Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Do I See Pixels In A Theatrical Release?
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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I like to sit in the center, towards the back. For whatever reason, when I go to a movie theater, people will always take the seats closest to the aisles around one-third away from the screen. Too much trouble to walk 20 feet or something, but it means my favorite viewing region is always empty unless a movie is really popular.
When I saw Zootopia, the theater I went to gosee it in had reserved seating (no extra charge). I got to see which seats were reserved, and the front rows were all picked, plus the seats next to the aisles on some of the rows back. The back two-thirds of the seats had scattered reserved seats more or less randomly like cars at a parking lot. Maybe that's because a lot of kids came to watch though, and they like having loud, booming experiences. I never cared enough about video quality to look for artifacts or pixelation. I've been putting stuff onto YouTube since 2006, after all. Something really big can be jarring to me though, like everything else, but I've yet to see a screw-up that big at a movie theater. |
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kevinx59
 Posts: 959 Location: In sunny California |
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I tend to sit near the back of the room/middle when I go to watch a movie ( also helps that since I don't go on opening day, it is usually very easy to find seats). I'be had to sit at the front on a couple occasions, and the neck strain was pretty bad. Not to mention the fact that I had to constantly turn my head left to right just to see what was going on. I haven't noticed pixels, though I have noticed different film grain on some of the expected films. Only anime film I've been able to see was Spirited Away.
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ScruffyKiwi
 Posts: 697 Location: New Zealand |
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Can't say I have ever noticed pixels in an Anime movie. I've seen a few Theatrical releases. I saw the final Madoka movie in a small arthouse theatre and watched "Wolf Children" and Eva 3.0 "you cannot confuse me more!!" in a larger multiplex theatre.
I sit mid theatre mainly for sound reasons. If you sit too close or too near the back you don't get all the effects properly with the way they locate the sounds. Sound is the main reason I like the movies as there is no way I can replicate that setup at home!!! |
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Desslok
Posts: 181 |
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I went to opening night for the latest Bond movie on an impulse and got there super late, having to sit WAY closer than I normally like. The opening credits, the text? It looked like shit, like it was a playstation game. I was thinking to myself "So how is this superior to film again?"
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GregoriusU
Posts: 23 |
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Dolby sound for theaters is optimized for seating at the center of the screen, 2/3 of the way back towards the projector, or a little further back from mid-theater. With stadium style seating, that puts you in the first few rows of the back half of the auditorium, where your eye-level is, appropriately, mid-screen as well.
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nixice
Posts: 21 |
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Except then there would be effectively zero theatrical releases of anime product outside Japan. These pictures, they don't make a ton of money (we were lucky this year to have at least two major movies get international release with Boy and the Beast and Only Yesterday, as well as the typical event releases of show-turned-movie stuff like Psycho-Pass and a niche try with Harmony, and none of that has been burning up the charts.) Releasing digitally saves a lot in material production and cuts down a good deal of the risk in booking these films across the country. Especially with stuff like the Fathom events, where tons of theaters run one film one or two times on a big Thursday event day for a small but rabid fanbase to come together on a rare occasion, that would never be possible with film. Last edited by nixice on Mon May 23, 2016 1:52 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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nixice
Posts: 21 |
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I don't know, I saw a 4K restoration of Eiichi Yamamoto's 1973 film Belladonna of Sadness (which was a full negative rescan / digital restoration, not an upscale or anything like that) and it looked like it was animated yesterday... Gorgeous colors! Deep contrasts in whites and blacks! And no blemishes but what exists in the surviving film that could not be repaired without altering the experience. It was like looking at 50 feet of white paper and saturated ink moving right in front of you. I could watch animated stick figures if they came out looking that amazing on a big screen with an audience of animation fans. 
http://www.moviemaker.com/archives/spring-2016/cinelicious-restoration-lost-anime-classic-belladonna-of-sadness/ If 4K animation projection is the future (and unfortunately, Japan will need to catch up a lot in order to be part of that future, its animation production habits are often decidedly old-school despite the cutting-edge material they produce,) count me in. This was an Alamo Drafthouse screening of Belladonna, BTW, where they're fighting like rabid weasels to keep film alive, but when you get results like that movie provided Last edited by nixice on Mon May 23, 2016 2:18 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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nixice
Posts: 21 |
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Well, but maybe you are forgetting how shitty an experience sitting front-row for a film all those years was. Seeing nothing but dancing grain can be a memorable experience if you really, really love the physical nature of film (and just in general, a pixelized image is probably going to be more annoying than a grainy image), but to the general folks going to a movie theater for the story and the acting and the explosions, either experience sucks. Also, a film print is beautiful day one and week one, but after enough time, the physical print will suffer from being run through the projector. Dust and dirt and hair will collect up on the film, that debris builds up no matter what you. Blasting the filmstrip with the gigantic xenon arc lamp needed to project that much light will cause the image to fade over time. And if anything goes wrong with the film (actually, no matter what, a theatrical film will have to have a reel change, hopefully at an unobtrusive point between scenes,) the only option is to clip frames out and put in a visible splice. Of course, a 35mm handled well can be a beautiful experience (even more so a lovely  70mm print,) but there are huge drawbacks to physical projection.
In an ideal world, there would be a place for both analog and digital technologies as both have their strengths and charms. Overall though, even as a cinemaphile, I believe the technology is for the most part making movie-going better. And going forward, digital is getting better all the time, while physical projection hasn't really improved in well over 20 years. (The last big leap for film, besides the introduction of polyester film stock at near the same time, was the introduction of digital cinema sound technology, and look at what that tech did for the cinema experience. Even stuffy hipsters can't look back fondly on the good old days of analog film sound.)
Theatrical releases are, as I understand it, not actually streamed (depending on if there's a live element.) The films seem to be downloaded for playback early, and then the theater probably just dials in for the encryption key per screening. (I was at a RifftTrax event at a theater, which was I assume live on the East Coast but tape-delayed for me, and the movie lost connection and failed to download the rest of the stream. It literally made the TiVO "ba-dumb" sound and showed an end-of-show message!) So encoding for streaming of a digitally distributed file shouldn't be an issue, they can go nuts with the bitrate if they want assuming the player follows the format. |
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PurpleWarrior13
 Posts: 2034 |
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Fathom Events are cool, but they can screw up. I went to a screening of Hitchcock's Rear Window last year, and we were literally staring at a Windows desktop background for a half hour before someone finally told a manager and we got to watch them mouse over and click on the correct file. When it started playing with no sound, they literally moved the buffer bar back to the beginning. It was no different than a teacher in school playing a YouTube video on a screen for the class. "I payed $14 for THIS?!"
Now that I work at that very theater, I'm told that most shows are automatic, Fathom Events have to be manually run. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Wow, I just happened to pick the best part of the theater for sound too. I just chose that part of the theater because the picture looks the best from there. (The kids love being at the front though.)
There was also an Answerman column some time ago about how anime theatrical releases are severely disadvantaged compared to showing big blockbuster movies. According to the article, it's very expensive to get a movie into a lot of theaters, which big Hollywood studios can afford but small anime localization and distribution companies cannot, and they have to gain the trust of these theater owners, which is not easy for non-established brands. |
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Desslok
Posts: 181 |
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Yesterday, one of the screenings in the Seattle International Film Festival was delayed by half an hour because they couldn't unzip (or whatever the hell they do to it) the file so they could project it. Eventually a great many patrons just gave up and walked out. Yeah, it might have its problems, but give me a piece of celluloid that you can shine a light through any day of the week. |
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5470 |
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nixice
Posts: 21 |
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Even the little Hollywood studios (and more so the outside-Hollywood indie studios) cannot afford to distribute films anymore, the independent and small-form cinema scene has struggled as the lower 2/3s of the business has dried up. Even known-name filmmakers like Soderbergh and Cameron Crowe and Woody Allen and many others are looking at TV and streaming media as a big part if not all of their future. It's hard to get a little film in front of an audience these days. We anime fans are lucky in a way that we have a defined and amassed niche. We may be few, but we are active, and we can be counted to show up for at least one night every once in a while when movie distributors make an anime movie a sub-cultural event. Arrive early, get a good seat somewhere in the middle of the theater near the sweet spot, maybe leave the Visine at home if you've got razor-sharp vision, and put some money in the coffers so that maybe perhaps cross-your-fingers some day there'll be enough in the system to fund animation studios moving more often to 4K in theatrical work.
Oh, come on fellow, you're saying you've NEVER been at the movies where there was a problem with the film? I don't know what the failure rates of digital cinema are (I've only personally had it fail on me once, maybe it's more an epidemic than that) but I used to be a projectionist (not an experienced, unionized, professional projectionist either, mind you -- at some point in the '90s they got rid of the guys who knew what they were doing and how to fix things) and it's a minor miracle that movies ever played right! We screwed up the loop for the gate, we got fingerprints on lenses when switching from flat to scope, we left the masking curtains up or down, we spliced over splices and left bubbly, badly-aligned splices that gummed up the sprockets, we forgot to adjust the sound levels between trailers and the films, we broke film all the time and spliced it with very little skill, we did very little dusting or cleaning to keep the room and platters clean, we handled film with our fingers dirty from working registers and popping greasy popcorn, and we just generally messed up movies a few times a month. I remember one time my friend had to explain to an exiting audience, while handing out free passes as an apology, who the killer was because we couldn't get the movie back up after something went wrong 20 minutes away from the ending! The pros had a better batting average, but even then, those are just the failures that happened because of user error; adding up the mechanical failure points on a full-sized movie projector / platter system is terrifying. When you're dealing with a film, it's not a matter of if something will go wrong, but when. |
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Desslok
Posts: 181 |
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Which is why I started off with saying "I know it has problems, but . . . ." And no, thinking back over all the movies I've seen over my life, I can't think of a time where there was an issue with the film, like it breaking. There were times the bulb burned out, but that's a point of failure that could happen to digital, too. I just prefer the look of film over digital. Digital looks very distinctly not-film. |
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