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MillimeterPerfect Projection
Dec 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
Addressing the State of the Art of Digital Projection.
Cars Director John Lasseter sweetened the prospects of achieving “perfect projection” on the digital release of the film by offering a trip to San Francisco, a private Pixar tour, and lunch on him as a sweepstakes prize.
When filmmakers bring their projects to Sundance this year, they needn't bring film at all. Like many modern festivals, Sundance uses digital projection. But if a fledgling movie gets picked up for theatrical distribution, the cost of striking 35mm prints can then loom large.
Gary Weaver, a senior VP at Buena Vista, puts the price at about $1,500 per print. When you consider that the Pixar/Disney release Cars opened in 3,814 U.S. film theaters and just 210 digital venues last June, you get a sense of the film-related costs still prevalent today. And Cars was actually a leader in the push towards digital projection. “At that time, Cars was the largest digital release,” Weaver says.
While the costs of making film prints (and replacing damaged ones) can be significant, the price of supporting multiple digital platforms is still uncertain. Despite support from the National Associtation of Theater Owners (NATO) and the studios' agreement on Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) specifications, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) must still take the DCI specs and develop a standard. “There's no question that 2006 was a challenging year digitally, because we've got MPEG and JPEG versions out there,” Weaver says. “Interoperability has not kicked in yet. We're supporting all the platforms, but it's pretty much a free-for-all at this point.”
It was against this backdrop that Pixar and Disney used the release of Cars to pursue what they call “perfect projection” — for both film and digital theaters. What the Pixar/Disney team and its colleagues at Dolby and Technicolor discovered in the process opened a window on the varied landscape of movie projection today.
Pixar/Disney distributed Cars trading cards with each print of the film, which featured Cars characters on the front and projection checklists on the back to ensure projectionists could access the information.
The Artists' Impetus
Not surprisingly, Pixar's current focus on the state of theatrical projection was pushed by Cars director John Lasseter and The Incredibles' Brad Bird. Lasseter's last directorial effort was 1999's Toy Story 2 (which was also Pixar's first digital release), and he was keen to mobilize theaters to show Cars with optimal brightness, color, sharpness, and sound. “The projectionist is the last step of the production team for our movies,” Lasseter says on projection.pixar.com, a Pixar website created specifically for projectionists. “Without them, we wouldn't be who we are.”
Pixar's website delineates the ideal specifications for presenting Cars both digitally and on film. It also encourages projectionists to post comments and questions, and at its launch, it sweetened the invitation with a rewards program, including a sweepstakes. The top prize-winning projectionist and three guests would be flown to San Francisco for three days and given a private Pixar tour and lunch on Lasseter.
“We had almost 600 projectionists hit the website when Cars opened,” says Paul Cichocki, Pixar's head of postproduction. Projection checklists were also printed on the backs of ‘Trading Cards’ featuring Cars characters, which were sent with every film print. “We wanted to make sure that the hands-on projectionist who opened the film can would get our information directly,” Cichocki says. “Another set went to digital theaters with an additional card containing information about digital projection.”
The Right Stuff
“Digital is the native resolution of Pixar's technology, and we're always pushing it,” Cichocki says. “CG material just looks fantastic on a digital screen, and even laymen can see the advantage.” It may even be reasonable to think that the explosion of computer-animated features might be prodding the growth of digital venues. But having to record this computer-generated movie onto film was a necessity Pixar and Disney had to face. Working with Technicolor, the team pursued an intensive strategy.
For six months before Pixar delivered Cars' negative, Cichocki met regularly with experts from Technicolor, Kodak, and Disney, focusing on ways to make Cars look better on film. Kodak helped by storing sufficient quantities of its Vision Premier color print film. “Every time we output a negative or made a print, it was on the same emulsion batch and looked similar,” Cichocki says.
At Technicolor, Tim Reynolds led the team that used Sci-Tech Award-winning technology to provide Pixar with the ability to previz final color as it could be timed and adjusted in the photochemical world. Cichocki credits Technicolor with ensuring continuity across the six reels in Cars.
“They put up reels in continuity, and only printed whatever they could in a 24-hour period,” Chichocki says. “This made the film version of Cars look consistently great. We also made 25 original negatives so that prints struck from those negatives were as close to the original digital format as we could make them.” As a final check, Disney had Dolby review every 25
The Real-world Test
Even with this exceptional level of pre-release scrutiny, Disney remained vigilant after Cars' release. Dolby was hired to run a month-long hotline with which projectionists could call engineers with questions. “Calls to the hotline were almost nonexistent after the first weekend,” says Dolby's Ted Costas, who directs production services.
Despite Disney's concerns about the problems of projecting film — the inevitable scratches, breaks, etc. — there were many more questions about digital projection. “Sometimes a projectionist would say, ‘We can't get an image on screen,’ so they'd be told to shut down and reboot,” Weaver says. “Digital does have issues, like loading content and operator error. Digital projectionists are still being trained by the projector manufacturers, and every week, new locations are added.”
One recurring source of difficulty involved handling the security keys used in digital projection, which had to be changed weekly for Cars. “Projectionists don't necessarily know how to read the ‘In’ date on their key, and where to call to get one,” Weaver says. “Requiring them to change keys on a weekly basis may be cumbersome, but the likelihood that they'll go dark is less. They'll know that every Thursday night their key is going to expire, and before the first show on Friday they've got to load another key. With the advent of digital, knowing about keys and getting hard drives loaded and rebooted is putting more attention on projectionists.”
Boots on the Ground
While Dolby monitored hotline calls, its people were also among a small army that Disney had checking the theaters screening Cars.
Dolby used a letter system for grading picture and sound, in which any theater scoring 90 points out of 100 received an ‘A.’ “We hit about 400 major market complexes around the country,” Costas says. Compared to what Dolby found when it visited theaters for 2004's The Incredibles, Costas says, “There was an 8-percent rise in perfect projection scores. Either people are paying more attention or things are just getting better.” Some of the theaters checked were digital venues, and the scores were equivalent.
Disney also used its own Buena Vista Network of college students to check out theater presentations, and it contracted Technicolor's Entertainment Services to attend shows and contact theater managers to correct any problems. While Disney has made multi-pronged monitoring efforts before, Weaver says, “It's the first time we've gone this wide.”
After all this attention, Cichocki felt having more than 95 percent of theaters scoring an ‘A’ was a great validation. He knows some film theaters will keep their bulbs turned down to make them last longer, and those screens won't appear as bright as they should be. Sound levels will also vary constantly, because few projectionists have tools to test whether speakers are at the right level and in phase. Despite his hopes for a digital projection future, Cichocki says, “Digital is still in its infancy and there are definitely problems. For some theaters, Cars was their first digital release. We're all still learning.”
A Fitting Irony
When John Lasseter reached into a spinning drum to select Cars' grand prize-winning projectionist, Pixar's partners from Disney and Dolby were standing by. Ironically, the name Lasseter chose couldn't have lived further from Pixar's leading-edge world. He picked Danny Meyer, a projectionist at the single-screen Lock One Theater in New Bremen, Ohio (population 3,000). While this theater has only 94 seats, it boasts a history dating back to 1913, when adults paid a dime and children a nickel to see three-reelers. There was something fitting about the prize going to a theater where a projectionist's attention to detail does make a difference. When Pixar's head of postproduction, Paul Cichocki, phoned the theater to tell Danny about his San Francisco trip, the Pixar veteran came away amazed. “His supervisor said Danny had never been on an airplane before,” Chichocki says.
