Is a curved screen really neccesary? - Page 2

At the risk of the Pixel Fanatics coming after me... I wouldn't bother adjusting zooms and overscan between lens-in and lens-out.

We're talking a few pixels here. Make one adjustment that'll cover everything and leave it bolted in place.

Overscan so that your main formats - 16:9, 1.85:1, 2.40:1 all fit within the screen's masked area, heightwize.

You'll lose a few pix from the 16:9 stuff, as it spills onto the masking, but any director who claims you have to see EVERY pixel in his frame is

1. Lying.
2. A fanatic.
3. A poor director (he makes his audience go to so much trouble because he didn't shoot properly).

All films are meant to be masked to some extent. They're shot with that possibility, nay probability in mind. You can afford to lose a few pixels to get rid of annoying black slivers between the top of your image and the top of your screen.

If you get too bound up with aspect ratios and deterministic set-ups where you try to get everything right (and then find out you forgot something that ruins it all) you WILL go crazy.

Overscan by about 3/4" to 1" top and bottom and you'll find everything fits,and what you lose by it being cropped with masking you won't notice (because you can't see it).

Here's a true story of a deterministic user who was so finicky he outsmarted himself (a recent installation of one of my lenses that I witnessed, mouth agape): the owner of the theater got 6 roller coats of black paint on his walls and roof, plus another 4 sprayed on top of the roller coats. The spray painter used too fine a mist and, as each new coat of sprayed paint went on. Each new coat stuck to the existing coats, eventually forming 'whiskers" made of paint. Nice and matt, nice and black... but you couldn't touch it!

The installers took three days to complete the installation, something that should have taken 4 hours. They couldn't touch anything without deforming the fine "whiskers" of spray paint and leaving a mark. Every day the owner checked for marks. The installers were paranoid. You couldn't even use gloves... gloves left a mark! and they never knew when the owner was going to make a surprise visit for a spot check.

I was there on the last day, supervising the set-up of one of my lenses. All we had to do was put the CineSlide (GetGray's motorized sled) in place. It took 5 hours, with laser levels, trembling hands and much sweat wiped off many brows. We couldn't touch the ceiling until the exact time that the CineSlide was put into place. Everything had to be measured in advance, then double checked. Then triple checked. We couldn't slide the sled around because that would have marked the ceiling.

A difficult client to work for? Too deterministic.Too obsessive about everything being perfect to even accommodate his workers.

After the installation was complete, the carpenter walked in and commented that the owner was going to be upset the first time the dog came in and pooped on the carpet. Someone said, "He'll hit the ROOF!". Quick as a flash the carpenter replied, "THAT'LL leave a mark!". We all agreed we'd like to be there when that happened.

Moral of the story: don't worry about the fine details. Just leave yourself enough room for the inevitable mistakes you're going to make.

(The original, roller painter had walked out on this owner, owed $3,000... he told the owner to keep it. It was worth it to get out of there.)

You know you're going to have to start a thread with details on how to duplicate that paint job now

I assume you're kidding?

It was a combination of the extra coasts of spray paint. As each coat was applied the whiskers of of built up on top of other whiskers. The only problem was that no-one could work sensibly with it. Nice finish, but failed the "practical" test.

And then there's that dog, just waiting to crap on the carpet, or wee against the wall.

Fargeddaboudit.

Yes and no , I'd never want to use it for the practical reasons you state, but I can see someone on the forum wanting to try to duplicate it.

This is exactly correct. I wont say that there aren't those obsessive directors out there who might compose their images to exacting dimensions, but the truth is that most simply adjust the camera until the composition looks right and the resulting overall image is what they are after. It's not some kind of exact science where a few pixels lost to overscan destroy the overall artistic intent of the director. In fact, there is some "slop" automatically built into the framing process since the director / DP can never count on proper masking or setup when the film is projected in the theater. Overscan is just a fact of life as films make their way from production to projection.

Interestingly, one of the things I have become even more aware of during our conversations with studios is how much filmmakers will tinker with the framing during the transfer to video, since they have this type of luxury now thanks to digital transfer / editing technology. The framing you saw in the theater might be modified by the time the film makes it to home video. The idea that there is some kind of "perfect framing" that represents the pure artistic expression of the director - and one that should not be tinkered with - is mostly a myth. All of that said, I think all of us who love films want the overall image composition and artistic intention of the director / DP to be translated as accurately as possible to the medium we choose to view it on.

It was an unintended result of the original painter (the one who rolled the first 6 coats) getting fed up with the client, packing his tins and rollers and fleeing the scene (not even waiting for the $3-large the client owed him).

The spray painter was brought in to "finish" the job and, as far as I can ascertain, used too fine a nozzle, resulting in tiny globules of paint being almost dry before they hit the surface. As a result they stuck to the highest point on that surface, which was the previous half-dry glob of paint. This is how the "whiskers" built up.

Let me assure you that no-one should ever want to go there. It was perfect, until you actually used the room. Like putting velour up on the walls that showed every finger touch.

Interestingly, there was a spot up the back of the room behind some curtains where the electricians looked like they'd had played "patty-cake, patty-cake, baker's man" with the wall. Grubby finger marks everywhere. I got some lens wipe cloths that I supply with my lenses to get the customers set up with proper cleaning tools, wet one with distilled water and simply wiped the mark away. No detergent, just water and a soft, light wiping motion.

Of course it left a terrible dark mark, and the installers freaked. But after 15 minutes it dried pretty-well perfect. You really had to look to see it, or the original oopsie.

Then, like one of those doctors who injects his own vaccine to prove it works, I deliberately made a mark myself. There was nearly a riot (can you have a riot with only three people in the room? These guys gave it a shot anyway). There was no choice but to apply my patented clean-up technique. Again, it worked perfectly.

I reckoned we had a winning strategy, and advised them to use it to clean up any marks they made trying to install the Cineslide.

It was inevitable... trying to manually manipulate about 6 kilos of motors, mechanics and lens onto the correct spot, all the while holding all this weight above your head (yep, one of the installers was just under 7 feet tall) - and get it first time perfect - was bound to end in tears.

("Why didn't they use a ladder?" I hear you ask... they were petrified at the thought of a greasy head of hair bumping up against the ceiling).

I think a knuckle hit the paint and left a streak just as the final screws were being driven in. Whose knuckle it was remained a mystery. There had been a lot of straining hands involved at one time or another.

Let's just say one minute there was a perfect 9 coats of paint and the next... what with all the huffing and puffing, and cries of "I can't hold this bloody thing up here much longer!"... there was an interstate highway exactly one knuckle wide running across it for about 6 inches. The mark really stood out. It was a doozy, a finger mark fit for Ripley's Believe It Or Not.

I went to apply The Technique and they grabbed me, forcibly restraining me. "Shorty" (the 7 foot tall guy) stood physically between me and the projector and just wagged his finger at me from side to side, saying, "No." OK, so it was their installation, not mine, but I was only trying to help.

Sheesh... some people are sensitive...

They knew the lens wipe with the distilled water would work, as I had demonstrated it twice, but all their courage had been drained out of them. After four hours of laser measuring, discussion, work-shopping and brainstorming, that mark in the last 20 seconds of the install had left them emotionally drained, mere shells of their former selves.

I never found out whether they finally did fix it, or whether (the preferred explanation to the client when he came around on his daily scuff-mark audit of the installation) they blamed "the electricians", who were by now long gone from the site. It was about 6 inches away from a cable conduit, so it could have been the sparkies, filthy devils.

One concrete result for me was that I went home and wrote some software to calculate the precise position of the screw holes, relative to the projector case, so that marking up the vital first hole in the owner's new roof was less a matter of chance and more a matter of science. I translate these into 3D AutoCad drawings, fully dimensioned, that I can email to the installer's iPhone. Half a dozen successful - scuff-mark free - installations later and I'm fairly confident that it all works in a practical sense.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

P.S. Lens Cleaning Wipes
If anyone's interested in the wipes I use, here they are: http://onboardsolutions.com/clean-room/comsumables/wipes-3/bemcot-wipes/

Bemcot S-2 wipes.

These are single strand, residue-free cotton wipes suitable for clean-room use. Very soft, almost lint free (if used wet, which you must always do), and - surprisingly - about the same price as Kleenex (which you should NEVER EVER use to clean lenses with).

Roll them into a cigaratte shape, soak the end with solvent and wipe in a continuous spiral motion, starting at the centre and moving outwards. Then discard after one use (but you DO get 150 per pack, so that's not much of a problem).
Edited by Aussie Bob II - 11/23/12 at 3:12pm

That's what they have those dotted lines on the video replay monitor for: "safe area."

I have a JVC projector and set the mask to "2.5%". Everything but 2.40:1 scope movies and 1.85:1 Academy Aperture stuff is cropped to the exact size (height, width, or both) of the screen.

Haven't had a missing-pixel-induced nervous breakdown since.