Film is dead, long live the movies

They had better be working on a new Pirates of the Caribbean movie right now.

Yes, I was among those making this a big boxoffice weekend for the Pirates movie, which was something of a revelation for me.

Little known fact: I was a projectionist through a good chunk of high school and my undergraduate degree. So I'm rather picky about projection quality. Plus, during my doctoral work, I thought a lot about film and video for behavioural analyses. In one of my earliest publications on movement analysis, I wrote, "Film's quality is still unbeatable," that's not true any more.

When we went to see Pirates of the Caribbean today, I noticed just before the movie started a little clip that stated the movie was shown on a digital projector. And I was amazed. The image was uniformly crisp across the screen, in contrast to most screens, which sort of have spots where the picture goes a little soft. I would daresay the Imax films I'd seen would have a hard time matching the image quality (though I haven't seen one of those in a few years, alas).

I honestly wonder if there's any market left for film at all now.

;;;;;

One last lecture tomorrow, and summer class is all over but the marking.