Yes but with the caveat that they wanted the lowest risk to US service members during the bombing. This means using up the fire and forget stuff rather than the guided munitions attached to planes. They have good air superiority, but poor logistical options to do that.
The traditional way to do this is to park two carrier groups within 500 miles of the target and convey tonnes of cheap munitions to the targets (as in iraq, Libya & kosovo) the problem for the US is that it means parking a carrier within drone range. You'd then establish a land base and move forward. Again all of the logistics of doing that are vulnerable to drone.
So this is the route they chose.
Until the US have something to counter drones cheaply, then they'll get stuck like this.
The problem is that this equates two very different way of building houses, and lumps them together.
For the USA, the reasons for zoning were quite different to europe. Each country had different reasons for different times.
In the UK, post war planners were setting out to make a new modernist utopia, or a new haven for personal transportation, or clearing the slums for homes of the future.
Parts of new york's policy was slum clearance, a lot of it was trying to keep "the poors" from bothering rich people.(There are other more distasteful dimensions to that, which are better covered by other people) The last part was about making a shit tonne of money.
I think the other thing alluded to but not explicitly mentioned is that nobody likes new houses. Even less people like houses from 30 years ago. Even less people like houses that are designed to hold people who are "un desirable"
The problem for the UK is the Fujitsu owns the last vestiges of the UK IT scene.
ICT/ICL and a bunch of other were all bought out by them in the early 90s.
But also there are two other issues:
1) there aren't many companies that are able to bid on that scale
2) if you remove fujitsu then you're handing it to either crapita or atos. who are also shite.
The solution to this is develop decent in-house architecture team who are able to drive specs and keep an eye on developments.
But
That requires three further things:
1) long term vision, with enough run way/agency to affect change
2) enough money to pay and keep decent people
3) the ability to terminate contracts when they get into shit. This is policitically challenging because contract termination == the current minister is shite in news term. "FLAGSHIP PROGRAMME SCRAPPED BECAUSE OF POOR PERFORMANCE, here is why $government is bad with lots of input from people with agendas that haven't properly been vetted because the journalist isn't a specialist (or its not a news site)"
Part of the answer is dividing programmes up into smaller chunks to attract a wider range of bidders.
The problem is that, even when divided up, they're still often "build and run" contracts which are less attractive to the smaller consultancies which tend to specialise in the "build" part, and are much less keen on the "run" aspect (with good reason, as it tends to be low-margin and painful).
And even then, fashions inevitably change and suddenly someone starts wondering why they've got 30 different tech vendors and need an expensive enterprise architecture team to glue their work together. Cue "why can't we just consolidate all this and get AtoS to do the whole thing?", and the cycle begins again...
> 2) if you remove fujitsu then you're handing it to either crapita or atos. who are also shite.
Yes, agreed, although (at least) Capita are probably much worse. They're currently in a deep hole having screwed over the administration of the Civil Service Pension Scheme. It's been causing deep pain for people for a long time now. Where's IBM when you need them, or Oracle? Just joking.
Yeah, I haven't been involved in film projection since late 1998. Back then, it was at my university student cinema, we had 70mm capability but only showed one or two films a year in 70mm because there were so few films available for us to hire in that format. If I recall, the main one we showed every year was Backdraft. By comparison, there were 2 showings per day during term time (so 7x10x3 days per year) and most films would only be shown 1 or maybe 2 nights.
I was told then that we were very lucky to have that projector as there were only around 4 or 5 cinemas in the country with 70mm projectors (other than IMAX), and I can only imagine it's gone down since then. That said, it's hard to find information on it now - the only list of 70mm cinemas I could find had 5, but included IMAX and not my university cinema even though they showed Interstellar in 70mm last year so probably are just not listed because it's not open to the general public.
> Aspect ratio by itself tells you very little about the theatrical viewing experience.
Yes, but also no.
to a whole generation of millenials -> boomers 4:3 == analogue and or cheap, "widescreen" is HD and better quality.
Thats why a lot of people were really happy to have streched 4:3->16:9 because wide screen == more modern and higher resolution. Unless you acutally care about that sort of thing you're never really twig that its just streched. I mean sure of you ask people about and compare side by side, they'll go "oh yeah"
The point now is that 4:3 is a allusion to a specific point in time, in the same way techincolour, or black and white, noir or infomercial are.
second disclaimer, dbspin knows all this, this is aimed at the casual observer
About 2010 was the time that digital cameras were common enough and had enough dynamic range to make "better" looking 35mm than 35mm. There were caveats, certain hella expensive fujifilm stock still looked great and had decent enough resolution if you were skilled enough. (I'm not a DoP or lighting designer so take this with that in mind)
RED gets lots of credit, but frankly they were not that great, they had optical resolution, but not very good colour or dynamic range.
However, the most important point is this, most films from about 2006 were fed through DI. This means they were scanned in, degrained, conformed (so all shots from the same scene had the sameish histogram). Then the colourist would grade it all, give it a feel ( a bit like foley/music) and it'd be lasered back out to film or sent to be packaged into a DCI.
the "feel" of film is usually added or enhanced. modern film stock isn't grainy, unless you choose it to be. (compare layer cake to harry brown) "film-y ness is a choice, in the same way that "warm" analogue sound is a choice"
As I mentioned, they obvious did a digital intermediary for visual effects shots. For Oppenheimer I don't think they was much CGI, but at the bare minimum I sure they did some digital compositing, so they must have matched their photochemical color grading with digital color grading for some scenes. Also, they had a digital colorist to produce the grade for the DCP anyway, to match the look of the film master.
But it seems to me that reputable sources have clearly stated that they did a fully analog film path all the way to release prints.
> And once production began, FotoKem printed literally everything Nolan shot. Then after the edit was complete, FotoKem brought in Negative Cutter Simone Appleby from the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image Animée in France to cut each section and glue it together, which starts with a list that comes out of the Avid that provides every single one of the over 3,000 shots. That list, coupled with a work print (a film version of the list of shots), was then rolled against the negative, using also a QuickTime reference with key numbers—all of which allowed Appleby to cut the physical negative together into the final assembly, from which final prints were made. And from there, Van Hoytema and Color Timer Kristen Zimmerman painstakingly perfected the color of each and every shot by hand.
> Theodosiou’s focus was matching the color of the digital master to that of the analog film master because Nolan and FotoKem knew that not everybody in the world would be able to view Oppenheimer on analog film. “We were able to manipulate the images and make them look exactly how Christopher intended for them to look on film,” says Theodosiou. “For the final tweaks, we had to split screen the image between a digital and a film on the screen and match the film identically throughout, from reel one all the way to the end.”
I mean yes, they _did_ do a photochemical grade. But the edit was assembled digitally, the shot conformed, sent to be cut manually, and then final grade was done photochemically. The Person who assembled the film in 65 said "I get an EDL from avid and assemble to the print"
Conforming film colour in analogue is _massively_ hard. its time consuming and generally not fun to do. so it makes so much more sense to do that digitally.
it would also explain the number of editorial team doing colour, because normally they don't do any of that shit.
Forgive me if my interpretation of this terminology is wrong. My impression is that "conforming" refers to assembling the final edit from the original source material, in this case literally cutting and splicing together film negatives according to exact frame counts output by Avid.
What do you mean by "conforming film colour in analogue?"
Conform is the process of matching edits with the "master" edit, generally.
One of the odd things about the "movie pipeline" is that generally the thing thats passed between compmanies is not the actual edit, but an EDL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_decision_list) which is a loosegoosey format, horrible in _many_ ways.
But it means that you can assemble an edit from different media (ie proxies, or digital sources, or actual film.)
and thats the same everywhere.
in a finishing lab, you assemble the edit[1], and then apply a base grade. So you conform the edit, then "conform" the colour so the expensive colourist is not doing busy work infront of the director. Now, some labs might have different names for this, but where I worked, conform was the edit assembly (which was way more faff than you'd hope, EDL is a really really shit format for coordinating edits) then base grade/conform grade to make sure that everything was roughly a "neutral" grade. ie when you cut between two people talking at each other, one is not widly brighter/greener/darker than the other. In sound its like making sure the levels are the same between actors, so one isn't louder than the other.
This might also be called match grading, but from what I remember match grading was for VFX people trying make sure they were producing stuff that looked right.
Manual colour timing was pretty much dead back then, and that was 15 years ago. So going back and doing match/base/conform grade manually in film seems like a fucking stupid thing to do. So does doing a final grade as well, but as Nolan is the only director who manages to finish on time and budget reliably[2], perhaps I'll forgive his foibles. He seems to have actually done the final grade in analogue.
[1] the finishing lab can often be a different company to the editor, so they will need to transfer the raw footage and the EDL (or hopefully something more modern, EDLs were shit when I was there and that was 15 years ago)
[2] Every other director who's doing any amount of VFX seemed to always over run. they'd want clean up or changes weeks after the target end date. Nolan is the only director whos has 400+ VFX shots in a movie thats finished on time.
I wonder if the render resolution was actually determined by the output resolution of the film recorder being used to get the sfx out onto film for display? I can't obviously find a film recorder that offers more than 8k on 65mm/15-perf.
As I've not seen anyone else mention it, I feel the need to point out that Digital IMAX (which is the vast majority of screens and showings) maxes out at 4K.
Tim webber says it was rendered at 4k. Which contradicts what I remember. If he meant 4k textures that would make sense. 4k textures might have been why renderman kept on OOMing though and we had to tile the render even more.
Also I don't know how they printed it back out to film. It might have been sent to hollywood to laser/print out.
Yes but with the caveat that they wanted the lowest risk to US service members during the bombing. This means using up the fire and forget stuff rather than the guided munitions attached to planes. They have good air superiority, but poor logistical options to do that.
The traditional way to do this is to park two carrier groups within 500 miles of the target and convey tonnes of cheap munitions to the targets (as in iraq, Libya & kosovo) the problem for the US is that it means parking a carrier within drone range. You'd then establish a land base and move forward. Again all of the logistics of doing that are vulnerable to drone.
So this is the route they chose.
Until the US have something to counter drones cheaply, then they'll get stuck like this.
reply