Kodak combats digital’s appeal, but resistance may be futile

[t1t4]

I like the last quote the best:
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Kodak, however, is not ready to give up; the company even aimed a gentle jibe at Lucas. “We’re out to prove the death notice for film was not only premature, it just ain’t gonna happen on our watch,” Morelli said at a product rollout in Los Angeles last month. “Not in this galaxy and not in a galaxy far, far away.

“This empire is definitely striking back,” he said.
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Someone should make sure Morelli doesn't see Return of The Jedi, and that's not just because it was the weakest of the 1st (or is that 2nd?) trilogy.

And didn't someone once say painting was dead? It might not be how most of us have our family portraits done but it is a long way from being dead.

t1t4

[Gentle Fury]

i think the post needs to get some of their facts straight....lol

The “digital cinema,” in which a movie would be sent to theaters as a computer file, is still years and millions of dollars away

ummmmmm there are like 4 digital theaters within a 50 mile radius of me here......sure thats not a lot....but according to them it is in the key of the flying car!....lol

Sony’s Columbia Pictures. Filmmakers “can capture it on digital and go back to the film [in editing]. If they want to make it look warm and fuzzy, they can do it.”

ok, where is the logic in that???? they are trying to say that they can take a digital image that has already been shot and transfer it to film and magically get back all the missing color information??? ummmmm, maybe in wonderland, but not here....thats like saying you can burn an mp3 to a cd and get better quality because it is a cd format which is "uncompressed"......lol Of course in both cases, what is lost is not even noticed!!! MP3 loses the highs that you cant even hear....digital film loses colors that we cant even see!

It’s one thing for indie directors to proclaim that film is dead. It’s another matter, however, when one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood — George Lucas — is leading the charge. Lucas shot each of his two latest “Star Wars” installments digitally, saying the new technology gives him the tools to put on screen anything he can imagine.

ummm, actually, AOTC was the only one that was shot all digital.....lucas and sony had the cameras ready for TPM but it turned out just not being viable......too hard to manage the cameras and i dont think the quality was up to where he wanted it.....but TPM was 35mm and AOTC was all digital (and did ANYONE notice a difference in quality?????? If anything the colors were even more vibrant!!!!

I think Kodak needs to either evolve or be left for dead......better start researching good storage techniques to suit the future of filmaking.......HD's, new recordable formats.....its only a matter of time before the incredibly wasteful and polluting industry of film is no more!

Funny, Kodak is the worst too....their Fix bath is SOOOOO poisonous!! it has to be filtered then disposed of....very bad for the environment!

Celluloid is on its way out......sillicon is the film of the future.....deal with it!!!!!

[danylyon]

Originally posted by Gentle Fury
...and did ANYONE notice a difference in quality??????

Well I think there were almost no details in the shadows and additionally the shadows were too grainy. (Maybe our theatre was set too bright.)

Anyway.. I guess they will sort that out.. I'm all for digital cinema.

[keithlango]

Originally posted by danylyon
Well I think there were almost no details in the shadows and additionally the shadows were too grainy. (Maybe our theatre was set too bright.)

Anyway.. I guess they will sort that out.. I'm all for digital cinema.

Having been around some digital to film transfer fun, there could be any number of reasons why the blacks were crushed in your viewing. One of the problem areas in going digital to film is in the blacks, as well as in the top end of saturation ranges and also brightness ranges (you can get blow outs pretty easily if you're not careful). Most experienced digital filmmakers (and FX shops for live action are the most experienced) are extremely careful in making sure their conversion tables for going from RGB image space to 10-bit cineon image space allow for compensation in these areas. And there's extensive film tests with different LUTs to find the right mix before settling on a single look up table for the conversion. Once the right LUT is found for the conversion, they'll alter the actual numerics in the RGB imagery to compensate for what artifacts that show up in the digital to film transfer. And for all their experience in this (this is stuff CG FX shops have been doing for years now) I can't imagine ILM would drop the ball on that. Especially when they have their own film transfer capabilities in house. Sometimes things can fall through the cracks when you're hiring out a service (I've seen that), but I'm fairly certain ILM has in house capabilities for digital to film transfers.

What's more likely is that your theater had a lousy projection system. We ran into that on our film and getting to the bottom of it drove us batty. We'd send off the digital, get back a film print, and lacking an in-house projection system (we're a small studio and don't have the budget for a full film projection system in house) we'd run down to the local theater and rent out a screen to see our film transfer results. The results were terrible. Crushed blacks with no detail, the top end of our saturation values were muddy, the blues had shifted and the whites had terrible blow out. At first we thought our look up tables were wrong. And then we'd screent he same print on a tuned projection screen at the transfer service and the stuff looked great. When we finally did a light reading of the original theater's screen and we found the bulbs were running half wattage. (grrr) Just the difference in bulb wattage can make the same film print look amazing or completely like crap. As a digital filmmaker you can control everything in the channel up til the point it actually gets to the theatres. And then it's out of the filmmaker's hands. Most theaters run with their projection bulbs turned down (some at half wattage) to keep the bulb life longer. That's because besides real estate & wage costs, one of the largest expenses for a theater is the projection bulb (some can cost upwards of $5,000 each). Additionally the mirrors in the projector that get dirty and can be all smudgy. Add it up and you can get a truly terrible viewing experience.

For this reason alone I'm eagerly anticipating the day when film as a medium will be replaced by digital. Seeing our film in digital dailies and then seeing it on film in a theater, you just felt like you were losing a third of your dynamic range in color and value. Like it had somehow cheapened the whole thing. Now if we could only get some of these digital cameras to emulate the warmth of some of the nicer filmstocks, we'd be all set.

-k

[Per-Anders]

hmm... i have one word... Polaroid.

[danylyon]

Thanks for the insight keith..

Seems like it was indeed the theatre.. I'll watch EP3 in a different one.

Is there actually any of the companies thinking about increasing the frame rate? When I watched TTT, in some scenes there was terrible strobing. I was definitly sitting to close.. but it's still an issue.

[parallax]

Well,
it is only a matter of time before people will be swithcing to all digital.
Have you seen the prices of cartridges??
they are mad.
Even 8mm stock is around 25 euro's in europe (giving you 3.40 min of footage max.)
Its simply not affordable.
especially for a student.

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