A digital offer the father of the 'The Godfather' didn't refuse

<I>On a bank of computer monitors, The Godfather's opening scene began to play;

the melancholy trumpet; the now famous line: "I believe in America...," and

slowly forming out of the blackness is the face of a man seeking vengeance.

 

Stop everything. Coppola, a famous perfectionist, told the technicians: "I want

his head to look like it's floating in purgatory." ...<P>

One area where the team came up short was in reproducing the same kind of

blacks. The sad truth is that digital technology doesn't block out light as well

as film, so it doesn't produce the blackest black. This was important for The

Godfather, as the movie was one of the darkest ever made.<P>

 

"With film you have light shining through a piece of acetate or some base that

has some property blocking light," Baggelaar said. "The light is actually being

blocked to create black. But in a digital projection scenario, there is always

light being thrown out by a projector. Just like an LCD monitor, unless you turn

it off it's not really black. One of the technical challenges was giving them

the blackness that they wanted with the limitations of the equipment. I think we

did a nice job by the end. "...<P>MPI always works in the same resolution as the

original negative, typically 4096 x 3112 pixels or, in industry lingo, "4K." By

digital camera standards, that's not much: only 8 megapixels. But by video

standards, that's a whopping amount: A single frame on 4k can be 50 megabytes,

said Bill Baggelaar, MPI's vice president of engineering. At a rate of 24-frames

per second, the numbers add up fast.

 

For example, The Godfather trilogy required 160 terabytes of storage, Baggelaar

said. </I><P>

 

 

 

great reading!<P>

 

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9961707-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

Interesting article, but I don't understand his comment about blacks. This depends entirely on the projector technology and the room. Plasmas, for example, produce very deep, rich blacks.

I should note I'm thinking about more than just "projectors" here, as plasma flat screens don't use a projector design.

and from there, inevitably to Christopher Doyle.

In the good ol days of film projection in theaters the lamp house used arc carbon lighting then later went to zeon bulbs and the sight glass on the side of the lamphouse that one used to adjust the carbons or verify the bulb operation were #10 shade welding glass. The sun will look like a dot when viewed thru one. I am not up to date with digital projection in theaters but the light source is going to simularly bright and it is easy to understand that achieving deep blacks will be difficult.

Interesting article, though, like many about making movies, a little confused...

 

About the blacks: Film prints also have a problem with blacks from three sources.

First, ambient light in the theater destroys blacks more than anything else. Second, the

black in a film print is not truly opaque. This is especially true of color prints. The dyes

used to create black in a color print is not as opaque as the silver in a true black and white

print.

Third, if the projector bulb is not bright enough, not enough contrast is projected to make

the blacks seem truly black either. In fact blacks don't look really black in a movie unless

there is some lighter parts of the frame. A completely black frame reveals a dimly lit white

screen after one's eyes get used to the darkness.

 

To be fair to "The Godfather", I believe it was originally released in technicolor which were

dye sub prints that used superior dyes than standard color prints. I'm not entirely sure

about "Godfather 1", but I'm quite sure that "Godfather 2" was the last movie released in

Technicolor before the dye sub equipment was shipped off to China. Technicolor could

produce a more opaque black than the traditional Eastman Color prints.

 

About digital projection: I've seen many very bad digital projectors in theaters where the

chief problem was the poor blacks. That said on occasion, I've seen some very good

digital projection in a couple screening rooms that rivaled film in the black department and

blew away film in the color and stability department.

 

About the transmissive properties of digital projection, DLP projectors use mirrors and a

black pixel should not have any exposure if the mirror is in the off position. Almost black

might be a problem though...

 

On the whole, film prints that we see at the multiplex today often look pretty awful

compared to the film print that Mr. Coppola remembers seeing at the Studio in 1972. In

fact they look so bad, that, for me, I'm looking forward to digital projection improving things

a great deal.

 

Thanks Ellis for sharing the article.

Good topic, Ellis. Sort of coincides with my discovering the work several nights ago of

a fantastic fairly unknown cinematographer by the name of Emmanuel Kadosh.

 

Just saw his work last Friday night in Jean-Claude Van Damme's action flick "Wake of

Death". I'm not a fan of Van Damme in general but got sucked in on this one just on

the look of the cinematography and it's treatment of blacks viewed on my Toshiba TV

calibrated by eye using a THX density target on DVD.

 

Kadosh really knows lighting. The shadow roll off on faces created incredibly natural

definition that resembled Danish and German photography without looking

Draganized. Everything looks like it was shot under low natural lighting with catch light

reflectors or softbox where everything remained tack sharp and well defined into the

shadows unlike The Godfather which has a sort of soft texture focus to it.

 

The look of Wake of Death was only apparant seen on my TV because when I viewed

YouTube and IMDB video previews on my i1 Display calibrated iMac, much of the

shadow roll off like on the sides of faces became abrupt and plunged into solid black

with a sort of high contrast appearance. I guess this is because of TV broadcast's

preamp gamma boost or the way film gamma differs from computer display gamma.

Not sure.

 

I don't know if this flick was shot on film or digital but it just grabbed my attention. Even

an IMDB review took note of the cinematography. Check it out when you get the

chance.