I'm sorry, Todd, but I had the opportunity to go see Toy Story 2 last night with the digital projector, and I leapt at it. If you wanna go again, I'm more than happy to head back into the city and see it again. The movie is decent, but I'll go back and watch that projector any day.
I wasn't sure that I was in the theatre with the digital projector (the AMC 1000 Van Ness has it on two screens, only theatre 2 is digital), so I was carefully watching for the symptoms during the previews, but when the digital portion of the show started there was no question about what we were watching.
Wow. I'd never noticed how much gate weave a movie has before. I never noticed just how much dust and crud a print picks up. Although I knew about it from looking at color theory I'd never noticed the lack of contrast in movie projection before.
Until it was gone.
With live action films you won't notice the improved registration because scanning still isn't registered perfectly, but you will see the higher contrast and lack of dirt. I look forward to the opportunity to see something live action on these projectors.
And there were a few glitches. Despite the excellent temporal anti-aliasing abilities of the RenderMan renderer there were a few scenes where the digital projector seems to introduce some strobing.
Overall, this is the reason I'll pay to go see movies in the theatre, and this is definitely the future of movie projection.
Thursday, December 16th, 1999 danlyke@flutterby.com