Tarantino: "Digital projection is the death of cinema"

[Signa]

Sure, you have some advantages like blowing out the engines doesn't cause the aircraft to crash, but that's not good enough to keep everyone using zeppelins over jumbo jets. It certainly wasn't the death of the travel industry to switch to jets.

No, just (part of) the death of the planet.

The logic of industry (bigger, stronger, faster, at any cost) need not be followed by humans, but when humans who take power DO follow it their actions are no surprise. These humans call "bigger, stronger, faster, at any cost" "progress" and have various names for anyone opposing them - "backwards", "crazy", "luddite", "naive". There's an interesting logic at play here - by the time industry destroys the world there will be noone left to say "I told you so". It's like a wild party - it feels really good while you're in it and with the help of enough alcohol you can forget you were ever in it. Unlike a party though or a video game, real environmental effects offer permanent rather than temporary destruction and cannot be undone through the reload function.

Ooooookaaaay, I take it you don't fly then. Good to know.

 

[Flutterguy]

Tarantino is to cinema as Jack White is to music. A bleeding heart hipster.

On the other hand, cinema used to be higher quality then home video could be. Nowadays you can download a bluray quality new release.

 

[DEAD34345]

I like Quentin Tarantino, and I like his movies, but he is literally insane. That's actually mostly a good thing in my opinion, because his movies are all also kind of insane (in a good way), but I really wouldn't take him seriously on something like this. I don't understand his argument because the article in the link doesn't explain his viewpoint at all, but it's probably just Tarantino being crazy anyway.

 

[shootthebandit]

Surely digital cinematography is more accessible to everyone. Therefore you can get low budget indie directors making higher quality films. The easier it is for keen amateurs to get into then the more likely you are to see good indie titles getting into the mainstream

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

Dont care about what he thinks. Only thing that ruins cinema is shitty movies and 3D.

 

[zelda2fanboy]

Film is a much higher resolution than digital and it seems like a rip off to go see a digital projection with the same 4K picture quality of newer high end televisions. On the other hand, I've seen many, many physical film projections in my life that looked like crap from decaying film, misframed projection, dim bulbs, and mismatched sound. Digital projections are nice and uniform. I haven't had too many issues with digital stuff (outside of a garbage home projector at a dying ghetto movie theater) at all. In the old days, it always felt like a crap shoot in my area if the movie was going to play all the through without a hitch. We are far from the years of union professional projectionists and have to rely on a low paid teenager a lot of the time to change the reels. And you could always tell when the reel changes were coming because the quality would go way down and those ugly cigarette burns start showing up.

 

[Guitarmasterx7]

Is it just a "READING A BOOK ON PAPER IS SO FAR SUPERIOR TO READING THE SAME BOOK ON A SCREEN" kind of mindset? Honestly the only conceivable problem I can think of with digital projection is that people will probably find ways to bootleg full quality films. But I dunno, Tarantino is a fucking weirdo anyways, I've just come to expect him to say and do crazy shit. Makes damn good movies though so it doesn't bother me.

 

[Arqus_Zed]

...

Is this really news to anyone?

It's Quentin Tarantino, for fuck's sake! He's against digital filming, of course he's going to be against digital projection! I mean, this is the guy that actually, manually damaged the footage of one of his films (Death Proof) to give it a more "grindhouse" feel. He's a nostalgia-fueled retro-film fanboy, everybody knows that.

That said, I love the crap out of (most of) his films.

 

[Hagi]

if on the other hand you were to take a film that had, just for the sake of argument, been recorded in a digital format equivalent to DVD/480p and attempt to convert it to the same higher resolution future digital media formats it would look like fucking shit...and there is no way to extract further detail from the format. none. all you have is 640×480 pixels and that's it for all eternity.

That's not actually true.

There's plenty of ways to extract further detail from that format. Most of them also used in gaming, you should've seen at least some of them if you've ever went peeking into a config file for any of your games.

You won't ever get the same quality as something originally shot in that format, not unless you're dealing with extremely simple pictures. But to say 480p is and always will be 480p is simply false, especially when claiming it'll always will be like that.

And that's just automated methods. If it's truly important you can still have a team with Photoshop go over the footage frame-by-frame to touch things up.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Nothing new here, a lot of film auteurs have been saying the same thing for ages. Jean Louis Comolli. Peter Greenaway. Godard has founded his whole career on that thought. That Tarantino should join the chorus of "film is dead" is completely expected.

 

[Something Amyss]

"Digital projection, that's just television in public. And apparently the whole world is OK with television in public, but what I knew as cinema is dead."

This sounds like a tantrum, to me. "Things aren't like how they used to be and it sucks!"

Does the interview continue after he tells someone to get off his lawn?

Seriously, this sort of superficiality is Tarantino's problem in the first place.

Honestly the only conceivable problem I can think of with digital projection is that people will probably find ways to bootleg full quality films.

They did that before digital projection.

 

[Areloch]

Or do you have some special copy of Star Wars that looks crystal clear on your 4k TV? If you do, you could probably sell it back to Lucasfilms for a pretty penny.

i don't have to have some copy of Star Wars that looks crystal clear on a 4k TV because Lucasfilm/Disney already do...and it'll be stored on FILM awaiting transfer.

but i can see you didn't bother to heed my request...at all.

Well, they actually don't. Kinda a known deal that they lost/destroyed the original negatives (I think they were turned into the special editions). All we'll ever have are the reproductions. That's one area where digital does far better than film. You can make backups of backups of backups and never lose anything.

That's what I was referring to about selling back to Lucasfilm.

Also, what request? To think about what you said? I like how you say 'don't come up with a counterpoint for your side'. That was neat. And I did cover that. Yes, a 480p video will always be 480p. And that does suck. I concur entirely. But as cameras get better, the pixel density is going to get to the point where it doesn't really actually matter. Unless you get Bigotron-sized displays, your average high-resolution LCD tv will eventually be superseded by the recorded resolution and the issue is nullified.

We're not there yet, but that's the direction we're headed. A 4k display is something like 9megapixels. If you can record film at 32mp or higher, you're officially operating well past sub-pixel resolutions compared to your consumer display. Which means you're achieving the same effect as film. Again, we're definitely not there yet, but we're moving towards it.

as for "why you dont just turn down the res on the software/your OS"...flat panel displays only look properly sharp if they are running at 1 for 1 in their native PHYSICAL resolution (or a in a quarterly subdivision of it where 4 physical pixels are used as 1)...whereas on a CRT you could change the resolution of the image projected by the CRT and if you don't understand that...well there's really not much point discussing it further: you don't understand the tech and you don't understand what i'm talking about.

Oh. You're doing THAT.

"Ooh, I made a technical point that really doesn't pragmatically matter, but you just are too dumb to understand the technology"

Don't do that.

Yes, CRT got away with changes to the resolutions made in software/OS, but that's not because they were magic. It's because everything was pre-emptively blurry by virtue of the projection. As you say, there's no additional data being generated. CRT's don't spontaneously create a better image from lower resolution information fed from your computer. All it is is that it's blurry pre-emptively, so it's not quite so noticeable. Even CRT displays will show up as pixelated garbage if you crank the resolution down past where the native blur compensates.

The fact is, if you're lowing the resolution because your system can't handle it, it doesn't have anything to do with the display anymore. Yes, a notch or so step down in resolution may potentially be less noticeable on a CRT than a LCD screen, but only relatively few steps. And if having some pixelation in your display is that much of a huge downer that the slight pixel density difference between the active resolution and the montior's native kills your experience, you would cough up for a machine that could operate at native. While technically a problem, it's only a problem in the most specific of cases.
Most people that have to operate on lower-than-native either don't care that much, or work to fix it. Having a CRT display isn't going to automagically fix how the display looks.

 

[My name is Fiction]

Digital projection will SAVE cinema.
It's cheaper, in the long run, and will have better quality of sound and video.
PLUS, it makes it damn near impossible to permanently lose movie because it's so much easier to store and copy.

you can't take a digital recording and transfer it to a higher resolution format without a loss in quality.

think about that for a second.

i mean really think.

don't just dismiss it offhand and look for a counter because that's your already chosen your side of "the argument".

atm you can take any film (on film) from any decade of the 20th and can convert it to any format you wish including any future digital media formats that feature a higher digital display resolutions because film doesn't have "a resolution".

if on the other hand you were to take a film that had, just for the sake of argument, been recorded in a digital format equivalent to DVD/480p and attempt to convert it to the same higher resolution future digital media formats it would look like fucking shit...and there is no way to extract further detail from the format. none. all you have is 640×480 pixels and that's it for all eternity.

this is what the future holds if everything goes "digital" (as it currently exists).

because display resolutions are inevitably only ever going to increase.

not everything new is universally better in all respects.

You hit the subject on the head there. A resolution gate issue could be a major problem down the line in a couple decades. But also there is diminishing returns in all things. Like the difference between a dvd and a blueray, big difference. But will the next blueray be as noticable as the last gap in graphical fidelity? Probably not due to the limits of human perception. Like who the fuck needs a 4K TV? I mean you got the same issue with framerates. 300 Frames per second? hype. 600? Sure but now i can not tell.

 

[J Tyran]

It's like that episode of Archer in the first season where they are on the zeppelin: sure, there's something cool about a voyage over the sea in the air, but it's never going to catch on in the mainstream ever again. Sure, you have some advantages like blowing out the engines doesn't cause the aircraft to crash, but that's not good enough to keep everyone using zeppelins over jumbo jets. It certainly wasn't the death of the travel industry to switch to jets.

Unrelated tangent but we might be seeing commercial passenger airships again, mainly for the same reason cruise ships still exist despite airliners being around. Sometimes the Journey is more important than the destination, can you imagine a holiday cruising over the Serengeti or the Alps? It would be awesome and the right location could command almost any range of prices, obviously people that just want to go to from A to B will use an airliner but airship cruises could be "mainstream" in their own way just like the age of cruise liners never died.

OT;

Is this just some connoisseur thing from Tarantino? I honestly don't understand his position but maybe someone more into films might understand where he is coming from, I don't understand it with some audiophiles wanting tube amps etc either.

Sometimes old stuff is better though,

Spoiler: like CRTs for retro gaming

 

[Boris Goodenough]

I mean you got the same issue with framerates. 300 Frames per second? hype. 600? Sure but now i can not tell.

Let's not forget those aren't true FPS (Hz), just refresh of the same frame several times.
Fighter pilotes have been tested at seeing the difference between frames at upto 220 FPS.

 

[Areloch]

snip

Wow, it's like you didn't actually read what I said and decided to go full 'cooing at a small child' level of patronization.

You must be a real treat to talk to in person too.

You may note, I was agreeing with you, I was just pointing out that CRT's aren't magic.

They don't 'make' additional resolution, but you avoid minor pixelation due to the natural blurring of the projection.

I also think you're massively overstating how annoying non-native resolution rendering is. I pretty much never run games at native resolution(though I do put it close) to get better performance. Console output has pretty much always been like this.

My point was, while it's true, it's seriously not that big of a deal. And you can get CRTs to exhibit the same effect if you crank it down far enough. Rather far, yes, but again, CRT displays aren't magic. Pixels and jaggies are there on LCD setups, but like CRTs, it's only really a problem if you seriously crank down the resolution.

I'm not trying to wage an attrition war, but you keep making this some sort of 'I post a pretentious reply, and then when I'm countered, I throw my hands into the air yelling 'YOU JUST DON'T GET IT'' deal. It's really annoying. (And yes, going for the 'well clearly you're just too stupid to understand what we're talking about' is going for the pretentious, "I'm better than you" approach).

If you'd read what I wrote instead of trying to figure out how to write a counter point as insufferably as possible, you may note I didn't claim you were wrong, I just don't think it's as big of a problem as you were making it to be.

 

[Ratty]

The guy has made his entire career out of nostalgia for sleazy 1970s Grindhouse films. To the point of making Death Proof for the "Grindhouse" double feature which had fake distressing on the movies to make it look like the film was old/worn out etc. Of course he's going to say film is better.


Personally I think film is better artistically in certain circumstances (like since Captain America took place in WW2 it just didn't look right to me not being shot on film) but I realize digital is here to stay. There's no use complaining about that. How about mentioning how dreadfully overused digital coloring (blue and orange, washed out grays and browns oh my!) and lighting effects (fake lens flares anyone?) in movies is now?