the skills? And if reports are true about smaller digital theaters, my incentive to go out to a theater to see a film would be pretty much gone...yes, my picture at home isn't quite as big, but not too far off, and with the presentation in video, why go out anymore? These of course, are just my opinions, but I don't feel I should pay money to go out, and see a show made on video, when I can see it at home...I'm sure dlp will soon be more available/affordable for the home theater...I just hope film manufacturers don't kill off film for the smaller/independent filmmakers who cant afford the 100,000 Sony Progressive Scan video cameras...

 

[Roberto Carlo]

Mr. Matson wrotte:

I saw AOTC at the Crown Annapolis theater. The presentation was great! I wish there was digital theater closer to DC, but the drive was well worth it. I was looking for rainbows and decreased black levels, but I didn't notice anything strange. To me, it looked like a clean film print. The sound was also excellent.

There is a DLP theater a lot closer than Annapolis: the Lee Highway Cineplex in Merrifield, VA. It's where Gallows Road meets Lee Highway right off the Beltway. I saw AOTC there in DLP and at the Hoyt's 22 in Alexandria, which is, as cineplexes go, a pretty good theater. There was no comparison. For AOTC, digital is the way to go.

 

[Bill Slack]

Well, after seeing AOTC a few times in DLP now, I think I've formed a coherent opinion on digital projection, in its current state.

The clarity (lack of dust and scratches) is stunning. The color and bright scenes could be eye-popping

The lack of resolution and the appearance of pixel structure were distracting to me, as was the poor black level.

I'll stick with film for now. My most recent viewing I went with Gregg Loewen, and I know he also went to see it again in NYC a few days later... and he seemed to echo the same things I did. He seemed especially annoyed with the black-level, while I found the pixel structure to be the biggest detractor.

Digital cinema is a good idea, but it needs more time.

 

[ChrisMatson]

I saw this over at Starwars.com
I just hope the future looks as good as it sounds.