For Your Consideration: an insult to filmmakers
All the utopian fervor from tech-heads and electronics manufacturers about how digital projection will change the way movies are seen always makes me wary. The change, I fear, won’t be for the better. When the kid behind the popcorn counter is working these $150,000 pieces of always-about-to-become outdated electronic 
gadgetry, instead of the time-proven, mechanically driven film medium, will the image be consistent? What happens when a pixel or three or forty-four goes wrong? Today was the horror show come true, with a last-minute screening of a would-be awards contender that’s only just finished was projected to a small group of reviewers (most belonging to one awards-sanctioning body or other) went completely off the rails. Showing at one of the best-run multiplexes in the area, a key projectionist and manager were flummoxed by the D5 high-defintion copy that was provided. After forty minutes of delays and false starts, with the control panels of the player projected on screen and an arrow punching various options across the screen, the dim projection began, with only the deepest of sound effects tracks playing: no music, no dialogue. One of the projectionists stood at the doorway of the theater, gawping as the image began to artifact madly, pulsing every forty seconds or so with dozens of bursts of pixelated noise. I couldn’t bear to stay, even if the tics got ironed out: this isn’t what the filmmakers spent a year or more of their life making all the way down to the year-end wire. For your consideration… the future of exhibition in cities small and large and certainly in small towns across America. I thought it was a insult to the people who made the movie, so I left, looking forward to the first screening with 19th century technology—35mm celluloid.
And what happens when reels don’t change properly during 35mm screenings at it all comes to a halt? Or scratches? Or hair/dust in the gate? 35mm prints are already losing their quality within a week of a picture’s run due to exposure. 2 weeks in, they’re significantly reduced. And so on. Digital projection, when done properly, removes those issues. Obviously, here it wasn’t a question of equipment failure, but of format incompatibility.
Look, you can’t go hiding your head in a hole in the ground because of minor glitches. These things will happen from time to time, or have you never been in a projection booth fire?
Hell, half the DVDs I get from Blockbuster freeze up from scratches and fingerprints. But I’m not going back to VHS…
mutinyco–Exactly, man. You can’t refuse to use a new technology because there’s faults to it. Things do improve, especially when given some time. Maybe next up is digital downloads–we’re kind of there already–but still, eventually, things do get better.
No argument with any of the above, y’all. I meant more to indicate how worrisome it is when the people using the machines don’t know how to run them. Someone’s paying rental on the auditorium to show the filmmakers’ work and the ones taking the cash have indicated they’re capable. And, lo and behold, less than 24 hours later, the studio is showing the movie late this afternoon, slotted after three other features at a dedicated screening room… in 35mm. See? Wasn’t that easy?