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DCP sounds like a great deal for you guys, especially when you can do it (and watch it) in-house and avoid any generation losses.

There will always be some generation loss, but I sure couldn't detect it last night. All of the flaws of the original source material came through completely intact.

 

We had one issue though, which we'll have to catch next year. A few years ago, before we required sound mixes for all of these films, the audio for the show would be quite uneven. So we hired the theater's sound board guy to sit at the back of the house and ride the levels, and balance out the show. Well... we apparently forgot to tell the theater not to do that any more, so despite everything being mixed to theatrical standards, he kept adjusting the volume during the show, effectively ruining the hard work of our mixer, Ben.

 

Now, of the 540 or so people there, probably only 4 or 5 of us could hear something was amiss. But it was still frustrating, and something else to add to next year's list.

 

That, and the Keynote slides before the show (seen in the picture above) need to be done at 1920x1080.

 

Someday... someday.

Update - added links for two more films:

 

Janine Chang - SunBurn

Tom Law - This Actually Happens A Lot

Congrats on another show.

Thanks - it's always a relief to have them over with. Some year, I wonder what it would be like to just go and watch one without any involvement whatsoever.

 

No more film links yet, but here are the official photos taken at the event.

And the official write-up of the evening.

There will always be some generation loss, but I sure couldn't detect it last night. All of the flaws of the original source material came through completely intact.

Seems to me if your workflow output video to JPEG 2000 as per the DCSS spec that you would avoid any loss.

That may happen at some point, but at the moment broad support for the codec (or XYZ color space) just isn't there. Plus, our need for DCPs is (currently) too minimal to make that sort of a shift. The whole Film School standardized on ProRes 422 (HQ) a few years ago, since it's a good balance between file size and image quality, and has modest CPU requirements for playback. But I think that will change, as Final Cut Pro fades away into irrelevance.

That may happen at some point, but at the moment broad support for the codec (or XYZ color space) just isn't there. Plus, our need for DCPs is (currently) too minimal to make that sort of a shift. The whole Film School standardized on ProRes 422 (HQ) a few years ago, since it's a good balance between file size and image quality, and has modest CPU requirements for playback. But I think that will change, as Final Cut Pro fades away into irrelevance.

I'm sure you're right. Assuming you can avoid generation losses during production, then you only take a minor hit on the final conversion. What's more likely is your workflow will become uncompressed as increases in CPU, network and disk space capacity make compression less relevant (just like DCSS uses uncompressed audio). So again the video will only be compressed once. Colorspace conversion will probably still be required unfortunately.

Uncompressed would be nice, but it's a ways off (although all of our still images prior to compiling into video are, in fact, uncompressed). The problem is, even as computers (mainly drive speeds) get to the point where they can play uncompressed in real time, storage here is a huge issue. We can currently only give students a meager 125 GB each. And at some point, we'll be moving to 4K resolution, which is going to require an entirely different infrastructure than we have.

 

I really hoped HD would be the end of this endless cycle of format changes... but it's just the tip of the iceberg.

 

One thing that will help a lot, I think, is that SSDs will ultimately achieve price per gigabyte parity with hard drives. I'm pretty terrible at predicting technology anymore, but I think within 10 years, we'll see 64 TB SSDs for under $500 each.

I really hoped HD would be the end of this endless cycle of format changes... but it's just the tip of the iceberg.

At least DCSS locks down the format and compression to a reasonable number of options.

One thing that will help a lot, I think, is that SSDs will ultimately achieve price per gigabyte parity with hard drives. I'm pretty terrible at predicting technology anymore, but I think within 10 years, we'll see 64 TB SSDs for under $500 each.

The Crucial M500 is 960GB for $600 - so you're looking for 2^6 over 120 months, or a doubling every 20 months. That might happen, although I think there will be some physical density challenges.

Update - added:

 

Tom Law (and many others) - Opening Titles