Dpp1978
Posts: 1007
Joined: 2/4/2006
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quote:
ORIGINAL: st3veebee
quote:
ORIGINAL: Darth Marenghi
Kodak's new laser projection technology is supposed to be twice as bright as the current 3D systems, so that should make a big difference in the next couple of years.
See: this makes no sense to me. Dark scenes at nighttime with shadows or black exteriors can't really get brighter. Black is black so it will always look duller...no?
No racist.
If the film-maker intends the scene to be very dark so that very little can be seen that is one thing. However if things the film-maker intends to be seen are obscured by bad projection, poor mastering, or any other issues, that is another. It is very easy for scenes which are designed to be dark but not completely black to become all but incomprehensible simply because there isn't enough light to illuminate the darkest parts of the picture or the print being shown was made a few points too dark.
Conversely there may be times when things which were never meant to be seen are in view due to the image being too bright. On at least one release of Citizen Kane on DVD a young Joseph Cotten is visible in a scene where his character should have been well into old age. Whoever made the master had that scene too bright so what should have been a faceless, shadowy figure was clearly, and anachronistically recognisable.
It is all about what photographers might call exposure latitude, and engineers might call dynamic range. Both basically refer to the difference between the minimum and maximum value of information possible to be captured on a particular medium and how many graduations there are between them, and whatever you call it, it amounts to much the same thing. Photographers measure latitude in stops.
A stop is simply a way of measuring dynamic range where each stop doubles the amount of potential information capable of being stored. A one stop black and white system would have 2 tones: totally black or totally white. A two stop system would have black and white but 2 shades of grey between them: or 4 tones. 3 stops would have 8 tones; 4 stops 16; 5 stops 32 and so on. the more stops you have the more precise the information you can capture. A colour system simply has different different elements sensitive to different parts or the light spectrum, each of which will ideally be equally sensitive. So a 5 stop colour system would have 32 tones for each of the primary colours.
Those who have read my witterings in the past will know consumer video is 8bits per channel: that is each of the three primary colours is stored to a precision of 8 bits.
8 bit in video terms is more or less equivalent to 8 photographic stops (the difference is in how the information is spread out across the tonal range rather than how many discrete tones there are). In fact bit and stop can be pretty well used interchangeably in imaging terms. 8 stops/bits allows for 256 tones between minimum and maximum. If your camera has a 14 bit sensor, it has a 14 stop theoretical exposure latitude (that is 16,384 tones per channel). I say theoretical as what is possible under lab conditions and what is possible in the real world are very different.
A high quality film negative can theoretically have up to 20 stops of information. That is a mind boggling 1,048,576 tones between minimum and maximum which incidentally is far more than the best human eye could ever discern and far more than a release print or digital print.
What has this to do with your question?
Well the footage as captured will have more dynamic range than will ever be used. The Joseph Cotten example is an example of where more was captured at the brighter end of the scale, and a properly prepared print or master would be timed or graded to be much darker than the negative. That means some information will be lost, but that is unavoidable, and in fact beneficial: if you were to project a print with the same levels as a negative it would look very washed out.
However if you print it too dark you lose detail in the darker end of the spectrum, leading to impenetrable shadows where detail is supposed to be seen. The Star Wars DVDs from 2004 were widely criticised for being too dark (which may or may not be the case) as was the Blu-ray of Coppola's Dracula.
It is akin to setting up your TV. The two most important controls are contrast and brightness which control the point at which your TV sets white and black clipping points. If your set is poorly set up you can lose information in the shadows and/or in the whites, or reveal elements which were never intended to be seen.
Similarly an under illuminated cinema screen will lose details which are meant to be present in the shadows, as well as limiting the peak brightness of the screen- it dramatically reduces the dynamic range of the image. This leads to a poor viewing experience as the most important things in picture quality are: dynamic range, black level and peak white level. Resolution comes a distant fifth after colour saturation.
So to answer your question, yes black is black, but what is important is the information just above the black level. If you lose too much of that the image will look dark and murky, much like your experience of the 3D version of Thor.
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RE: Mark Kermode's 3 D Boycott - 
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