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"As Good as it Gets" - Afterthoughts
65mm demonstration footage
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in70mm.com
The 70mm Newsletter
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Written
by: Rick Mitchell,
Film Editor/ Film Director/ Film Historian. Compiled from two different
articles |
Date:
05.07.2007 |
70mm
frame from the demonstration film. Katherine
Beer and Jen Johnson. Note
the colours and curves. 70mm frame blow up.
There could be, if some contemporary filmmakers with true vision
can be gotten to see a short test film shot last year using contemporary
Eastman negative and print stocks. The project was initiated by an
executive at Arri who wanted to remind film makers of what film quality
could be and was shot by cinematographer Bill Bennett, ASC in Lone Pine
and downtown LA under a variety of daylight and magic hour conditions.
The original project involved shooting the same setups in 65mm, 35mm
anamorphic, and Super 35 and a 4K DI was made of the material, a print
of which was shown for comparison last November at a program called "As
Good As It Gets". I missed that program but got to see the 70mm print
off the original negative at a private screening at the Egyptian Theater.
I had not seen new 65mm material since the Super Dimension 70 demos, and
though not at 48 fps, this looked TERRIFIC!!! The detail you could see
was breathtaking. Little grain was visible, and I was sitting in the
seventh row. I forgot to ask if Digital Projection, even 4K, could
stand up to that; some who saw the "As
Good As It Gets" show, where a digital
version was also shown, said that it couldn't.
Mr. Bennett, who was at the screening, said that after the November
program, there was a run on available 65mm cameras, as filmmakers were
electing to shoot their big masters in 65mm (as was done for
"The New World"), and closer angles in 35mm, usually Super 35, matching up the
material in the DI.
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More
in 70mm reading:
"As Good as it Gets"- Demonstrates
power of large format
“As Good as it Gets” - cast/credit
Todd-AO Test
Film
Panavision and the Resurrecting of
Dinosaur Technology
Who is Rick Mitchell
Internet link:
fromscripttodvd.com
Mount Vernon Visitors
Center
"As Good as it Gets" is available from:
Henning Raedlein
Head of ARRI Digital Film
ARRI Film & TV Services GmbH Tuerkenstr. 89
D-80799 Muenchen
Germany
Phone +49 89 3809-1970
Fax +49 89 3809-1549
Email hraedlein@arri.de
www.arri.de
www.arricommercial.de
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Front
view of the ARRI 765 camera. Picture by Paul Rayton
Could this lead to a new feature shot in 65mm? Maybe. Though the
results of the survey of American 70mm equipped theaters done by New
Line Cinema a couple of years ago were apparently never published, an
independent survey done by
fromscripttodvd.com concluded that there were
still enough theaters from the Eighties to support a reasonable American
70mm release, though they aren't all the kind of venues we like to see
70mm in, and they'd all have to install DTS readers, magnetic striping
apparently no longer being available, which is a print cost saving. I
didn't have time to check in70mm.com to see what the situation is in
Europe, but was surprised to hear that there are no 70mm
screening facilities in Germany *), so the people at Arri, who do have the
world's only 65mm laser scanner, have never seen this print!
*) Of course, it was later learned that there are places to screen
70mm in Germany; the situation illustrates the popular mythology that
seems to prevail in the exhibition world, that somehow 70mm "doesn't
exist. There are at least 30 cinemas in Germany with 70mm
equipment and ready to show, editor.
Unfortunately, the situation with "Superman Returns" is likely to be used
against any filmmaker lobbying to shoot totally in 65mm. In an
American Cinematographer article, cinematographer Newton Thomas
Sigel, ASC stated that after testing 65mm and being enthusiastic about
the results, they elected to go with digitally shot Super 35 because the
film's total release could not be in 70mm. Mr. Sigel apparently
didn't do his research, or he would have known that at the height of the
Eighties blowup craze, no more than 200 70mm prints were ever made, and
during the roadshow era, rarely as many as fifty! But the 35mm prints,
and even 16mm anamorphic, and in one instance that I know of personally,
Super 8 anamorphic prints of those films are of higher quality
than from 35mm photography, especially Super 35. The examples I'm
citing were all photochemical reductions; I don't know what the
results would be from a DI.
This 70mm print was screened in Bradford, England in March, and the "As
Good As It Gets" Program is to be repeated in Los Angeles prior to Cinegear. At this time, 35mm prints from a DI from a new higher
resolution laser scan and a digital version will also be shown. At the
moment I can't provide additional information, but will pass on any
updates I hear to those who are interested.
If only someone could get Clint Eastwood to that screening.
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"As
Good As It Gets" screening at UCLA's Bridges Theater on 21 June
2007
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Katherine
Beer and Jen Johnson. Note
the colours and curves. 70mm frame blow up.
Though I saw the 70mm contact print off the 65mm negative material shot
for this program a couple of months ago, I missed the original
presentation last Fall, but was happy to be able to see its
re-presentation at UCLA's Bridges Theater on June 21. The idea behind it
was to revive interest in 65mm for origination, primarily for material
that was to go through a digital intermediate. Both Bill Bennett, ASC
and Kees Van Oostrum, ASC were upset at the results when footage they'd
shot went through a DI and thought it might be better to originate on a
larger negative.
This idea actually goes back 80 years when the size of movie palaces
began to greatly exceed the ability to increase the size of the screen
and get acceptable images on it. Experiments were done on negatives up
to 70mm and MGM and later Paramount, using 65mm, developed systems that
were intended for reduction printing to 35mm. None of the Wide Film
experiments caught on then, but were revived in 1953 because of and the
impending CinemaScope. One effort to create a "wider screen" was the
practice of masking off the old 1.37:1 frame to aspect ratios as narrow
as 2:1, and projecting the results onto screens two to three times
larger than in the past. This resulted in grainy, soft images and once
again, originating on larger frames for reduction printing was looked
into, resulting in VistaVision, and because CinemaScope also had image
resolution problems, Camera
65/Ultra Panavision,
CinemaScope 55, and
Technirama.
(This has been a very quick simplification of history, of course.)
The benefits of the most recent experiments in originating on a larger
frame was immediately evident in the first film screened at UCLA, "We
Fight to be Free", a short film for the Mount Vernon Visitors Center
in Virginia, photographed and directed by Mr. Von Oostrum. Background
material, particularly vistas, were shot in 65mm, while elements to be
composited with them were photographed in Super 35, often against
greenscreens, using Panavision film cameras, or as digital stills. This
material was scanned at 4K with the compositing done at 2K, going to a
DI. The resulting 35mm anamorphic print from an IN from the DI, looked
terrific, without the mushy video game look usually found in material
that has been composited in a computer. There are certain shots in the
film that anyone with a knowledge of the logistics of filmmaking knows
had to be composited, though they don't look it, but a tape made by the
effects supervisor showing how many of the composites had been done
revealed a lot more prestidigitation than noticeable. The film flashes
back and forward between summer and winter, and though some plates were
shot in the winter, the bulk of the filming took place in the summer.
The matching of simulated winter scenes into actual winter scenes is
seamless. It's to be hoped that Mr. Van Oostrum will be invited to
screen both the film and the behind-the-scenes, which is on video, for
film classes and other interested parties. The film is being screened
digitally at Mount Vernon.
The original "As Good As It Gets" program was then presented, a
series of shots made by Mr. Bennett in 65mm, 35mm anamorphic, and Super
35, using Arriflex cameras and Arriscope lenses for the anamorphic
footage. The 65mm negative was scanned at 8K at Arriflex in Germany, the
others at 4K at Fotokem in Burbank, edited and assembled into a digital
intermediate. The 6 minute presentation intercut the same setups from
the different formats, followed by B negative quick comparison cuts. For
some reason, only two cuts from the anamorphic footage were included in
the longer presentation.
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Mount Vernon Visitors
Center |
Side
view of the ARRI 765 camera. Picture by Paul Rayton
Three different
versions of the results were presented in the recent presentation: a print
from the internegative from the DI, a print made directly from the Arrilaser,
and a 4K digital version using a specially installed Sony projector. It was
clear that the 65mm material was always superior to the others in every way.
The anamorphic footage did not look as good by comparison, plus, in shallow
focus shots, the anomalies introduced by anamorphic elements were quite
obvious. The Super 35 footage looked acceptable. As both hosts pointed out,
the image quality difference is immediately noticeable with the 65mm on big
wide shots, but things pretty much even out as you focus closer.
It's hard to comment on the 4K digital version because the projector image
was dimmer than the 14FL being put out by the film projectors (for 70mm,
they'd be putting out 16FL.) The quality of the 65mm came through, but the
other formats pretty much looked the same as in the filmouts. A clip from
"The Sound of Music" was then shown on the 4K projector, from a scan of
a 65mm IP, though I don't know if the type of scan rate was mentioned. It
looked quite sharp, but the color appeared way oversaturated. The 70mm print
of the 65mm test footage was then shown, followed by a new print of the
first reel of
"Baraka" (1991).
This demonstration actually raises a number of questions that might be
answered in a future presentation. The first is, given that the goal is
higher image quality for large screen theatrical presentation, is the cost
and effort worth it now that theatrical exhibition seems to really be on
life support? My reference here are not to the small art houses theaters
that have commanded so much serious focus over the last 15 years, but what's
left of the mainstream moviegoing market, facing major attrition from the
availability of downloads or DVD release the same day as theatrical release,
which is increasingly likely to happen when a major studio hatches an
ill-conceived $300,000,000+ turkey that they've become certain hasn't any
chance of flying. As was learned during the crepe hanging of 2005, not only
is the over 30 audience increasingly picky about spending the time, effort,
and money to see films in theaters, but even the previously vital 15-24 set,
this generation of which having grown up with increasingly larger video
screens and fairly quick access to films on video, are also choosier about
what they'll go to the theater.
Yet few of these youngsters have seen real big screen image quality, though
there is eagerness for doing so, by young and old, based on David
Strohmaier's experiences showing
"Cinerama Adventure"
around the country, especially recently at Yale and Princeton. But is
digital projection, whose results are not that different from HD in the
home, really the answer? Or the degrading of superior film images through a
DI?
We now need to see comparisons of images wider than 1.85:1 taken through
both IN/IP and DIs taken from different scan rates, (I have yet to see a 2K
scan from anamorphic material that came anywhere near the image quality of
an IP/IN print, duping being necessary for a fair comparison with Super 35).
Examples need to be projected from both film and digital onto a really large
screen, like that at the Academy's Goldwyn Theater or the Egyptian. We also
need to include consideration of material originated digitally, on both high
and low end equipment, since an increasing amount of that is being done
today. The only real way of getting large numbers of people into theaters,
especially at today's prices, is to offer them an experience in the
auditorium that they can't get at home.
Of course it would also be nice if what was on the screen was also worth all
the effort, but there seems to be nothing technology can do to plug the
intelligence gaps in the industry's executive ranks, really a pre-Katrina
New Orleans.
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