Brett Sinclair

Selenium...the selenium used to defeat the blob monster in Evolution...and in my Head and Shoulders ..Cool

There's no need to kneel, I'm a very democratic sort of lord.

ChristineCB

Ah yes, THAT selenium. A wonderful little film, out of the blue. Galaxy Quest, Evolution, Big Trouble, Disorganized Crime, Ruthless People.

julian_craster

Deleted

julian_craster

Playing In Asia: Digital Cinema
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...tm?chan=search

Singapore is in the vanguard of the film industry's shift from celluloid to pixels
The projection booth at Singapore's Suntec City multiplex sounds like those at theaters worldwide. After the projectionist feeds the film through the projector, the room fills with the clickety-clack of the spinning reels. But beside each of the five traditional projectors sits a newfangled model that takes no effort to load and makes no noise other than the hum of a cooling fan. These are digital projectors for showing movies delivered on removable hard drives. "My guy just needs to push a few buttons" to start a digital film, says Oh Chee Eng, a top executive at Eng Wah Organization Ltd., the theater's owner. "It's so much easier."
While music, television, and even radio have all moved to digital formats, the movie industry still clings to technology dating from the days of Thomas Edison. That's starting to change, though, since Hollywood last year finally settled on a common format for digital movies. Digital-cinema advocates say the technology will lower costs, add piracy protection, and provide new sources of revenue to theater owners by helping them show live events such as concerts and soccer matches. "It's really starting to take off," says Al Barton, vice-president for digital-cinema technologies at Sony Pictures Entertainment (SNE ) in Hollywood.
Singapore is leading the way. The ultimate goal is to make the island nation a center for entertainment, with post-production studios helping to create content and Hollywood distributing digital movies from Singapore to the rest of Asia. The government has ponied up about 15% of Eng Wah's up-front costs of installing digital equipment, which can easily reach $100,000 for the projector and computer, or about five times the price of a conventional projector. Today 15% of the city's 158 screens are digital, and the rest could be converted by yearend, says Mike Connors, a former Asia chief for the Motion Picture Association of America and now a consultant to Singapore. "It's very clear the government wants this to happen," he adds.

Still, it's tough for theater owners to make a business case for buying digital projectors. Cathay Organization Holdings Ltd. opened the first digital cinema in Singapore in 2003, but today it has only three digital projectors. One reason: Cathay can't raise prices to cover the $400,000 it has invested in the equipment. At a time when movie attendance in Singapore is falling -- down 7% last year -- the market can't handle even a small increase in ticket prices from the current $6 or so, says Suhaimi Rafdi, Cathay's president for business operations. "The sums don't add up," he says.
But advocates are hanging in. As things stand, many digital cinema projectors sit idle for months at a time because there aren't enough digital movies. Last year just a dozen of the 150 titles shown in Singapore were digital. Cinema owners are expecting about twice as many digital films this year, now that Hollywood has adopted a standard format. Currently, digital versions of Mission: Impossible III, Poseidon, and The Wild are showing.
Movie houses can also use the technology for more than films. With the projector hooked up to the Net or a satellite link, a whole new world of content becomes available. Cathay showed the finals of the local version of American Idol in its digital cinema in 2004 and will present World Cup soccer matches this summer. Eng Wah plans to add a further eight digital projectors and is looking to computer games as a way to make them pay off. Last year, Eng Wah hosted a competition with videogame maker Electronic Arts Inc. (ERTS ) in which fans watched hotshot gamers compete on the silver screen. Another possibility: dozens of gamers facing off in a huge electronic brawl. "I [could] convert my cinema into a game hall," says Oh, the executive from Eng Wah.

christoph404

As a professional stills photographer I would say there is quite a basic issue regarding film versus digital that seems to escape most discussion, and for me and many others in my field it is one of aesthetic. Amidst the endless debate about pixels versus grain and resolution and sharpness etc there seems to be little thought given to making a basic visual comparison or assesment to what we are actually watching on screen. Using a medium(digital capture) that is incredibly sharp, without grain and providing incredible detail and depth of focus is not ,I would say neccessarily a good thing if you are making a movie. Many movies that are actually shot using digital capture end up being manipulated in post production to make them look less digitised and more filmic, so we have a situation where uneven filmic grain is added and a 24 frame per sec flicker and other subtle forms of degradation are introduced to the digital file to try and mimic the quality of 35mm film! So why not use film? I would say possibly for reasons of cost in lower budget movies,certainly not because digital is better or clearer or whatever. Recently I was asked in my professional capacity to take some wedding photographs for a film costume designer who was getting married to a cinematographer of Polish origin working in Hollywood on some very prestigious feature films. Neadless to say we had a good chat about movies and photography and interestingly enough the only brief I received from the groom was that I shoot his wedding on film rather than digital. He was pleased to hear that I would be shooting film anyway whether he asked me or not.He told me later that as a cinematographer he loathes "digital capture" I asked him why, he said "its too sharp", "its too clean", "too clear", "its too clinical" "there is too much work to do afterwards to make it look good" and interestingly "there is too much "depth of focus" when what you want is short depth " Those seemed like very informed comments to me from someone who is actually photographing feature films.
I use both film and digital for my stills photography work and I personnaly never get involved in the film versus digital debate anymore with other photographers because as far as I am concerned they are very different mediums from each other with very different effects, they both have their uses, their advantages and disadvantages. If you were talking in terms of sharpness and resolution then I would say that without a doubt there is no digital film camera in existence that matches or will ever match the quality of a David Lean film such as Lawrence shot on full size 70mm. Someone might invent a film camera with the equivilant resolution (40+ million pixels?) but what about the colour saturation and unique granularity of the film format? And thats the thing about colour film, it is so infinitley different and unique from stock to stock and it is part of the art of the cinematographer to create the visual look using specific film stock and developing and so on. If you look at say a Bond film from the 60's such as Thunderball there is an amazing saturation and intensity of colour going on there that is very different from say the the more modern Bond films, all that digital is going to do is try and mimic filmic style and quality but I somehow feel it will never be a case of being "better" cheaper maybe, but big budget hollywood films I think will continue to shoot on film for a while yet because in the grand scheme of things the cost of film stock and developing has become a smaller percentage of the total cost in comparison to the salaries of actors and other location and filming costs which are not affected by the medium you are shooting on. Having a crew of say 45 people on location for a week is going to cost you regardless! The film stock costs would seem negligible in comparrison. As for digital projection, again that is something separate, aren't we all watching digital versions of our favourite films in DVD format anyway, the point is there they still retain their filmic qualities because they were shot on film in the first place, and aren't there a plethora of home projectors using digital technology to project our DVDs onto the wall of our sitting room? I have seen demos of some of these machines, they are not hugely expensive and look good to me. I think the idea of digital projection is good, providing it can match the feel and quality of a regular optical projector, I would say the way ahead would be to use both technologies side by side, both film and digital, lets continue shooting on film and project digitally if its going to look as good as optical projection (no scratches or tram lines at least) If it means more bums on seats and more film production then great, but not at the expense of quality, it presently costs upwards of £15 per person to attend the cinema in central London, I for one will simply stop going if the quality is not maintained, better to buy the DVD and my own home projector and watch at home

Steve Crook

I'm surprised to hear you mention things like depth of focus. Isn't that more to do with the lenses rather than the recording medium?

Digital film does have some other advantages which you've aluded to in the number of people involved. Shooting a scene on film is a complex process with a lot of people and a lot of equipment. At a Q&A with Jack Cardiff, a very clever young lady asked him what he thought about working with digital after working with film for so long. The thing that he focussed on was that it was easier for the actors. If they've been getting into the mood for a soft and gentle romantic or emotional scene and then there are lots of people shouting things like "Lights, camera, action" around them and the sound of all the heavy equipment, that can break the mood. But when he was working on a film shot on digital, there was no extraneous noise, no fuss, the cameraman just started shooting and wasn't at all intrusive.

Steve

christoph404

Well yes, but not entirely as your ability to easily control depth of focus is affected by the recording medium you are using.(film format size for example or digital)When shooting on say 35mm film of medium speed (speed meaning light sensitivity) say 200 ASA,normally the film camera has a constant shutter speed related to 24fps (usually 1/45sec shutter speed)so the camera man is making the correct exposure by adjusting the iris or diagphram of the lens.However the diagphram of the lens controls what your depth of focus will be as well as the exposure, so if the camera is focussed on someones eyes in a medium close up and the iris or aperture is at say f1.2 (which would be quite a large opening or wide aperture to allow more light in) then the focus may extend to four inches in front of the actors nose and to to four inches behind. Hence the background slightly out of focus.A skilled camera man never leaves to chance how much of a scene he wants in focus and how much he doesn't. If shooting an interior and you want deep focus you need more light because in order to achieve a deep focus effect you have to have a small iris which lets in less light (aperture) say F11 or F16 So the actual depth of focus is achieved through adjusting the iris and the light accordingly. Usually it is an aesthetically pleasing effect to have background slighty out to some degree especially when filming a close up or medium (unless your John Frankenhiemer directing "The Train" where everything is pin sharp from forground to infinity!!) and this effect is relativeley easy to achieve because the realtively slow sensitivity to light of medium film usually means working at wide apertures anyway hence the very sharp forground yet soft background effect. Digital on the other hand is much more sensitive to light and the camera man will often find himslef using small apertures when he doesn't want to and having a very continous depth of focus when he perhaps wants to focus on foreground So you are then in a position where you want to reduce the light to achieve a shallow depth of focus and thats not easy if you are filming outside on a sunny day!! You then have to start using ND filters to cut the light down, a bit like putting sunglasses over the lens.If you are using a large film format like 70mm then you have the opposite problem because the physics of a movie lens to cover this format means that the lenses are very "Slow" with perhaps a widest iris setting of F4.4 or even F5.6 so you need lots and lots of light to get a workable iris setting. Digitals sensitivity to light is fantastic for doing low light photography or filming at night using available light, normally you would use very fast film which is very grainy but digital is not, so for films like "Collateral" which was mainly shot on digital at night on the streets of La, its perfect. That movie was shot in both film for some scenes and digital for the street stuff using very little extra lighting.So yes lenses do control focus and depth but the ability to control it easily is greatly influenced by the medium you are using.

Steve Crook

But not every cameraman sticks to the 24 fps. To cite the great Jack Cardiff again, he would vary the camera speed where appropriate so that in films like The Red Shoes the dancers would appear to linger longer at the top of a leap, or spin faster when they were being transformed into a dancing newspaper. Having come from the period of the hand-cranked camera he knew the value of over, or under cranking. He would also play with the aperture and other things to get special effects "in the camera".

But they are just some of the reasons why he was (& remains) so special

Steve

christoph404

Yes I agree, Jack Cardiff is a genius, I beleive he is about 92 years old now!! The last of an era ,and in my opinion one of the greatest cinematographers ever. I guess you have read his autobiography "The Magic Hour" Written in a very easy going and entertaining style with some fascinating insights into his career in movies

Steve Crook

Yes, I've read that, and Conversations with Jack Cardiff by Justin Bowyer (B.T. Batsford, 21st September 2003. ISBN 0-713-48855-7). I've also had the pleasure of meeting him quite a few times. A lovely man.

Steve

christoph404

wow! thats quite a privilage to have met him, I think his personnality really comes across in "The Magic Hour" and he indeed seems like a great chap. Would like to read more so I will look for Justin Bowyer's interview. Cheers

Steve Crook

Some of the anecdotes in the Inteviews book had already been related in his autobiography. In fact that's one problem he has, or that we have in his audience. He tends to answer most questions at Q&A sessions with a standard anecdote, and although they're all great, I've heard them all. So the challenge is, to ask him a question that can't be answered by a standard anecdote - but that he can still answer. That's why it was great when Barbara asked him about working with digital when we saw him in Canterbury a few years ago. He chatted away for some time about all the new stuff he'd been doing, its advantages and disadvantages.

Steve