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USC has a series of screenings and seminars for people in the motion picture industry which they are holding here. Last night I attended my first, Pixar's THe Incredibles. My feelings on the movie itself are in the Movies forum, this thread is to discuss the projector system.
This was shown at a special theater USC has set up which is not open to the public, using one of the new Christie CP2000 digital cinema projectors. Screen was about 50' wide scope format, and I was fairly close, no more than 25' away and a bit off center. You can read about the sound system at the link too. Wile the sound was really clean, it was not nearly at reference level, so it did not make much of an impression on me.
The video is another matter. The native resolution of the PJ is 2048 x 1080, but the media was used directly as rendered from Pixar, at 1920x803 (the scope aspect subset of 1920x1080) and was mapped 1:1 to the projector, so NO scaling was applied.
This was the cleanest I have ever seen a movie look. Detail was, well, incredible. I have seen equal detail, but it has been in really well run high end theaters running top of the line 35mm or 70mm prints. There was absolutely no evidence of pixel structure, and note I was sitting VERY close at 1/2 screen width. The image was beautifully smooth, and color and contrast were very good as well. This projector is rated at something like 1700:1 on
ff, and 500:1 ANSI. This later number is the really impressive one, as most of us with home FP systems are looking at something less than half that, unless you have a Sharp 12000 or Marantz S3 or one of the really top performing DLPs in that respect.
The catch - fast pans. Objects in motion (not all, just faster moving objects or scenes) exhibited the juddering motion many of you have probably seen when light credits scroll up a dark background at the end of a film on digital displays. I am not sure what frame rate the projector was operating at, but it may be that it was not a multiple of 24 (say 48 or 72) but rather at 60 which might have caused this. It was very apparent on anything with vertical or horizontal lines (i.e. the scene where the supersuits are being demonstrated) but was also visible on things like pans past trees as loss of visibility of the detail without looking like traditional motion blur.
Black level was not absolute, obviously at 1700:1, but it was quite good, easily as good as any film system I have seen. Detail in the dark scenes was very very nice. I saw no evidence of dithering in dark areas that I have frequently seen in other DLP presentations.
This was a very big stepup from the older 1280x1024 digital cinema projectors we have been seeing up to now. I think when these are available to people in more locations, we may see some quality come back into the presentation at the local cineplexes. It may be a bit (a year or 3) before this happens, but with the industry pushing for it (and they are) it will come eventually.
There was a short Q&A with a senior manager of editorial and post production from Pixar that was also interesting. He discussed some of the differences in their production process that have occurred over the last few films (they use a projector like this one in their screening room for dailies), and answered some questions about the film making, the director, remastering it for other media (TV, DVD) and his thoughts on the direction of the digital cinema intiative.
They are having a seminar soon where they are going to alternate the projection system between this digital unit and a high quality 35mm rig, showing each reel of the film twice in succession so a true analysis of the differences in the presnetaion can be made. Unfortunately, I have to miss that because of a business trip to the land of the rising sun. Damn.
BB
This was shown at a special theater USC has set up which is not open to the public, using one of the new Christie CP2000 digital cinema projectors. Screen was about 50' wide scope format, and I was fairly close, no more than 25' away and a bit off center. You can read about the sound system at the link too. Wile the sound was really clean, it was not nearly at reference level, so it did not make much of an impression on me.
The video is another matter. The native resolution of the PJ is 2048 x 1080, but the media was used directly as rendered from Pixar, at 1920x803 (the scope aspect subset of 1920x1080) and was mapped 1:1 to the projector, so NO scaling was applied.
This was the cleanest I have ever seen a movie look. Detail was, well, incredible. I have seen equal detail, but it has been in really well run high end theaters running top of the line 35mm or 70mm prints. There was absolutely no evidence of pixel structure, and note I was sitting VERY close at 1/2 screen width. The image was beautifully smooth, and color and contrast were very good as well. This projector is rated at something like 1700:1 on
ff, and 500:1 ANSI. This later number is the really impressive one, as most of us with home FP systems are looking at something less than half that, unless you have a Sharp 12000 or Marantz S3 or one of the really top performing DLPs in that respect.The catch - fast pans. Objects in motion (not all, just faster moving objects or scenes) exhibited the juddering motion many of you have probably seen when light credits scroll up a dark background at the end of a film on digital displays. I am not sure what frame rate the projector was operating at, but it may be that it was not a multiple of 24 (say 48 or 72) but rather at 60 which might have caused this. It was very apparent on anything with vertical or horizontal lines (i.e. the scene where the supersuits are being demonstrated) but was also visible on things like pans past trees as loss of visibility of the detail without looking like traditional motion blur.
Black level was not absolute, obviously at 1700:1, but it was quite good, easily as good as any film system I have seen. Detail in the dark scenes was very very nice. I saw no evidence of dithering in dark areas that I have frequently seen in other DLP presentations.
This was a very big stepup from the older 1280x1024 digital cinema projectors we have been seeing up to now. I think when these are available to people in more locations, we may see some quality come back into the presentation at the local cineplexes. It may be a bit (a year or 3) before this happens, but with the industry pushing for it (and they are) it will come eventually.
There was a short Q&A with a senior manager of editorial and post production from Pixar that was also interesting. He discussed some of the differences in their production process that have occurred over the last few films (they use a projector like this one in their screening room for dailies), and answered some questions about the film making, the director, remastering it for other media (TV, DVD) and his thoughts on the direction of the digital cinema intiative.
They are having a seminar soon where they are going to alternate the projection system between this digital unit and a high quality 35mm rig, showing each reel of the film twice in succession so a true analysis of the differences in the presnetaion can be made. Unfortunately, I have to miss that because of a business trip to the land of the rising sun. Damn.
BB
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