How would a Canon T2i look on the big screens?

Snapper123 said:
I think the best thing to for everyone to pick one of their own projects and go to your cinema and tell them "I'm interested in renting a preview spot for my commercial but i'd like to see it projected first to test the quality." and they probably would meet you at closing time to set something up. I don't see why not. Perfect opportunity to test things.

Do you have to output a video to something fancy to do this, though?
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This is a good question. Has anyone ever had to deliver footage for a legit 4k digital projector? What is the file format?
 
I would think they'd be able to take anything from DVD, Blu-Ray, D5, HD CamSR or even files such as ProResHQ and ect. I do know that Sony HD CamSR has a 4K option or atleast on the decks I've seen.
 
Oh I just realized. I've been working on in cinema projects and our deliverables have been both 3 things -- 10bit Uncompressed HD, ProRes HQ, and D5.
 
tackyattack said:
So could you get the T2i to look as good as super 16mm on both the big screens and computer screens?
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YES!. I have recently seen both "Black Swan", as a projected 35mm print, and the film "Tiny Furniture" as a projected digital image, at the same theatre. If you are not familiar with "Tiny Furniture", it is a feature film, shot on the Canon 7D, that was the darling of last year's SXSW Film festival. Here is the link to the films website: http://www.tinyfurniture.com/. The look of "Tiny Furniture" was on more than a few times compromised by the films low budget, and, probably, inexperience cinematographer, but it compared very well to the look of the blown up Super 16mm. I highly recommend seeing "Tiny Furniture". I think that it is a great lesson for low budget filmmaking. Now the story and acting my not appeal to many folks on this board, but my hat's off the the filmmaker LENA DUNHAM, the writer, director and lead actress. She took what she had, what she knows, and made a feature film, that, while very flawed, IMHO, was still very well made.
 
life4eva said:
So you are basically saying that these Dslrs will not hold up well in those certain areas?
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A company here is producing a cinema release to 50 theaters with 50 release prints. They thought the look of the 5D would work based on commercial work done on the small screen. Although the footage looked good in the edit on a 40 inch monitor, when a test print was struck it looked soft on the 40 foot projection. They started over and and shot with Sony EX3. It may also be to do with the Canon lenses. I know the company has an Arri 35mm package and a fast set of Zeiss primes that were probably used. The total budget was around USD $350.000.00.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIaT2JCKB_E

 
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Wait? So is this whole discussion about digital projection or transferring to film? Also why in the world would you want to transfer to film? Just keep it digital. I've seen it projected digital on a digital projector on a huge screen and it held up fine.

Can you tell us all the details about that company's test. There are so many variables that it could be a numerous amount of things like, how they shot with the camera, lenses, picture style settings, color grading, ect.
Also what was the post process.
 
Just got back from Black Swan. When it was over, I turned to my friend sitting next to me and told him that some parts were shot on the 7D. His response…


"Wow. Really? I never would have guessed."
 
Snapper123 said:
The way I heard it once, 1080P on a DSLR is near 16mm film, maybe a little more or less. 16mm seems to be used most often for television shows, The Walking Dead was filmed on 16mm for instance - it probably could have been done with a DSLR, but at the end of the day, either source seems to cost just as much, and with 16mm, you don't have to worry about a single moire issue, and it also has a better latitude supposedly. And then with cinema films, they seem to usually step it up to 35mm, which seems to be what 4k is equal to.

So the big question is as long as you watch out for moire issues, is 1080P aka 16mm film an adequate source to project onto a major cinema screen? I'd personally trust it on a small indie screen - that's what both the Zacuto Shoot-Out and George Lucas's Ranch Reels seemed to be projected upon - but with the size of modern cinema screens, I'm just not sure. 16mm is simply double what 8mm is, and 8mm is for what, classroom and office projectors? Double that, and it seems that indie screens would be a safe bet. But with huge official big-city cinema screens? I'm just not sure. I wish I could see the results with my own eyes.
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You might have seen 1080p on a big screen and just not known it- if you saw Star Wars Episode III, Superbad, Superman Returns etc. on a digital cinema screen you did. Most films shot digitally were shot on cameras that shoot 1080p and most digital projectors in movies were 2k until recently (4k started rolling out around 2009 I think).

Also, 35mm film has traditionally been scanned at 2k for vfx work and animation (2k and 1080p being close in resolution). Part of it was because of cost/time, but also because they found that most viewers could not tell the difference past 2k (until you get to IMAX sized screens). Also, the screen at George Lucas's Ranch is about 40 feet I believe.

Of course, there has been some issue of whether DSLRs actually record true 1080p, but I don't think resolution should be an issue. The Sony Cinealta, Panavision Genesis and most other digital cameras only shoot 1080p. Red shoots at 4k but it supposedly only resolves at 3.2k because of de-bayering. The Alexa I think shoots at 2.8k.
 
A commercial I did on the 7D (basically the same in IQ as T2i) is playing everyday here in digital projection. We didnt do film out since were projecting on a high end 3D capable projector.
Screen is 39 x19 feet.

Posted it on this thread for pics of cinema showing and link to video and some BTS. Also included some underwater scenes with the actors also on the 7D.

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?228190-Panglao-Island-Nature-Resort-Cinema-Commercial&p=2151000&viewfull=1#post2151000

For ingest in the server I exported sequential tiffs and a 48 khz audio track.
 
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I think the one thing I'm forgetting is that modern theater projectors are powerful as heck (every time I watch something on them, I'm amazed at how strong and thick the image looks even though it's projected from so far back and onto such a dramatically huge screen.) Really taking that into account, I'd say that footage from these cameras would look outstanding.

Things to keep in mind though:

- Films are usually much wider than 16:9, possibly even wider than 2K, and to achieve that on DSLR footage, you have to crop the top and bottom, which causes the middle image to be a bit weaker once it's accounted for - or you have to use anamorphic lenses, which stretching the image when you're done would cause a bit of loss, as well.

- I already feel like these cameras, despite having 1080P pixels for the video, just have issues that cause detail to be pretty low quality depending on the situation - that may add to the problems.

- While say a 480P video could be projected onto the screen itself, it might look better if the ratio was kept (say projecting a small video onto the middle of the screen, instead of trying to stretch it out to the full screen) - DSLR footage may benefit from this by a degree, I could deal with black borders around my film; I'd find ways to decorate it.

All in all, there's certain kinds of degrades in quality that I'm worried about, and some that I'm not. Like the Black Swan shot above, I strangely see shots like that all the time in the cinema that strike me as low quality, there was a shot just like that in Tron, but even with that, I honestly don't think it looks bad. You can see her features without anything jumping out to you as "this is bad" and you can see the details, it just looks like it was recorded on something that was real dense or has been stretched, and to me, that look is fine. I just don't want a look that looks faded, or transparent looking. I want the image to look nice and full - but if just a bit of blur happens, like the Black Swan shot, I think I'd be fine with that. Just, I have seen previews and commercials at the cinema that have this weird transparent, faded, super-low quality weird look and I don't want that at all!
 
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I was 2nd unit director/dp on a short film and had to shoot it with a t2i (the A-cam was my 7D). The film was cropped to 2.35:1 and projected at an UltraStar movie theater digitally in 1080p and looked gorgeous. It was part of the 48hr film festival and along with a ton of other awards, it won best cinematography.

You can watch the 720p version here:
 
Snapper123 said:
- Films are usually much wider than 16:9, possibly even wider than 2K, and to achieve that on DSLR footage, you have to crop the top and bottom, which causes the middle image to be a bit weaker once it's accounted for - or you have to use anamorphic lenses, which stretching the image when you're done would cause a bit of loss, as well.

- I already feel like these cameras, despite having 1080P pixels for the video, just have issues that cause detail to be pretty low quality depending on the situation - that may add to the problems.
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-yeah, Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith had to be cropped down to about 817 lines instead of 1080 because of the 2.35:1 aspect ratio.

-aliasing and moire and whatever else from line skipping probably account in part for this. like I mentioned, DSLRs supposedly only really resolve closer to 720 even when advertised as 1080.

I guess I made a mistake when I said resolution shouldn't be an issue. I should have said if it actually resolved 1080 lines it wouldn't be an issue. They're definitely a bit softer. I guess I was just reacting to the bit about 1080 only being suitable for smaller indie venues and not mainstream cinema when it already has been shown there. 4k is definitely an upgrade though- according to Sony (who admittedly have a vested interest in promoting their 4k projectors), people can tell a noticeable difference between 2k and 4k except those in the very last rows.
 
Kholi said:
It'll look soft and out of focus slightly. As seen in Black Swan, but it mixed alright with S16mm.
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Just saw Black Swan last night and that was my feeling too - but it seemed like in a few scenes it was sharper than others (if all the subway scenes were done with Canons). But I also don't know how wide-open they were shooting those scenes with and I wonder if that could be a factor in why at least one or two of them looked a bit soft-out-of-focus.

We were about to switch to Canons from the GH13 for shooting the remainder of my film, but now I'm having second thoughts. I like the live monitoring and that's why I was going to make the switch - but now that the GH2 has live monitoring I'm thinking that going that route may be better as GH footage does seem quite a bit sharper than Canon. To me some of the soft shots didn't seem like camera issues but rather, focus issues - although it's hard to believe that on a production like Black Swan that they wouldn't have gotten this right, and if they shot at f/8 with a Canon 24mm L lens - it should have been sharp and damn near everything would have been in focus at that aperture and focal length...odd.

That said they could have shot all of Black Swan on the 7D - it just wouldn't have mattered, if you're that good at telling stories visually it just doesn't matter - hell they could have done it on Super 8 and I doubt anyone would have cared.
 
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I actually work at a theater (Muvico in Thousand Oaks) where it's all 4k digital projectors but I've talked with projection and they actually hardly ever get films delivered to them in 4k. Most all movies are delivered in digital 2k, the majority of the time it's only Sony Studios that actually does deliver some films in 4k. Perhaps that correlates with the fact that they are the ones who made the 4k projectors?

Honestly though, after seeing a ton of movies in 2k and a few in 4k, there is a difference, but 2k still looks beautiful. I personally have not seen Black Swan yet, but I do think that T2i footage could hold up on the big screen. When you're working with near 2k footage, it's going to look pretty good even when there are shortfalls with using DSLRs. These are all just technicalities though, I'd rather watch a good story even if the resolution isn't quite up to the film industry 'standard'.
 
You guys..... ..... DVX user threw the West Fest in downtown Los Angeles last year and I went. They showed stuff shot on Red, 7d and 5d and I can tell you on the big screen it looked great. You could barely tell the difference and sometimes depending on how well it was shot it was not noticeable enough to tell the difference between cameras. It looked very filmlike but with it's own style. But it still looked great.

A friend of mine was an actor in the winning film and he said they shot on both Red and 7d. No one could tell which shots. If fact no one probably noticed.

My own personal opinion but Black Swan was no where near a good or great example of how well the 7d can shine on the big screen. They shot in less than great settings. They shot a 24mm 1.4 lens at f8 rated at ISO 1600. That immediately would red flag most of us because many do not attempt to go over 1250 ISO. Anything higher introduces too much noise. Also the filmmaker is known for making things look gritty in his films so I'm sure they dirtied up the image in post. I kind of wish people would stop bringing up Black Swan as a topic of how the 7d looks on the big screen. Anyway we've seen film shot on a 35mm Arri or Panavision and the range of looks from good to bad on those cameras can create some really bad cinematography and some award winning work. The same can be said with the 7d. So would you really say all footage from a Panavision looks soft if you saw one movie that someone shot a grainy film stock with a bad combination of use of camera?

It would be nice to rave about the camera if someone shot a feature film (one of the big dogs) at optimal settings. Basically someone who knew how to squeeze the best out of the camera. It seems like they weren't too concerned about making it look great but instead making it look gritty to fit the film. This is great for them but not really great when the DVX user community when people base an opinion that the 7d looks soft or noisy on the big screen. Well if you look at how they shot it you would understand that they we not using the camera in the best way, so I wouldn't rule out the 7d for the big screen based on one film especially a DP who probably dedicates more time into 35mm film cameras than a 7d.

Philip Bloom has done big screen test at the Sky Walker Ranch with great results. He even has a thread in the this forum.

I don't really care though. I saw it on the big screen and I like what it brings. It doesn't look like film but it has it's own look and it can tell a story and that's the most important thing to me. Of course I will always try to get the best images out of the camera, which is the reason why I hang out on these forums to learn from all you guys.

I can tell you though that I work as an Online Editor and we are constantly outputting 1080p 23976 material to D5, HD CamSR and digital files to be projected in theatres. This is stuff for big budget companies that you all have heard of in the industry and this is what they are delivering on for stuff to show in theatres that don't necessarily have to so with a feature such as preshows, pre trailer trailers and ect. I've seen these projected and they look great too. You don't necessarily have to output 4k to have a good output to project in theater so don't think you're going to have to take out a loan or sell an organ to get your film on the big screen and have it look beautiful.
 
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My last film was shot on a Canon ZR800. No joke. It looked good projected, so I have no concerns about my Rebel for our new film. If the ZR looked good, the Rebel will look amazing
 
I think the interest in the use of the 7D in Black Swan is that it was shot on format (s16/dslr) that many of us are familiar with actually having our hands on, many of us starting out haven't had a chance to shoot s35 or RED yet and so there's definitely an interest in seeing how things look on the big screen as used by a good director/dp and with what one would assume would be a strong post production pipeline and transfer process - I think that's really where the interest comes from, and I agree I don't think Black Swan is a good example of 7D footage. I think the other reason there is interest is that the film is on wide-release and so it's something any of us can drop down to the movie house and see on the big-screen easily, no matter where we live.
 
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