The Death of Cinema pt. 94

yes, that is the exact intention and there are absolutely no pluses to this from an audience, theater, or film archivist standpoint

cinema's dead, lock thread

― mh, Tuesday, May 1, 2012 5:13 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

Like I said before: the ability to view films, long-term, is completely contingent on someone curating and preserving the work, regardless of physical medium. Anything beyond that is quibbling.

― mh, Tuesday, May 1, 2012 5:01 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

i mean what the christ is this. nobody's calling for the death of digital, the upsides of it are obvious to everyone, and even if they werent it wouldn't matter because it's here to stay. even nolan isn't anti-digital, he's advocating for the director's choice. theater owners want to make their own choices about how they exhibit movies, not be bullied into changing at massive expense and at the expense of programming options. and quibbling? it would be convenient for you if that were so, but the specific differences do matter hugely. you're just being wildly disingenuous all over the place

No, I just felt, perhaps wrongly, that "The Death of Cinema" and the general tone of articles posted is all nay-saying and speaking about the problems, where in the long term many of these changes could make some archiving easier for film from here on out.

It just kind of rings to me like the entire threads of Dr. Morbs naysaying on anything made fewer than 30 years ago. I agree that it'd be a horrible tragedy if we lost even one film from that era due to an inability to project an old reel, a distributor only shipping in a new format that film had not been converted to, or if we end up with fragmentation of the market and an inability to just, you know, watch a movie.

The point is that the upsides are _not_ obvious to everyone and that there is a lot of naysaying on digital, not just due to the effect it is having on traditional filmgoing.

I do appreciate the call-out, though. "quibbling" and the like was overreaching, sorry on that

i would think it is in mega-chain/studio's interests to make digital as cumbersome and high-barrier as possible -- as soon as a low-cost, low-maintenance format/system is entrenched, this would effectively put every dork with a fancy camera rental and a kickstarter project on the same playing field as brett ratner.

Good point. Can we just burn the MPAA to the ground?

yeah sorry i didnt wanna be mean it was just frustratin to read. i do feel like the truly anti-digital partisans are a pretty miniscule minority at this point, ten years ago it was more of a thing but it seems that just about everyone has accepted it, some with more misgivings than others - everyone knows now that you can make some amazing looking movies on digital, and everyone knows that top shelf digital projection looks pretty darn good. these weren't taken as a given a decade ago.

i mean part of the thing with the academy's digital dilemma 2 study is that basically every filmmaker they surveyed was totally ignorant about or unconcerned with the archival issues related to digital, and when it comes to documentarians and indie filmmakers, those are the guys who arguably benefit the most from the digital revolution and also stand to get hit the hardest re: these archival issues

from the 55 new answers I figured celluloid musta been banned today.

Two years from now (or less) the studios aren't even gonna be sending out film prints.

and then a virus eats your backups and your files are gone

I don't see what the point of going around like this is

― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 8:44 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't want to continue this either, but: not a degradation issue. (also not something that has ever happened to a bank or other financial institute)

sorry but thats insanely reductive (and to what purpose??)

Reductive, but true. BTW, the great advantage of digital over analog is the ridiculous ease of making as many copies as you like. If arguments are being made that analog is durable, then the counter argument is that digital is reproducable. You can put all your eggs in one master analog copy in cans in a vault, or you can distribute your eggs in a hundred, or a thousand, or a million, or more digital copies for amazingly little cost in money or effort.

But, as I said so reductively, anything can be lost if no one pays any attention to saving it. Digital or analog makes no difference to that part of the equation. And it is desire and attention that make up the lion's share of any archival effort. It actually helps if it is in a cheap and easy to reproduce medium, tbqf, so long as the desire to save it exists.

Fair enough. But there is also a question of what is passed around and saved in the multiple copies- is it the YouTube version, the DVD version, the Blu-Ray version, the constituent elements that were mixed down to make all of the above? You may say this is gilding the lily, but there it is

It is kind of amazing that studios are both pushing digital projection at all costs, really kind of bullying theaters into it (offering help upgrading only if they trash their old 35mm systems etc) while at the same time being so terrified of piracy, I mean do they really not see no potential crossover there

With the way some piracy has been done, specifically by theater insiders, I think there's not much of a difference. I've never seen a pirated direct dump from a production house hard drive, and I think that there's probably some sort of DRM on the system. If anything, that would be the fear for archiving -- I can't think of any digital video format that's no longer decodeable, especially given the fact you can go to a reference implementation in the worst case and just compile up a new version for your computer, but once the original hardware goes by the wayside, it may be a total bitch to "unlock" the movies on those drives.

Completely hypothetical since I have no idea what they're doing in that aspect, but that would be my fear.

As for what's in the multiple copies -- at the very least, the version that was sent to be screened at movie theaters. Production houses, especially the likes of Pixar where the entire process is computer assets, would be wise to keep all their materials, but in the end, it's the movie that counts.

For a long time studios saw no profit in archiving, because the only venue for watching movies was the movie theater and the theaters only wanted to show new material. Television was at first viewed only as a dumping ground for old stuff, but that eventually changed. Ever since cable and the VCR arrived, the profit in archiving has been obvious. I'm pretty sure this will continue.

This gives a pretty good summary of how (at a cinema level at least) digital film files are stored and delivered:

Digital Cinema Package

If that's tl;dr then it's worth noting that the files are encrypted at all stages, and decrypted via a key transmission method to the cinema, so piracy at this point in the chain looks unlikely (and would doubtless be traceable to the cinema that the files originated from). Even with compression the bit-rate for DCP files is still about 8 times that of blu-ray too, so the files are going to be in the order of hundreds of GBs as well.

"The profit in archiving" applies most to the "top of the mountain" titles, though.

Thanks, Bill! I was kind of wondering how they did it.

I was actually brainstorming this last night and came up with a pretty godawful DRM scheme they could use. I hope such a thing never comes to pass, because... you could get pretty crazy.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aMB-u3dedB8/T6ErwzESf6I/AAAAAAABWe4/pB_nbxqE_JQ/s1600/deleted1.jpg

I posted that way the hell upthread but it's behind the "more messages" now.

yeah that's what kicked off this revive

Yeah, I don't get that at all because how the fuck are the hard drives they send out even writeable?

Ever since cable and the VCR arrived, the profit in archiving has been obvious. I'm pretty sure this will continue.

― Aimless, Wednesday, May 2, 2012 12:33 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

its probably less obvious in the age of internet piracy?

lol, we don't need profit now, we have people running torrent-seeding systems for scene "cred" or for ratio

From a CNET article it looks like that Avengers screening booboo was because it had been downloaded, rather than sent as a disk, so it's feasible that someone could delete it from the DCP server by accident I guess.

On a thread related note, this blog entry about the benefits of digital distribution for small-time filmmakers is quite an interesting read. Some good snaps of a typical DCP set up too:

http://wearecapture.com/blog/?p=238

Two years from now (or less) the studios aren't even gonna be sending out film prints.

Eerie.

http://news.doddleme.com/news-room/and-so-it-begins-20th-century-fox-to-end-film-distribution/

Getting ready to make up crazy facts about film projection for the grandkids.

So, everyone saw Hugo in digital projection, right?

caught a glimpse of what looked like a windows 98 desktop for a split second after I saw the raid: redemption yesterday, lol

in a chain theater

David Bordwell on James Cameron's presumptive agenda:

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/04/22/its-good-to-be-the-king-of-the-world/

Off topic, but this quote:

Second, if these guys are so passionately committed to quality, why don’t they make better movies?

caught a glimpse of what looked like a windows 98 desktop for a split second after I saw the raid: redemption yesterday, lol

― (⊙_⊙?) (Alan N), Monday, May 7, 2012 11:22 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

ive seen that a few times. also when i saw A Separation, the first 5 minutes or so played without subtitles because the projectionist forgot to turn them on - like when you're watching a DVD.

yeah for some reason i thought that bordwell article had been posted. its good, but i still cant muster any sympathy for the conscience-free big chain exhibitors who have been bilking theatergoers ever since the multiplex era began. i mean at fucking cinemacon this year the big chains were batting around ideas about allowing texting during movies to lure in teenage customers. there is no low they won't stoop to in the name of profits. of course, independent theaters are getting shafted by cameron's 'all stick' approach too...

Chris Nolan, defender of celluloid:

http://www.laweekly.com/2012-04-12/film-tv/35-mm-film-digital-Hollywood/

third time's the charm

haha, sorry, didn't see it until I showed the hidden posts. mea culpa

THE MOVIE VANISHES

http://youtu.be/EL_g0tyaIeE

http://www.quora.com/Pixar-Animation-Studios/Did-Pixar-accidentally-delete-Toy-Story-2-during-production/answer/Oren-Jacob

They almost lost 2 months worth of work, but then they redid everything anyway so it wouldn't have mattered. Still scary.

i should also point out that it incredible that

rm -rf *

it's

it's not a problem, it's a valid operation - you can't remove the ability to delete stuff, or change how it works.

decent permissions will stop anyone being able to delete anything but their own files (yeah, ok, that can be catastrophic enough).

tbf Orson Welles lost two whole reels of footage when he ran out of desk space and set them on top of the trash can and the janitor threw them out

I think he actually misplaced them in a pizza box

I think he actually ate them

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rm_(Unix)

A command so dangerous shouldn't be so easy to use. This page has a bunch of different solutions, which most linux distributions don't use.

most of those (3) solutions won't work with the above because of the fact that it explicitly used -f to force removal. and the Protection of the filesystem root doesn't apply because it's not necessarily /

(ubuntu enforces -i by default, i think. but that's dangerous as it just leads to people typing -f by rote, to bypass all the y y y y y y y y that needs doing if you're deleting more than one file)

backups.

tbf Windows has the same issue, it's just that no one uses the command line

I have, in the past, had the charming habit of holding down shift while deleting in Windows to do a real delete all the time, though.

Backups!

oh, a digital troubleshooting thread! let's kill cinema now.

decent source control is probably the first step though. more difficult with large binary files (textures) but...

=D

so there's a new doc opening in a few cities and playing on VOD where Keanu interviews filmmakers about the digital changeover! Plenty for Lucas- and Cameron-haters to chew on.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/side-by-side/6454