Are you fine with digital movies and projection?

I don’t notice digital projection. And I’m fairly attuned to that kind of thing. I worked in photography for years where I had to be careful of the flicker of fluorescent lights and I worked as a projectionist a little, too.

High frame rate films that look like soap operas and TVs that make everything look like that drive me nuts, though.

One thing about digital is if you sit on the floor and look up it gets all wonky and dark. Same with trying to see it from the side. Perhaps you could try adjusting the angle of your TV or your seating?

Imagine taking a picture of a city with a digital camera. You take a picture, and immediately review it to find, it didn’t turn out how you were hoping. So you adjust the settings on your camera, and maybe pick a new location to shoot from. You take the picture and review it to find this time it’s what you’re looking for.
Now say you want to add a flying saucer to the sky in that picture. You plug into a computer and transfer the image over at full resolution to an editing program. Here you can make whatever adjustments you want. If your friend wants to see it, you email it to them. If you want to make sure you always have that image, you save as many backups as you want or upload it to the cloud.

Now imagine you took the same picture with an old fashion film camera. 1st off, you have no ability to review the shot until you go home and develop the film. But lets pretend you took a few variations adjusting settings and location each time and at least one of them is what you’re looking for. Now, how do you add that UFO to the shot? First you have to develop it. 20 years ago I did this, and believe me, right off the bat, the developing process leaves a lot of room for you to ruin the only copy of your image. Aside from that, it requires a dark room, chemicals/special equipment, precision, and time… Say it all goes off without a hitch. Now you have a negative strip of film. You insert that into a down facing projector, get some light sensitive paper, do a couple test exposures to find the duration you need to expose it, then make your print. Right after you expose the paper with the projected image, you have to place it in separate chemical baths for a specific duration to help it expose correctly. If that goes off without a hitch, now you have a print of specific height/width… If you were using a standard projector it’s probably 8.5×11 at most. Now if you wanted to add that UFO, you could scan that image into a computer, knowing all along that the clarity of the original negative is being diminished/limited by each successive process. How large of print did you make? How large of a print can your scanner handle? How good is your scanner? That will dictate the quality of the image you finally have on your computer. Granted, this image we’re dealing with image was only 8.5×11, and will lose clarity as you enlarge or zoom into the image. None the less now you have the image in a form you can edit. Once all edits have been made digitally, you go about making negatives again from that image using more specialized equipment. Then that negative must be physically delivered to a theater which can place it on their projector and present it on screen. (and to be fair, this explanation is just for ONE frame, and still not the whole process in detail)

I agree with @Call_Me_Jay about the “soap opera look”. That’s the only thing that bothers me about the “progress” we’ve made in home media over the past several years. It looks like garbage.

It’s the same with digitally generated/enhanced/produced music. Some of the effects available are awesome, but I’d prefer to play a Hammond B-3 across the stage from someone on a Strat with stacks of Marshall tube style amps over the latest and greatest digital equivalent.

^^Oh yeah, man. Booker T and the MGs.

I was a head projectionist for about three years and then got promoted to technician where I would run around the state repairing projectors. There is a local art cinema near my house and I do a few hours of maintenance there a month and go in if there is a catastrophic failure.

I have only seen one film projected in digital. This was at a theater that was basically a bar with a 600 seat theater bolted onto it. It was so fucking bad I sat in the lobby drinking while my sister finished the movie.

First, the masking was off by a few feet. This is completely unacceptable. And the most egregious error was it looked like the anode wasn’t properly anchored. So the bulb was slowly drifting forward in the yolk. This gave it what we would call a “Cybill Shepherd” effect.

It used to take me around three hours to install and focus the bulb. I don’t think a single screen theater have the resources to do that. Well, they do, but they don’t want to pay the 100 bucks for it. Which is funny since the xenon bulbs run about 1K. And properly installed they last around twice as long.

There is a knob for amperage sent to the bulb. Generally I would start a bulb that was properly aligned at around 115 amps. Then gradually up the amperage to 150. At that point I considered the bulb dangerous. That would result in the bulb lasting around 2250 hours reliably.

The chuckelheads that didn’t respect the art of projecting films would just stick the bulb in and deal with it being dim. Crank the amps up to 175 and the bulb was shit in 1000 hours.

This was a massive exercise in frustration. Most of the projectionist made 25 cents over minimum. So I understand their frustration. I was pissed too, I got paged at 9PM on a friday night because they didn’t bother to put some oil in the projector so I would have to replace a intermittent movement when I was getting up on hottie at a party.

Shit, I guess I could deal with digital if projectionists were competent and paid properly.

Maybe you can explain this to me @mazingerz88. We recorded “As Good As It Gets.” I’ve never seen it before. When I played it my first thought was that we pulled it off of TCM and it was a 60’s or 70’s movie. The film tone had that about it. I almost quite watching it. But then an old lady mouthed, “Son of a bitch,” and I knew it wasn’t an old movie. It also has Helen Hunt, Jack Nicolson and Cuba Gooding Jr. in it.
What was it about the film tone that made me think it was old?

@Dutchess_III If I recall correctly, that lady saying “son of a bitch” happened very early? I guess the movie at that point exudes that 60s or 70s feel because of the music and the clean but somewhat old looking condominium hallway?

Also, did you record from a TV broadcast? Could be the “texture” and lighting quality of that particular recording look like a 60s or 70s movie.

Yes, it was the first line in the movie. That’s how I knew it wasn’t 60’s or 70’s. They allowed massive sexualization of women, and glorified rape in the 60’s and 70’s, but women didn’t cuss!
Yes, I recorded it from the TV.