Went to See 35mm Movie in a Commercial Theater-Observations Compared with Digital

basspig

basspig

Veteran
Wow.. 35mm film looks just as blurry as I remembered from the last time I watched a film, ten years ago.
It is easy to get spoiled with our XDCams, Blu-ray and 1080P projection.

I went to see Atlas Shrugged on Wednesday at a theater complex in a larger city.
The first things that hit me, compared to my home viewing experience:

1. Picture was dim.. 14 FL is not very bright, especially if you're used to 60+ FL in your home theater.
2. Picture was very soft. When we arrived, they were running some ads that appeared to be from digital sources. They looked better, about like 720P video. But when the movie previews began, the film was running. The picture got grainy and details got soft. Oh, and little scratches and dirt spots appeared here and there..
3. The picture flickers. I forgot just how annoying that flicker is!
4. The sound was honky, irritating and beaming.

While I was there, I got to enjoy inhaling the stench of a dead rat that must have found its way into the ventilation system.. much of the lobbies on the upper level and this theater were filled with the sickening stench.

When we got home, my wife wanted to watch Coraline, on DVD. So we popped it in our upscaling Oppo 83 player and the first thing that hit me was that the text of the opening credits was crisper and sharper than the text on the 35mm distro print we saw in the commercial theater hours earlier. The whole movie was quite satisfyingly sharp, even though we were sitting much closer to our screen and it was taking up a wider field of vision than where we were in the Fairfield Theaters earlier.

And forget about Blu-ray, particularly anything I shot on XDCam and authored myself--those look like 20/20 vision, not even like a proxy for the real thing.

What I'm amazed at is that movie theaters are still stuck on this ancient film technology. We're still subjected to flickering images, fuzzy images lacking in fine detail, and bandwidth-limited audio. Even a modest home theater can best what commercial theaters offer.

The theater we were in had a 20' screen (I counted ceiling tiles and their were ten across on their 24" dimension, above the screen). Even though Atlas Shrugged with made with a RED camera, the print just couldn't do it justice. Not even close. 35mm distro prints are matched by DVD through a good upscaler.

I did not expect film to look so poor after becoming used to digital cinema. But there it is.
 
Well, to be fair, you probably saw a lousy projection. A tiny bit of focusing might have helped make it look better.

But, yes, I can largely agree with you on that. I saw the SCCE evaluation projected off (I believe) a 4K projector, and it was pretty amazing and disheartening to see that every time 35mm film came up I wanted to root for it, but just ... couldn't. It was grainy and noisy, which over the years we always appreciated but ... man, watching an Alexa side by side with 35mm film, I think it would be quite difficult to make the case that the 35mm looked "better". The camera also had a bit of gate weave so the image would "float" around a little bit, which -- hey, we're all used to that, but when you've been watching four or five rock-solid displays and then the next one comes up and it's floating around a bit, you do have to kind of ask "why?" Is it really "better"? Frankly, no, it isn't a more accurate presentation, it's not "better", it's just ... familiar...

There are many things that may contribute to the "magic" of cinema, being 24fps motion, a little organic texture to the film itself (grain, even the occasional dust specks) and even some scratches and some floating gate weave. Is it a superior image representation as opposed to a digital projection? No. Sorry, a 4K digital projector of a 4K digital-shot image really is going to look sharper, crisper, etc. The things true film adds to it are flaws. Noise, scratches, flicker, those are imperfections, not an accurate representation of the image.

But the counterargument is: the 4k digital could be argued to be more "sterile" by comparison, whereas there's an organic-ness to the film projection. And when you start looking at it in those terms you get into segments of simple viewer subjective preference. Some folks are just going to like it more. And others will prefer the distraction-free crispness of the digital projection.

Like I said -- I would love to believe that film is just "better" in all ways. But after seeing the SCCE, I'm gonna sell off all my old film cameras. Well, I'll keep one, I could never give up entirely, and I really sometimes do prefer the film aesthetic -- even if it's not "sharper" or "clearer", even if it has dust and scratches and some gate weave and even if it flickers sometimes... I mean, really -- that's kind of the point, that's almost what you'd want to be shooting film for, nowadays... :thumbsup:
 
Another factor is that release prints are like third generation from the negative. I saw a 35mm answer print for a film at the lab once and it was sharp as a tack and virtually grain free, like good 70mm. I suppose Digital Intermediates remove at least one generation but still, there are too many variables that can screw up film projection. I rarely see a film presentation that's absolutely perfect unless it's in a high end theater like Arclight or an IMAX show. But every digital projection I've seen has been tack sharp from edge to edge and perfect. Well, there was one time the projector stopped working for 15 minutes. That's the downside of digital. It either works perfectly or not at all.
 
basspig said:
What I'm amazed at is that movie theaters are still stuck on this ancient film technology. We're still subjected to flickering images, fuzzy images lacking in fine detail, and bandwidth-limited audio.
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Depends on the theater. All of the theaters around me are all digital. I have to drive 30 minutes to get to one that isn't. Many films are still shot on 35mm and when transferred to digital look great still. After proper post processing. Like Batutta said, watching a film print in an old theater is a little different as it's multiple generations through and probably doesn't have the best projectionist.

So I agree to an extent. Film projection should be all but dead. Film acquisition however may still have a few more years on it. At the very least with some old school filmmakers.
 
Well the projection was okay.. the film grain was in perfect focus, as was all the dirt and scratches. The print was soft. Just comparing titles between what I saw in theater and what we watched on DVD that same evening, it was apparent that the DVD resolved more detail than the print.
Sadly, only the commercials were in digital.
Oh, one other thing... the film projection was overscanning onto the drapes at left about 9" worth.. and a couple inches on the right side as well. The digital projection was off-center to the right side of the screen and 16x9.
Film aesthetic probably appeals for the same reason vinyl records appeal to some. It's 'organic' looking.
Oh, and I *swear* I can still smell that dead, decaying rat that permeated the theater.. that smell just stays stuck in the nose.
 
Ah, truth and beauty points of view. I see it all and I prefer film. Plenty sharp. Richer colors. Much more latitude making those hot stabs look great instead of hitting the digital wall while preserving shadow detail. As for DVDs (surely this means Blu-rays) I've never seen a television anywhere at any price that can make a clean black.

People have been predicting the end of film for a very long time. It's not dead yet.
 
Atlas Shrugged has got the lowest ever Rotten Tomatoes score (or it did last time I looked). I have only heard terrible things about this movie (including the cinematography). Could the mundane nature of that particular film have led you to start picking the overall cinema experience apart? Just a thought...
 
No offense, really, but I've got to say that I've never seen an HD movie projected on a 30' screen that looked as good as film, and I've never seen a blurry film unless there was something amiss with the projector. Outdoor scenes with wide shots are where you really see the difference.
 
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swoopie said:
No offense, really, but I've got to say that I've never seen an HD movie projected on a 30' screen that looked as good as film, and I've never seen a blurry film unless there was something amiss with the projector. Outdoor scenes with wide shots are where you really see the difference.
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I think most here are referring to exhibition, not capture. Film still has the edge in every category that counts. It's film exhibition vs digital where digital is clearly superior except for high quality prints (70mm or IMAX)
 
Atlas Shrugged was shot on a RED in 4K but that film has the worst production value of anything I've seen in at least the last year. What a mess. Lighting on actors was terrible throughout. I saw it digitally projected and it was sharp as a tack, but you could tell they didn't know how to shoot a movie. I can only imagine what one of the 35mm prints of the film would have looked like.

You can't blame anything about 35mm film based on a crappy production like this one. I've seen a ton of movies lately that were shot on film and projected digitally and they looked marvelous. Some I had to check to see if they were shot on film or digitally because I couldn't tell.
 
slondon said:
Ah, truth and beauty points of view. I see it all and I prefer film. Plenty sharp. Richer colors. Much more latitude making those hot stabs look great instead of hitting the digital wall while preserving shadow detail. As for DVDs (surely this means Blu-rays) I've never seen a television anywhere at any price that can make a clean black.

People have been predicting the end of film for a very long time. It's not dead yet.
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In general, up til recently, I agree with the above. However, the current generation of digital imagers is fantastic. For example, my wife's Nikon D7000.. I would never go back to Kodak Ektar 25 after seeing the detail, color fidelity and lattitude that is within those camera RAW files. It's true that you can fix a lot with film, but the price you pay is noise/grain.

As for televisions, yup. I haven't seen a clean black until I switched to DLP projection. But of course that came at a steep $$ price. But I'll never go back to LCD/Plasma TVs. Projection just looks so organic and filmlike.
Speaking of blacks, that was one thing that was not quite as good on the 35mm print.. the blacks were more like dark grey and not much detail down there. But this was shot with the RED camera, so who knows what happened along the way. I enjoy deeper blacks and more shadow detail on the DLP with a good BD movie or original XDCam footage I shot myself.
 
WRT the production values, I thought the film looked nice, at least in terms of the sets. The colors looked better on my computer monitor and when I downloaded the trailer and the "Readen Comes Home" clip and watched it on my DLP projection system. It looked luscious and warm. In the theater it looked soft and colors and lighting didn't seem that good. It lost a lot in the transfer to print.

As for the reviews, I have to tell you that there is a very well organized Liberal smear campaign going on. The movie is a huge threat to Statists and the far Left and they want it killed by any means possible, even if it means outright fabrications about Ayn Rand and the story of Atlas Shrugged.
 
Let's leave the politics off the board. There are a million places to discuss politics, DVXUser isn't one of them. Thanks for understanding.
 
basspig said:
WRT the production values, I thought the film looked nice, at least in terms of the sets. The colors looked better on my computer monitor and when I downloaded the trailer and the "Readen Comes Home" clip and watched it on my DLP projection system. It looked luscious and warm. In the theater it looked soft and colors and lighting didn't seem that good. It lost a lot in the transfer to print.

As for the reviews, I have to tell you that there is a very well organized Liberal smear campaign going on. The movie is a huge threat to Statists and the far Left and they want it killed by any means possible, even if it means outright fabrications about Ayn Rand and the story of Atlas Shrugged.
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Politics aside (and the book aside), what did you think of the actual movie? Everyone who has seen it seems to think it is just.........plain boring.
 
Barry, I had to answer to the bad reviews that someone raised. Unless you're part of the conspiracy of Statists, I would prefer you back off on this point. :Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)

The movie wasn't bad, and in fact it was quite a shocker that it wasn't a complete trainwreck, given the microscopic budget. But several major important character developments were left out, leaving the unitiated with a 'who cares' feeling for those characters. In several places, it seemed as those the director was telling the audience 'you should care about this character now', rather than developing that character and letting him/her win the audience's emotions.
I thought the first run of the John Galt Line was tremendous. It was the climax of Part One. The CG was good enough that on the 35mm distro print on a dim projection system, I couldn't notice any flaws. Back when I saw the trailer, on my computer monitor, I thought some of the lighting between the CG and the bg plates didn't match quite right, but in the theater, you can't tell. And I was sitting pretty close to the screen, about 28' away.
I liked the sets. They were rich and opulant. The colors and lighting looked much better on the downloaded clips I viewed at home. Lighting was too dim on the projected version and the blacks were not really black, but a dark grey, similar to watching LCD TV.
I think the flow and pacing was reasonable, not quite up to John Woo levels, but definately way above 'indie' film levels, and "B" movies that I've seen so many of.
Lighting had it's moments. I think the cinematography was surprisingly good, given the budget. It holds up well to collective of Hollywood films in general.
Acting ranged from on-target to cartoonish (at least in the trailer). It was better in re-shot scenes for the actual movie. I learned that they had shot some scenes in advance to make the trailer and get investment money. Those were awful. The movie acting is much better, but all was done in ONE TAKE, due to time and budget limitations. They did very well if that was the case.
 
I have to agree with the sentiment that this movie may not the best example of the quality of film acquisition and exhibition, especially if you saw it on a screen that was only 20' wide. I have to think that a venue with a cinema screen that small may not be the optimum showcase. My experience to contribute to this debate is having seen the Coen Brothers film "No Country For Old Men" both digitally projected and as a film print. I missed seeing the movie when it first came out, and, as the Oscars approached, I found that it was showing at one theatre in the town I was living in at the time. I went to that theatre and to my great displeasure found that it was going to be digitally projected. I really dug the movie, but the visual experience sucked. Being a big fan of the cinematographer Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC, I knew that the image I was seeing from the digitally projected image were not the images that were intended. The highlights were clipped, and showed no detail, and the bottom end was even worse. There was no shadow detail at all. Nothing but a muddy mess. It was a great disappointment. After the movie scored big at the Oscars, it was moved back into theaters and I went across town and saw it projected as a film print. I was blown away at the beauty of the images, especially the subtle details that showed up in the carefully crafted shadows. This convinced me that from now on, I would make sure that if a movie I wanted to see at a cinema was shot on film, that I would make an effort to see it projected as film, if at all possible. IMHO, there is nothing quit as beautiful as carefully crafted images, created by highly talented cinematographers, shot and exhibited on film and properly projected on a 60' screen in a venue optimized for the cinema experience. The idea that the same movie, shown on a 60", or so, TV could be better just does not compute... for me.
 
IMHO, there is nothing quit as beautiful as carefully crafted images, created by highly talented cinematographers, shot and exhibited on film and properly projected on a 60' screen in a venue optimized for the cinema experience. The idea that the same movie, shown on a 60", or so, TV could be better just does not compute... for me.
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Even a film shot on 35mm will be a bit broken up on a screen as wide as 60 feet. It really takes 70mm to look good on a screen that big. I can see much more detail on a big screen TV myself. Sometimes that's not good though. I remember going to see November on a 30' screen when it came out because I wanted to see how a movie shot on a little DVX100 cam would look spread out on the big screen, and I have to say that, except for the wide shots outdoors, it looked very good and surprisingly like 16mm film. Later on, I watched the same movie on my home television, and it didn't look nearly as film-like on the smaller screen. There was something about it being spread out on a 30' screen that gave it a little grainyness that seemed more film-like to me. It was sharper (too sharp!) on my TV, but not very film-like there. I liked the big screen grainy version better.
 
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Regardless of subject matter I thought this movie was a turd. The actors (except for 2 faces I've seen before as bit parts) all looked like Cinemax soft-porn stars and were nothing to write home about. The lighting on the characters was generally flat and boring, though the sets were well lit. I thought the beginning was frantic and out of control. It felt like a summary of eight weeks of soap operas to me.
 
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