mr_x wrote:you mean digital projectors like in schools and conference centres? the lamps are almost as expensive as the projectors and the results up close were nothing to write home about from the ones i saw
whatever you do digitally you cannot escape the graphic pixel which gets you in the end, a square block, horrible thing, give me photo emulsion any day! ;)
they've been trying to re-invent oil paint for 600 years (and failed) presumably the same thing will be tried with photo emulsion :roll:
I'm talking about theatrical digital projection. It's a slow conversion mainly due to the expense. The price tag I heard for one that can fill a 50 foot screen is around 90 grand which makes it currently too expensive for most theatre chains to covert all of their auditoriums. Plus, it's my understanding that one movie takes between 4 to 6 hours to download, however,film platter buildups and breakdowns are time consuming as well.Like you say, also, there's the problem of blocky artifacts, but I think that's something that will lessen as the technology progresses and no technology is without it's problems. Can you really say blocky artifacts are any less offensive than a dirty or serverely scratched print with multiple splices? I've had to endure such in cheaper theatres.
As much as I love film, though, I feel the electronic conversion of the industry to be ineveitable eventually. While we purists may appreciate the subtle nuances that film brings to the image, purists don't count for that much on the grand mass scale of consumers and that's unfortunately what will decide the future outcome of the moving image. Remember we live in a world that's run by banks and if you want to make a case for film, you're going to have to prove that those subtle nuances make the difference in bottom line profit, enough of a difference to justify half a million dollars at least in a movie's budget.
As far as keeping an addiction alive it's going to take the grass roots efforts of individuals to operate on a labour of love basis, just breaking even, if that ,to continue manufacturing film emulsions, loading them in reliable cartiridges (I've had my share of bad ones during my recent super 8 attempts, NOT something I ever experienced when I shot super 8 back in it;s heyday when it was a viable production and home movie format) Then you have processing to deal with and it seems like every year environmental regulations get stricter and another emulsion bites the dust because it's environmentally unfriendly to process and deal with the waste chemicals.
Also, an addiction isn't an art form, a means of expression and especially not a business, so while we're all mourning the inevitable,I feel we should try to look at the new electronic formats not as competition, but as an ineveitable next step in the evolution of the moving image. We may lose the sacrosanct pure film look, but we may gain a hell of a lot more in that the lack of expense (no more film stock or lab costs)has already made more small independent productions possible which would not have been possible with film. I've personally witnessed too many potential projects go down the tubes because the film makers insisted on attempting to do a feature in 35mm, 16mm or super 8 with no money.
Once back in the 90's I was shooting a commercial and my gaffer was commenting on the then new HD video formats he had been working with. I asked if it looked like film and he replied that it didn't llok like video and it didn't look like film to him, but something different. This to me is something positive.
The future doesn't have to be doom and gloom just because the Beaulieu 4008 ZM2 ends up in a museum display.
