james cameron again you disappoint me as ex retired projectionist
The ex retired projectionist, are you talking about you or James cameron? If it is you, maybe this is where your anger comes from - with Digital Cinema, projectionists were simply not needed any more. I once met a retired one in Greece. Within one year he was out - and even had to install many digital projectors in the Thessaloniki area.
With Digital Cinema, you get a harddisk, copy the content (A DCP file) to the projectors's internal one, make a playlist for the evening, preset the loudness for each element
(Advertisments, trailers, main feature) push a button and walk away.
The staff selling the tickets does this now.
A friend of mine from the GDR lost his job after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A qualified projectionist in the eastern block was trained over three years for the skills to plan and build a cinema. Training was about optics as well as physics of sound. Of course, they repaired everything themselves. Skills that were not needed in the West.
The result:
When screening my own film in different cinemas, the sharpness had to be checked, sometimes the projectors were slightly off.
There was always problems with the sound. (Simple 5.1)
In one cinema, when peaks like drums were playing, they scattered all around the room and the projectionist was unable to find the error in his Dolby-Pro Logic setup.
In another cinema, the left channel was too low, in a large open air venue - that mixed down to mono because surround does not work well in large open spaces -
music and Sound-FX were muted about 6dB.
This would not have happened with trained projectionists.
But back to topic: Digital Cinema and the process of color timing has indisputable advantages over analog.
You can debate the source, camera negative or RAW-File. It is more a debate about aesthetics.
And of course safer long-time storage of film over digital.
But the latest generation of digital ARRI movie cameras has a latitude higher than slow film stocks.
In analog times, what we got to see on the screen was about the 8th to 9th dub-generation of the camera negative.
With Color-Timing it alone took 5 generations from the negative to the master for mass copying. And of course this master was dubbed
for sub masters to make the final cinema print. And each print, errors do not pile up evenly, like hiss on a tape.
Batches of film stock are slightly uneven because the chemistry changes during production. And the master wears during copying.
Then projection: When I went to a cinema to watch a film, I tried to watch it in the first days because the copy quickly wears.
But with digital, you scan the negative and keep its latitude, very fine grain and sharpness - no loss at all way up to the master for the DCPs.
DCP is the JPEG2000 based codec for cinematic projection.
Sound btw. is uncompressed, discrete channels, i.e. 24bits/48KHz/6 mono audio files for 5.1 surround sound
With digital, you can color correct even parts of the image using masks, something that was not possible in analog times using color wheels.
Here is a nice writeup:
MAKING THE GRADE Special Report / DI Grading MAKING THE GRADE Special Report / DI GRADING During this magazine's lifetime, the role of the person
britishcinematographer.co.uk
Last but not least, your whole statement is wrong: The trailer you present as "wrong colour" is different from the DCP projected in the cinema - gamma is different, LUTs are different and of course the trailer is mastered to pop in bright environments, on youtube, on portable devices. The DCP is a diffent breed, allowing subtleties in a dark environment.
