dcp

24fps or 25fps, which is best?

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The monitor overlays here show how “Annabel Lee” was shot at 24fps with a shutter angle of 172.8 to prevent flickering of non-incandescent light sources, a typical recipe for UK filmmakers today.

An article of mine from 2014 weighing the merits of shooting at 24 vs. 25 frames per second has recently been getting a lot of hits. I’m surprised that there’s still so much uncertainty around this issue, because for me it’s pretty clear-cut these days.

When I started out making films at the turn of the millennium, 25fps (or its interlaced variant, 50i) was the only option for video. The tapes ran at that speed and that was that. Cathode ray tube TVs were similarly inflexible, as was PAL DVD when it emerged.

Film could be shot at 24fps, and generally was for theatrical movies, since most cinema projectors only run at that speed, but film for television was shot at 25fps.

Three big technological shifts occurred in the late noughties: the delivery of video over the internet, flat-screen TVs and tapeless cameras. All of these support multiple frame rates, so gradually we found that we had a choice. At the start of a shoot, as a DP I would have to ask which frame rate to set.

The frame rate and resolution menu from my old Canon 600D, the first time I owned a camera that could shoot 24fps.

Americans and others in NTSC regions are in a different situation. Their TV standard of 30fps has a discernibly different look to the international movie standard of 24fps, so the choice of frame rate is as much creative as it is technical. I don’t think anyone can tell the difference between 24 and 25fps, even on a subconscious level, so in Europe it seems we must decide on a purely technical basis.

But in fact, the decision is as much about what people are used to as anything else. I shot a feature film pilot once on 35mm at 25fps and it really freaked out the lab simply because they weren’t used to it.

I shot the 35mm pilot for “The Dark Side of the Earth” (2008) at 25fps because tapes still played a part in postproduction at that time. Today I would not hesitate to shoot at 24.

And what people seem to be most used to and comfortable with in the UK today is 24fps. It offers the most compatibility with digital cinemas and Blu-ray without needing frame rate conversion. (Some cinemas can play 25fps DCPs, and Blu-rays support 25fps in a 50i wrapper which might not play in a lot of US machines, but 24 is always a safer bet for these formats.)

Historically, flickering of non-incandescent light sources and any TV screens in shot was a problem when shooting 24fps in the UK. These days it’s very easy to set your shutter to 172.8° (if your camera measures it as an angle) or 1/50th (if your camera measures it as an interval). This ensures that every frame – even though there are 24 of them per second – captures 1/50th of a second, in sync with the 50Hz mains supply.

 

The Times when 25fps is best

There are some situations in which 25fps is still the best or only option though, most notably when you’re shooting something intended primarily for broadcast on a traditional TV channel in the UK or Europe. The same goes if your primary distribution is on PAL DVD, which I know is still the case for certain types of corporate and educational videos.

Once I was puzzled by a director’s monitor not working on a short film shoot, and discovered that it didn’t support 24fps signals, so I had to choose 25 as my frame rate for that film. So it might be worth checking your monitors if you haven’t shot 24fps with them before.

“Finding Hope” was shot at 25fps simply because the director’s monitor wouldn’t accept 24fps signals.

Finally, if your film contains a lot of archive material or stock footage at 25fps, it makes sense to match that frame rate.

Whichever frame rate you ultimately choose, always discuss it with your postproduction team ahead of time to make sure that you’re all on the same page.

24fps or 25fps, which is best?

A Post-lockdown Trip to the Cinema

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This article first appeared on RedShark News last month.

What’s wrong with this picture? Apparently nothing, if you work for the Light.

As I write this, I’ve just got back from my first trip to the cinema in six months. Although they have been allowed to reopen in England since July 4th, the higher operating costs in the pandemic kept many cinemas dark well into August. On Friday the 21st, my local branch of the Light here in Cambridge finally opened its doors, and I went along to experience post-Covid cinema.

Studios have been shifting their release dates throughout the lockdown, with some films giving up on theatrical exhibition altogether, so the Light, like its competitors, has filled its screens with classics for now. I selected Jurassic Park, which I haven’t seen on the big screen since its original release in 1993.

When I arrived, the lobby was dark and almost empty. Like most public spaces, it had sprouted new signage and a one-way system since March, and it took me a couple of attempts to find the right lane. Once inside the main corridor though, little had changed except the odd hand sanitiser dispenser on the wall.

I found my screen and took a seat. As with everything from trains to swimming pools, pre-booking is now strongly recommended, due to the diminished capacity caused by social distancing. When you pick your seat, the website makes you leave two empties between your party and the next. You can even pre-purchase your popcorn and bucket of cola.

I needn’t have booked, however. In a screen of about 100 seats, exactly ten were occupied. It will take the general public a while to cotton on that cinema-going is an option again, even before they decide whether they feel comfortable doing so.

As I sat masked and expectant, my hands sticky from sanitiser that refused to evaporate, I was treated to a rare site: a cinema employee inside the auditorium. He announced that they didn’t have any ads or trailers yet, so they would delay starting the film to give everyone a chance to arrive.

A few minutes later, the man reappeared and asked us all to decamp to the corridor. Apparently they had installed a new sound system, and they needed to test it, which could be very loud. Why they couldn’t have checked the system for eardrum bursting at some point in the last six months is beyond me.

The ten of us duly waited in the corridor. A snatch of the Imperial March from an adjacent screen betokened another classic being wheeled out. A woman with a spray bottle and a cloth, masked like all of her colleagues, worked her way down the corridor, cleaning the door handles. A group next to me (but, I hasten to add, appropriately distant) cracked jokes about the sex appeal of Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcom. Another group, evidently missing the trailers, watched one on a phone. (If that doesn’t sum up the existential crisis facing cinema, I don’t know what does.)

At last we were readmitted. The lights dimmed, the sounds of a jungle faded up on the brand new sound system, and the Universal logo appeared. But the trademark globe looked like a deflated football. The film was being projected in the wrong aspect ratio. And not just slightly. It was almost unwatchably stretched, like the flat 1.85:1 images were being shown through a 2:1 anamorphic lens.

By the time the first scene was dissolving away to Bob Peck’s cries of “Shoot her!” the problem hadn’t been corrected, so I stepped out to find a member of staff. The senior person on duty claimed that the problem lay with the file supplied by the distributor, not with the projection. “There’s nothing I can do,” he insisted, while I goggled over my mask in disbelief.

At this point, had I not had this article to write, I would have gone home and watched the film on Netflix, or even on DVD. (There’s that existential crisis again.) But I persevered, trying not to imagine Dean Cundey weeping tears of frustration into his beard.

Fortunately, Jurassic Park is such a great film that it could be appreciated even in the face of such technical incompetence. A larger audience would have been nice, to enjoy the scares and humour with, though since screaming and laughing project dangerous droplets further, perhaps that’s less than ideal these days.

Overall, I must say that I found the experience of going to the cinema less altered than many other aspects of life. I’ve got used to wearing a mask, so much so that I was halfway home before I remembered to take it off, and I normally avoid peak times so the emptiness didn’t feel too unusual.

But with the rise in streaming subscriptions during lockdown, and the understandable caution that many feel about going out, cinemas will need to work much harder to get bums back on flip-up seats. The kind of technical troubles that the Light suffered tonight will only strengthen the case for staying at home, mask-free and pyjama-clad, where you can control both the virus and the aspect ratio.

A week after writing this, I went to a Showcase to see Tenet. The member of staff who took our tickets unequivocally told us that the printed screen number was wrong, and that we should go to another one. We did so. The ads and trailers finally started, fifteen minutes late. We were just wondering why they were trailing such kid-friendly movies when another member of staff came in and told us that Tenet was showing in the original screen after all, and by the way, you’ve missed the first couple of minutes. 

Hopefully it is now clear why I wrote “10 Reasons Why Cinemas Don’t Deserve to Survive the Pandemic”.

A Post-lockdown Trip to the Cinema

10 Reasons Why Cinemas Don’t Deserve to Survive the Pandemic

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I know that as a professional director of photography I should want cinemas to recover and flourish. After all, even if many of the productions I work on don’t get a theatrical release, my livelihood must still be in some indirect way tied to the methods of exhibition, of which cinema is a foundational pillar. But I think we’ve reached the point where the film industry could survive the death of fleapits, and I’m starting to think that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Disclaimer: I’m writing this from a place of anger. Last Friday, the day that the cinemas of Cambridge reopened, I went along to the Light for a screening of Jurassic Park. The experience – which I shall detail fully in a future post – reminded me why going to the cinema can often be frustrating or disappointing. Since lockdown we’ve added the risk of deadly infection to the downsides, and before long we’ll have to add huge price hikes, the inevitable consequence of all those empty seats between households. (Controversially, I think that current ticket prices are reasonable.)

Setting Covid-19 to one side for the moment, here are ten long-standing reasons why cinemas deserve to be put out of their misery.

 

1. No real film any more

My faith in cinema was seriously shaken in the early 2010s when 35mm projection was binned in favour of digital. Some may prefer the crisp quality of electronic images, but for me the magic was in the weave, the dirt, the cigarette burns. The more like real life it looks, the less appeal it holds.

 

2. Adverts

I’m not sure what’s worse, the adverts themselves, or the people who aim to arrive after the adverts and overshoot, spoiling the first few minutes of the movie by walking in front of the screen as they come in late.

 

3. No ushers

Yes, I’m old enough to remember ushers in cinemas, just as I’m old enough to remember when supermarket shelf-stackers waited until the shop was closed before infesting the aisles. (Perhaps the unwanted stackers could be seconded to the needy cinema auditoria?) It’s not that I need a waistcoated teenager with a torch to show me to my seat, but I do need them there to discourage the range of antisocial behaviours in the next three points.

 

4. People eating noisily

I understand that the economics make it unavoidable for cinemas to supplement their income by selling overpriced snacks. But do they have to sell such noisy ones? Is it beyond the wit of humanity to develop quieter packaging? Or for the gluttons to chomp and rustle a little less energetically, especially during the softer scenes?

 

5. People chatting

One of the Harry Potter films was ruined by a child behind me constantly asking his mum what was happening… and his mum answering in great detail every time. Serves me right for going to a kids’ film, perhaps, but you never know what kind of movie might be spoiled by unwanted additional dialogue. I recall a very unpopular individual who answered his phone during The Last Jedi. And I’m sure we’ve all experienced that most maddening of all cinema phenomena: the people who inexplicably attend purely to hold conversations with each other, often conversations that aren’t even related to the film.

(5a. People snoring – a signficant drawback of Vue’s recliner seats.)

 

6. People looking at their phones

“The light from your phone can be distracting too,” say the announcements, and they’re not wrong. Basically, the biggest problem with cinemas is people.

 

7. Arctic air conditioning

Why is cinema air con always turned up so high? No matter how hot it is outside, you always have to take a jacket to keep off the artifical chill in the auditorium.

 

8. Small screens

Home TV screens have been getting bigger for years, so why are cinema screens going the opposite way? Shouldn’t cinemas be trying to give their customers something they can’t experience at home? There’s nothing more disappointing than shelling out for a ticket and walking into the auditorium to see a screen the size of a postage stamp.

 

9. Bad projection

The purpose of going to the cinema is to see a movie projected at the highest possible technical quality by competent professionals, but the reality is often far from that. Stretched, cropped, faint or blurry images – I’ve witnessed the whole gamut of crimes against cinematography. The projectionists seem poorly trained, unfairly lumbered with multiple screens, and locked out of making crucial adjustments to the sound and picture. And because there are no ushers, it’s up to you to miss a couple of minutes of the movie by stepping outside to find someone to complain to.

 

10. Netflix is better

This is the killer. This is what will ultimately bring cinemas down. TV used to be film’s poorer cousin, but these days long-form streaming shows are better written, better photographed and infinitely more engaging than most of what traditional filmmakers seem able to create. Maybe it’s just that I’m middle-aged now, and movies are still being made exclusively for 16-25-year-olds, but it’s rare for a film to excite me the way a series can.

Having said all of that, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is out on Wednesday. Now that’s something I am looking forward to, if I can just find somewhere showing it on 70mm….

10 Reasons Why Cinemas Don’t Deserve to Survive the Pandemic

Festival Screenings and DCPs

neiloseman,

Stop-Eject poster 857x1200Last summer I completed two short films as director, the 17-minute fantasy-drama Stop/Eject and the two-minute  puppet fantasy The One That Got Away. After a year of entering them into festivals around the world without getting anywhere, I was beginning to give up hope of them ever getting selected. But I’m delighted to say that both have been recently accepted for festivals taking place this month.

Stop/Eject will get its world premiere at Raindance Film Festival in London. Raindance is amongst the UK’s most prestigious festivals, counting amongst its previous premieres Memento and The Blair Witch Project.

The One That Got Away will get its first overseas screening at Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival in Brazil.

The welcome news of these festival selections had me scrambling into the archives of this blog for the post I wrote last year on making a DCP (digital cinema package). Since the decline of film as an exhibition format, DCPs are the new standard for delivering movies to a cinema.

I needed to transcode The One That Got Away’s 1080P ProRes 422 (HQ) master into a DCP. Belo Horizonte accept 25fps DCPs, so I skipped the frame rate conversion. I dropped the ProRes file into a new timeline in Final Cut Pro and set the sequence frame size to 1998×1080, the standard resolution for a non-Cinemascope 2K DCP. I then used the Motion tab to blow up the image slightly to fill the width of the frame, losing a little at the top and bottom of the image in the process.

The_One_That_Got_Away_ posterI used Final Cut Pro’s ‘Export using Quicktime conversion’ to export the ProRes file as two mono WAVs and an 8-bit TIFF sequence. (16-bit is preferable for DCPs, but the film had been edited in Final Cut 7, which only deals with 8-bit colour space.) I then followed OpenDCP‘s straightforward three-step interface to transcode to JPEG-2000, then MXF, then wrap it all up with the XML files. I didn’t need to worry about disc formatting, because the festival accepted an FTP upload of the files.

Before uploading The One That Got Away’s DCP to the festival, I decided to test it at home as best as I could, so I downloaded a free trial of EasyDCP which let me check the first 15 seconds. The colours were screwed up, but that’s normal. Home computers can’t handle the XYZ colour space of DCPs.

Stop/Eject’s DCP was created last year, as documented in the post mentioned above, Making a DCP. I purchased a 500GB Lacie Rugged USB hard drive to put it on, not knowing at the time how big the files would be. I now know that 2K DCPs at a reasonable quality are about 1GB per minute, so Stop/Eject’s is 17GB. A memory stick big enough to put that on would have been expensive last June, perhaps more expensive than the Lacie Rugged. But over a year later, a Corsair 32GB USB 3.0 stick is only £15.45 and there are even cheaper brands on the market too. Plus, of course, a stick is much easier to post to a festival than a hard drive, and far less likely to get damaged on the way.

So I bought the Corsair stick and booted up my Mac in Ubuntu, as detailed in last year’s post. I formatted the stick as EXT-2 rather than 3, as Raindance’s documentation seemed to favour the former. I copied the files across from the Lacie Rugged. Then it was just a case of packaging it up and sending it off with back-up copies on DVD and Blu-ray, and a press kit for good measure.

Incidentally, Stop/Eject’s DCP runs at 24fps for maximum compatibility, extending the running time of the film by about 45 seconds over the original 25fps version. I had wondered for some time if, when the film finally got into a festival, this longer running time would be an issue. After all, at nearly 17 minutes at 25fps, Stop/Eject is quite a long short already. I’m told that Raindance almost decided against selecting it because of its length. And the judging panel had been watching a 25fps screener. How would they feel about screening an even longer version? I contacted the festival, explaining the situation and offering to make a 25fps DCP if need be, but they were fine with it running at 24fps. Apparently they allow for runtime discrepancy when scheduling.

Well, that all got very dry and technical, didn’t it?

Hurray! My films got into festivals!

Festival Screenings and DCPs

Making a Digital Cinema Package

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The finished Stop/Eject DCP. Not as cool as a roll of 35mm.
The finished Stop/Eject DCP. Not as cool as a roll of 35mm.

Now that huge reels of 35mm film are all but obsolete, Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs) are the new means of getting a film to a cinema. Many top film festivals will only screen off a DCP or 35mm print, and in terms of picture and sound quality and compatibility it is your best option for screening at theatrical venues in general. Much has been written about how you can make a DCP at home for nothing, but having just gone through the process myself for Stop/Eject I’m going to round up some of the best sources of information I came across and enlarge on the area of disc formatting which hasn’t been too well covered elsewhere.

To ensure maximum compatibility of your DCP you need to:

  • convert your film to 24fps if it isn’t already at that frame rate
  • use a standard 2K aspect ratio, 2048×1080 or 2048×858
  • put it on a disc that is EXT3 formatted
  • supply that disc in a Cru Dataport DX-115

I’ve spoken to filmmakers who have ignored many or all of the above and still run their DCPs successfully in cinemas, but I decided to play it safe and do all of the above, except the Cru Dataport, which was a little too expensive. Instead I bought a 500GB LaCie Rugged USB drive and put my DCP on there. Read Knut Erik Evensen’s excellent blog post on DCP delivery for more info on Dataports and USB compatibility.

The formatted drive as seen in Ubuntu, with the DCP files copied over
Step 5: the formatted drive as seen in Ubuntu, with the DCP files copied over

So, here is the process I went through. I was starting out with 25,409 uncompressed 16-bit TIFF files representing each individual frame of Stop/Eject, and six mono 24-bit linear PCM WAV files for the 5.1 surround soundtrack. The TIFFs were in 1080P (1920×1080) letterboxed to an aspect ratio of 2.35:1.

  1. First of all I used Photoshop to batch convert all the TIFFs to the 2048×858 aspect ratio. This is actually 2.39:1 rather than the 2.35:1, so it meant cropping a sliver of the actual picture off the top and bottom, not just the black bars, as well as enlarging the picture slightly. It took my poor iMac about 12 hours to convert the 25,409 frames. I’m sure there’s quicker batch conversion software out there than Photoshop if you hunt around though.
  2. Next I used a free piece of audio software called Audacity to slow down each of the six audio files by 4% so that they will match the images when they run at 24fps. (Stop/Eject was shot and edited at 25fps.) Thanks to Matt Cameron’s blog for this tip.
  3. Then I downloaded and ran OpenDCP, the brilliant free software that actually creates the Digital Cinema Package for you. It’s very simple to use, but check out the help Wiki and Danny Lacey’s seminal blog post to guide you through it. The end result was six files: four XML files and two MXF files, one for sound and one for picture. Encoding at the default bitrate of 125mb/s, which the Wiki says is more than good enough for 2K at 24fps, Stop/Eject’s DCP was just under 17GB, so about 1GB per minute.
  4. Now the tricky bit – copying those six files onto an EXT3 formatted drive. EXT3 is a Linux file system, and is not supported by MacOS. So I downloaded Ubuntu, a free operating system which does support it. (Choose the 64-bit download unless you have quite an old computer.) The downloaded file is a disc image (.ISO) which you can burn to DVD using Disk Utlity (found in the utilities sub-folder of MacOS’s Applications folder). Then restart your Mac, with the DVD still in the drive, and hold down C when you hear the chimes. This will boot up your Mac in the Ubuntu operating system. (You can release C when you see the black screen and Ubuntu logo.)
  5. Once Ubuntu was running, I right-clicked the LaCie Rugged in the list of drives in the lower left of the desktop and chose format from the contextual menu. To get more than the default options, I clicked Disk Utility in the dialogue box that came up. I could now select EXT3 as the file system (leaving the other settings at their default values). When I clicked format, Ubuntu didn’t seem to be doing anything, but after a few minutes the Disk Utility showed that the volume had been created. I could then close the Disk Utility, and drag and drop the six DCP files from another hard drive (MacOS formatted) onto my newly EXT3 formatted LaCie. Apparently you can put these files inside a folder if you want, but again to be extra safe I put them in the root directory.

After completing the DCP I took it to the Courtyard, my local arts centre, where head projectionist Simon Nicholls was kind enough to let me test it. To my very pleasant surprise it worked perfectly, uploading at about real time via the Doremi server’s USB 2 socket and playing shortly afterwards with superb sound and picture quality. Much as I love celluloid, the ease and cheapness of this process are breathtaking, the purchase of the hard drive being the only cost. I’ll let you know how I get on running it at other cinemas.

Making a Digital Cinema Package