Is there a website yet where I could look up the real starting time of movies? Simply arriving at the right time avoids the worst part of the theater experience, only it’s hard to do given the variability, especially if my companions include “arrive 3 hours early at the airport” type of people
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He’s probably also upset about the contract switching – presumably this gets ironed out in the future but everyone relying on royalty share in contracts signed in 2018 got the rug pulled out from under them and their project’s lifetime revenue by the (necessary) switch to day-1 streaming.
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down with p-frames
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DCP use Jpeg2000, so there’s fancy wavelet compression going on for each individual frame. I’m not even sure what wavelets are but they sound like some quantum physics shit.
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yeah and if you’re already using jpeg compression on individual frames there’s no real reason not to use predictive frames other than that H264 wasn’t that good at acceptable bitrates.
DCP is technically an outdated and improvable spec, but it was a pretty good solution for the delivery problem it was trying to solve. a ~75mbit+ 4K HEVC is definitely superior to a 2K DCP and much smaller, for example, but 75mbit is still huge compared to most expectations of streaming.
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The basic idea of every JPEG format is that it starts by storing rough blurry broad strokes of a large swath of the image (low-frequency data) and then progressively fills in more and more detail. With JPEG2000 it’s actually quite apparent in a web browser in that on slow connections, the image starts off looking blurry, as opposed to starting off with only like the top half loaded like PNGs. (There’s some further distinctions between DCT from the original JPG and wavelets from JPEG2000 but the essential principle is the same.)
For various reasons JPEG2000 didn’t take off on web browsers though (it’s better suited for controlled environments like movie projectors) but there’s a new format “JPEG XL” that will soon come to a web browser near you, so this “blurry-first” behavior might become an everyday experience
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now everyone look into RAWcooked for encoding dpx files to ffv1 and you can have my job
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Feel like literally the only person in the world for whom the stupid trivia question slideshow and the 18 previews and people yelling at the screen during quiet drama are all unambiguous benefits to theatergoing experience
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All the greatest theater experiences ever have involved dudes screaming about seeing Willow in the podracing scene or kids dancing in the aisles during Get Rich or Die Trying, or a drunk guy making fun of his equally drunk friend’s broken leg throughout Friday the 13th, or an elderly man laughing really loudly at an establishing shot of a house during a midnight screening of Halloween.
I need wild audiences!
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the latter two are great, but the first one has been feeling so cheap that between it and the whole box office+concession situation it puts me off going
like if it were just preview reels and people talking over the movie, great, it’s the additional product that’s been appended around that part I hate
also having OCD means I don’t need much reason to go build my own little tragic commons instead
you don’t get wild audiences here that’s for certain
i would absolutely show up for the movies that would otherwise generate them!
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we have like, the one repertory theater plus the festival where people know they’re supposed to yell and do, during normal screenings never. Canadians love the rules
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something something DCP isn’t just the format but also a set of standards your house needs to meet in order to be doing shows properly
ask me about chatting up studio engineers who kindly ask me to adjust bulb power (we’re actually too bright if we run at full power)
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I say this after having gone to see the Shirobako movie at a Regal and having the sound cut off during previews and the lights not going down and instantly knowing what likely was the cause (probably an automation cue gone awry or meant for a movie people actually care about).
but then I get to bitch about how that (and the other Eleven Arts anime I’ve seen, the Euphonium movie) looked like godawful shit that even if the bulbs weren’t turned way the fuck down because xenon bulbs cost $$$, it was still rife with encoding errors as if no one did a QC pass
I am half-seriously considering buying and ripping the bluray and sending it through Resolve and making a DCP that isn’t fucking ass just so I can go on twitter and dunk on them
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honestly I can’t do much, I don’t have the training nor equipment to set color calibration or do a pass on sound levels
what I can do is stuff the ultimately isn’t conceivable in a commercial environment due to time or the operating costs of a house. I can sit down with a movie a few days or even hours ahead and do up a custom matte, a sound check to make sure things are pleasurable to listen (reference level is 7.0 on the fader, we often do shows at 5.5-6.0 because movies are mixed that fucking loud), rack focus, bulb alignment, hell, even getting filmmakers to take a look
I’m sympathetic to the movie theater thing and honestly I can’t turn off (ask me about seeing Mandy and thinking the movie froze and having to fight off the panic attack) and that does color how and what I see (the AMCs around me have Dolby rooms and those look and sound great all the time and getting in there for no additional upchrage with A-list pretty much singlehandedly justified the monthly cost) and I get that hey, we can get a lot of the quality one gets in a theater but I dunno, there’s something nice about being a dark room with others and you’re all having the communal thing (I weep for people who will never see Cats in a theater)
also it’s currently fucking hot here, chilling in the AC for a couple of hours is nice
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what I actually like is when a movie fucks up and it’s not my problem
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wait until this guy finds out about my VR theater that i pirate 720p movies for then stream it over wireless to an oculus quest.
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sometimes i like to turn on TV shows and then just listen to the audio and guess what’s going on on the screen
one of these days i will listen to the unofficial columbo “radio dramas” which is just an episode of columbo with a weird nerd describing what is happening on screen
fuck everyone who tells me how to consume media, my life is finite and i don’t have time for your bullshit
why am i getting so angry about this
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help
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I get why he’s upset as a filmmaker, businessman and film liker
however just lmao thinking you can undo 2-3 generations of people who have lived in a time where film consumption has been hilariously democratized and the experience of film watching isn’t the end-all be-all
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