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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

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Peter Moretti said:
I'm with you on this. I just saw it at the Arclight in Hollywood. At times it looked like there was an extremely fine scrim in front of the screen, things just looked slightly hazy and soft. I don't know if this was caused by diffusion in front of the lens, or some process in post.

I also thought the colors looked odd and kind of electronic. And I didn't see the rationale for it.

People may not have liked the look of "Public Enemies," I certainly did like the look. I understood it; to make a period film look contemporary, Spinotti and Mann intentionally went for a modern almost video look. I really had no idea idea what look Fincher was going for except kind of under exposed and maybe kind of maroon/crimson (in homage to Harvard?).

I was going to say I never thought 4K could look that soft, but I read earlier that all the .R3D's were rendered out at 2K (for understandable reasons).

I do want to thank Michael and others involved with the film for posting here and congratulate them on their work. Making any movie is like going to war. But they made a blockbuster with cutting edge technology, so hats off to them.

That said, I'm not going to lie about my opinion of what I saw, FWIW.


P.S. I do want to say that the compositing of the Winklevi was simply amazing.
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Peter, It's always a bit difficult when talking about softness, colors being shifted, hazy, etc. to know whether it was a result of any of the many things that could go wrong in printing and projection. The print I saw was exceptionally nice, no haze, quite sharp, and definitely no maroon cast. It was dark alright, but pleasingly rich to my eye. I think maybe you saw a bad print poorly projected as Deenan suggested.
 
Timothy,

I'm going to try to see it at the theater Michael suggested. The closest I can describe it is it almost looked like the negative was slightly flashed.

I don't think I'm seeing things, as I asked the friend sitting next to me if she noticed it and she said "Yeah, I didn't know what that was, maybe like they put smoke in the room?"
 
is underexposure in most scenes, in luck of color in many scenes, is luck of sharpness in all scenes, in unequal in colorgrading between shots in the same scene ....
I was VERY suprised whan i have looked at that as it looks like "old" Red one more then the new one. I have 2 x misterium X and i think is great if u know what to do so i do not know why they shoot that as they had.
Anyway the movie is great !
 
Welcome to the world of film prints. I saw it digital in Las Vegas and it looked incredible. We are very proud of this movie and consider it a flagship RED project.

Jim
 
martin.kryjom said:
is underexposure in most scenes, in luck of color in many scenes, is luck of sharpness in all scenes, in unequal in colorgrading between shots in the same scene ....
I was VERY suprised whan i have looked at that as it looks like "old" Red one more then the new one. I have 2 x misterium X and i think is great if u know what to do so i do not know why they shoot that as they had.
Anyway the movie is great !
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Martin & Peter,

It is hard to be too emphatic - you can't necessarily trust what you are seeing at your local theatre. Even the difference between an answer print and a release print at the lab is huge. And remember that it could be Snuffy, the bong addled college dropout up in the booth at the cineplex.

Martin, there is a big difference between dark and underexposed. I saw lots of "dark," but those were scenes that were intentionally dark, not underexposed. TSN is a great looking movie - by my lights the best looking Red shot movie yet, rich, beautifully lit, quite subtle, very sharp, shallow depth of field - all good.

Tim Eaton
 
TOM
Im a colorist for a long time , so i understand all aspects of that topic . I was even before red and digital era has come.
So, lets say is theater so how it has happend that few people from different parts of the world has the same opinion?
How come that other films looks a lit bit sharper in the same theather?

If i say underexposure i know what i mean, esspecially in RED world. Yes there is no noise anymore if u underexposure, but also if u are far under u loosing sharpnes and saturation of the scene ( same in 35 mm more or less).


I own 2 MX cameras and 2 different system for cc . I work every day and analize Red fotage and i know prons and cons.
Im VERY happy with MX upgrade, is totally different story and im already in stage 2 program so im still RED guy, but i need to say what i see and what i think has to be done in a future.
If KODAK in 70 had had say that all is perfect with film those days, we had not had now such a great negatives as we have :)

regards
MARTIN
 
Martin, I and many of my (in the biz) friends have seen SN, and there is nothing that anyone can say that will alter our very favorable opinions of the quality of the movie's imagery. But forget that, please consider that Jim Jannard has just stated : "I saw it digital .... and it looked incredible." Who should know better than JJ when it comes to the quality of this camera. Unless, of course, you think he's just blowing smoke up our asses. He is not.

Movie theaters won't add anything to the image quality, if anything, they will only detract, it is how much they detract that is important. If you say inferior, and others say perfect, you might want to think about this some more. No projector that I know of will make an inferior image look "incredible".
 
Bill Anderson said:
Martin, I and many of my (in the biz) friends have seen SN, and there is nothing that anyone can say that will alter our very favorable opinions of the quality of the movie's imagery. But forget that, please consider that Jim Jannard has just stated : "I saw it digital .... and it looked incredible." Who should know better than JJ when it comes to the quality of this camera. Unless, of course, you think he's just blowing smoke up our asses. He is not.

Movie theaters won't add anything to the image quality, if anything, they will only detract, it is how much they detract that is important. If you say inferior, and others say perfect, you might want to think about this some more. No projector that I know of will make an inferior image look "incredible".
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We've also seen the footage on our projector (where it was graded) so we have a reference point as to what it should look like.
 
Bill Anderson said:
Martin, I and many of my (in the biz) friends have seen SN, and there is nothing that anyone can say that will alter our very favorable opinions of the quality of the movie's imagery. But forget that, please consider that Jim Jannard has just stated : "I saw it digital .... and it looked incredible." Who should know better than JJ when it comes to the quality of this camera. Unless, of course, you think he's just blowing smoke up our asses. He is not.
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Everyone has their own taste. What is "incredible" to one person is sometimes not particularly attractive to another. The promise of technology such as Red's cameras and digital projection, is to faithfully maintain and reproduce what the filmmaker's visual intentions were. Whether one likes the result has nothing to do with the technology, and everything to do with one's personal taste.
 
M Most said:
Everyone has their own taste. What is "incredible" to one person is sometimes not particularly attractive to another. The promise of technology such as Red's cameras and digital projection, is to faithfully maintain and reproduce what the filmmaker's visual intentions were. Whether one likes the result has nothing to do with the technology, and everything to do with one's personal taste.
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Sure - taster's choice - one person's dark is another person's rich, etc. One person's desaturated is another person's natural chroma. Those are matters of taste. But I think what we are trying to encourage Martin to consider is that what he may be perceiving as poor decisions by the filmmakers or functional problems with the RED, may well be artifacts of the delivery process, SFX, DI, IN, answer print, projection system, etc., etc., in the print that he saw. It's one thing to say the film was too dark, quite another to say it was "underexposed." It is one thing to say that the whole film was soft, and quite another to say you saw a buzz here or there. It's impossible for the film to "lack sharpness in all scenes" when that was clearly not the case for many of us who saw it projected elsewhere.

I'm also not trying to say, Martin, that you lack expertise, only trying to give you a heads up that many others saw the same film with a very different reaction, and not just in areas of taste, but also in areas of sharpness, and exposure, which are not wholly subjective. One other clue to this is what Bill alludes to, which is that projection systems are not going to fix underexposure and soft focus. It works the other way around, which is to say that those who saw underexposure and soft focus when others did not were most likely seeing projection or print problems.

Based on what Red has shown us with their 4K system at various events, I've come to trust their visual sensibilities. Their reels have generally been extremely well projected, and beautifully graded. So when Jim and Deenan say they saw TSN digitally projected in 4K, and it was beautifully lit, well graded (whatever your taste), sharp, and those observations are consistent with what I saw projected at a theater, I just take with a grain of salt other's impressions that the movie was soft, lacked color, or was underexposed.
 
MMOST: I had taken "taste" into consideration when I made my remarks. I'm not so sure Martin did, or that he'd qualify his remarks as a matter of taste when he posted "if I say underexposure I know what I mean", and "lack of color", "lack of sharpness", "unequal color grading".

And I don't doubt for a moment that Martin saw those things. What I doubt is his belief in where the sources of these things originated.
 
We projected our (filmed in RED) movie in the Venezia Film Festival. The two projections were terrible (posterization in the image, really contrasty, oversaturated...) all projection problems... and it was digital projection! Even in the review in the Variety digital magazine they noted this as being "DoP's failures". As the DoP of that project, three weeks later I saw the exact DCP file projected in the San Sebastian Festival... it looked perfect.

I learned one thing: it doesn't matter how much money or effort do you spend in your final color grading, a bad projection can really f$&k all you job.

I can't believe Fincher or Cronenweth let the "technical" qualities of their movie gone "soft" or "wrong". It's, clearly, a projection issue.
 
Hey guys,

Given the current discussion, would anyone recommend a venue in the LA area that did a great job with a digital projection? I'd like to see it again in the best possible quality.

Thanks,
Bill
 
Same experience here. Students of mine made a very beautiful short, it won a price already in another festival. It was carefully graded, but had very delicate shades of white close to the limit, but not clipping at all.
This film and a few others, screened digitally in another festival, looked awful. Contrasty and clipped, all detail gone. The only film projected well there was shot on R1 by a friend of mine, but transferred to 35mm…
Theatre owners and projectionists still need to learn a lot about this new world!
 
Due to the success of the digital roll-out even if you were told a certain cinema to go to it might not be the same screen. Unless it is a small theatre that only have three or four screens. You might want to add screen number as well as theatre ;)

I have seen it in four times with three projectors, one of them was bad because of lens shake but focus was good, the rest were perfect. Luckily the other 35mm the stability was good so there was a nice overall brightness.

That it is also something that should be considered. Digital bulbs last for 6-700 hours and 35mm vary but are safe for over a thousand. Towards the last fifth of their service life they can seriously dull and the amps need turning up they also flutter which is the stability. There is also an annoying amount of cinemas that don't have silver screens installed for all their digital's yet which affects the brightness.

Like Jim notes, it truly is a flagship film for the MX sensor. Superb work all round. Fincher and the team that worked on it really nailed it.
 
Ja!, Here in Puerto Rico they run the lamps past 60,000 hours....
 
Reminds me, as filmmakers, always to follow up on how your film will be presented. I like this letter from Kubrick to a film festival organiser:


Kubrick does not cede control easily, as seen by the involvement he ensures he has when the film head for the 1972 Venice Film Festival. He asks nine questions of its organisers.
July 26, 1972
To Umberto Orlandi
… What is the make and type of the projectors which will show the film? Will the film be shown on 2,000ft reels. Is there control of the sound inside the auditorium during the screening? If so, where, approximately is it located? Is there a sound system or telephone which is connected with the projection booth? Please describe this. If someone wanted to leave the auditorium during the screening and go into the projection booth, how long would it take to get to the projection booth and would it create a disturbance? Where is the film actually to be screened at Venice? What is the name of the place and its address? Are all the films at the festival being screened in the same room?

Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/3555933/The-letters-of-Stanley-Kubrick.html
 
Frank Cueto said:
Ja!, Here in Puerto Rico they run the lamps past 60,000 hours....
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Ha! Do they just wait for it to blow and then change it? The only problem with that is it usually smashes the mirror as well and then cost the price of three lamps! Where's the logic ;)
 
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