Anyone miss film projection glitches?

Paul F said:
I like to think that if video came before film, people would wax poetic about video noise and complain about film grain. It's what we see first that gains our heart. It's not always true, but it is so in many cases.
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I dunno.

For a long time (and some argue still) film has a great resolution and greater colour depth / gamut than almost every digital system out there. And remember film was being constantly improved (R&D) over the years, but it pretty much stopped in the mid 2000's once digital took their business down. I find it astounding that we can reach back to film shot 100 years ago and have an image today that is arguably better than what those that created it would have been able to see.

Will we feel the same about the first DI films in 2K ? I think not. From my recollection the first DI film was "Pleasantville" and from a VFX sense it made sense to do it as aa DI because of what happens in the story. The thing with film is that you can re-scan it, use better imaging technology today than what we had even a few years ago. What you can scan today looks better than what you could do 20 years ago. We've all grown up being used to crappy scans of low con TV prints of films for their initial TB broadcast, being turned into DVD masters then being upresed for the BlueRay to 4K. I think a lot of our film origination and exhibition has been dumbed down because of these kinds of processes.

A film I produced and shot in 2006 has started turning into a bit of a cult film, especially around Halloween and about to have a BlueRay re-release. It was shot film AND digital, but finished to 2K DI, which was what was the best you could do in those early days of DI. A UK company is about to re-release it as a Blue Ray using...only a 2K master to generate that BlueRay from.

Funny too that Blue Ray is getting a resurgence of a kind at the moment because we're alreasing how much compression the streamers are using.

RAW images, if you have the originals COULD in theory be re-processed with a better algorithm and be made better. There's not more hidden resolution there like with film.

It's taken an awful long time for digital to be technically better. For most it already is, and projection is a subject very dear to me.

99% of film projection is / was terrible.

When film projection is done well it's a thing to behold. It's just that no one does it the way it should be done, and thus you get the issues being discussed.

JB

A discussion of Pleasantville.
https://vfxblog.com/2018/10/22/pleasantville/

https://www.wired.com/story/blu-ray-resurgence-collectors/
https://screenrant.com/4k-blu-rays-streaming-services-better-worst-physical-digital/
 
I miss good film projection. I lived in Los Angeles for twenty years so I got to experience probably the best film projection ever had to offer. Any time I saw a film outside the city I was reminded how terrible film could be. An interesting film to watch to see the difference between film and digital is Steve Jobs, which has a different capture format for the three eras it takes place in, Super16, 35mm and Alexa Digital. The 35mm definitely looked the best. It had more richness and subtlety of colours, notable in the skin tones. The Alexa footage had an ever so subtle pastel feeling to the colours by comparison. As for the old vinyl vs digital debate, I trust my ears, and vinyl just sounds more pleasing, even compared to hi-res 24-bit audio. I don't think there's any single reason for that, but a variety of factors including music mastered for vinyl using less loudness compression, a smoother rolloff of high frequencies, harsh, square sound waves getting rounded off by the pickup coils and extra distortions that give the music a more live, real feeling. That said, I find classical music harder to listen to on vinyl due to the long, quieter passages classical tends to have, which makes vinyl artifacts more apparent. Hard, 70's rock is at its absolute best on vinyl.
 
ahalpert said:
I think they're talking strictly about the audience's point of view

And you know the saying - if you remember Woodstock, you weren't really there
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I don't think audiences miss film defects too much either. I don't think the average audience member wouldn't
even know what those defects were, it's just something they might recall if they saw again or you pointed it out,
but most people have no idea what these defects were named.

For me, it's just like records. I miss the sound of analog but I definitely don't miss the clicks, skips and crackles of analog at all.
I don't miss cleaning records before playing them I always hated that when I was kid, I would save for weeks to buy a new album
and I knew that with every play, I was actually degrading the sound, always hated that.

I wasn't at Woodstock. But I was at the Monterey Pop Festival. I was four. I have a vague recollection of it.
 
combatentropy said:

There are few remastered music videos on Youtube. See also "Take On Me" by A-Ha.
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I saw this last year, the Wham video is the perfect example that nobody back when it as produced ever saw it look this good. It's like we get a magic mirror to look
back on the past to get a peek of what real life looked like back then.
 
combatentropy said:
There are a few remastered music videos on Youtube. See also "Take On Me" by A-Ha.
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Ha. I had in mind this gem. I was stunned after watching this in the cinema. (watch it all the way through by the way)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds

There's plenty more of the cheese though

https://youtu.be/O6uOHnxf85g

JB

EDIT,

And totally forgot this as well. Footage you've seen before, but RE-TRANSFERED and looking amazing. Especially the final concert which was shot on 35mm. You can even pick which camera had the bad lens...The trailer doesn't do it justice compared to viewing in a cinema.

https://youtu.be/tI4E0mxwbf4

Bloody hell and this too...

https://youtu.be/3Co8Z8BQgWc

The opening few mins are all re-scans of some 70mm film that no-one has seen till now...
 
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My favorite film glitch which was also pretty rare: When the projector drive mechanism broke and the current frame would burn up in a fraction of a second. ( this happened often with 16mm films we were shown in high school by people who had no idea how to operate a projector, and at least once or twice in a full size commercial theater )
 
My memories are of a commercial theater showing a film .... stutter then that wonderful haze as the film fried before your eyes ... groans from the
audience and a minute or two before the projectionist would restart the film .... if he was not out in the hall smoking ...

Film would restart to applause from those present ...

Only upstaged by the inevitable flash of the lamp .... darkness ... cursing from above the balcony.

Also the sound of the film striking the projector as it rolled without a track to follow.

That was cinema ... all else pales ... even the presentation and projection had an element of risk.
 
I don't miss film projection glitches.

That said, I do love me some film grain and vintage lens low-contrast with swirly bokeh.
 
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