Multivisual capabilities

Source: The Santa Fe New MexicanAug.mini storage 09--The projection room at the Jean Cocteau Cinema is crowded. There wasn't much room before, with the bulky 35 mm projector and the platter system, a table-based film-transport system that requires less frequent attention than the older projector-mounted film reels. Now, up front, right next to the old projector is a brand new digital projector.Brent Kliewer remembers that the projector in the original Collective Fantasy and in the Jean Cocteau during his tenure was a Brenkert, made in the 1940s. Jon Bowman, the Cocteau's manager now, said that either Blue Pearl or Trans-Lux, the two companies that ran the theater after Kliewer, changed the projector. The one in there now is a 1950s-model Simplex with a yellow Strong Lume-X lightbox.The new equipment includes not only a digital projector but also a Blu-ray player and ?"channels that accommodate different types of input, including streaming from the internet or Skype or an HD cam," Bowman said. "It's a very flexible system."The Cocteau's digital projector is the same model as the new one at the Center for Contemporary Arts. "We have both 35 mm and various digital formats. We can do everything now," said Jason Silverman, film curator for CCA. "We had the best installer in the country come out after we researched this for more than a year. They came out with this incredible equipment that measures the light and color at particular places in the theater, and then that information is used to build a profile for the projector."Silverman explained that the digital projection system there and at the Cocteau is called DCP, short for Digital Cinema Package. "The story on that is that the studios decided they wanted to convert to digital, and they created a coalition to come up with a new format that would retain the quality and also be piracy-secure."The hard drives they send us can only be played on DCP systems. And there are keys you add that have limited time frames on them. On Thursdays we'll get keys for our new week of screenings, we'll plug those in, and that will unlock our films so we can play them for another week."A question: Is digital totally better than film? Or are there aficionados who say something is lost in the translation to digital, similar to audiophiles who maintain that music played via vinyl and analog tape sources iself storage superior to that on compact disc?"I would say that the huge majority of people who go into the Regal Stadium do not know that they converted to digital last November. They can't tell the difference. I've worked with 35 mm film 18 years now, and I love it, but I also love DCP. Yes, film degrades, and there is a certain Zen quality to that: things are born and they die. We had a pristine print of Beasts of the Southern Wild that we showed five times a day for months, and there were places that were a little rough by the end of the run. There is something beautiful about that, but it's also nice to see things as the creator of the piece intended." Silverman said the CCA did the same sort of calibrations for its sound system as it did in generating digital profiles for the picture.Sound has also been upgraded at the Cocteau. At the end of July, there was a bank of large new speakers on the stage. "We have a new Dolby Digital surround-sound system," Bowman said, and there are two additional speakers for the booth and the concessions area -- that's an old trick from drive-in days. I worked at the Silver Dollar Drive-In in Albuquerque, and you could still hear the dialogue when you went to get popcorn and drinks."A new Harkness screen, tailored to digital projection, was on the way to the Cocteau at press time. That should be dandy for a decade or so."I was talking to our installer, Curt Rousse from Taos, and he said the next stage will be large monitors [each one actually a seamless assemblage of hundreds of monitors], so you won't have either screens or projectors any more. That's probably 10 or 15 years out."? Bowman said they intend to hold on to their 35 mm projector for the time being. "One scenario is if we have a guest artist who wants to show a film."But Cocteau owner George R.R. Martin and Bowman will likely get rid of the film equipment at some point, because film versions of movies are being converted to digital and there will be no need to have the old-fashioned projection equipment.By the way, this is a great time to buy a 35 mm projector. "Five years ago, you'd pay $25,000 for one, and now it's more like $3,000," Bowman said.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, N.M.) Visit The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, N.M.) at .santafenewmexican.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉