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This topic comprises 6 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6
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Author
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Topic: Showplace Cinemas, Evansville, IN. Going Digital
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Brad Allen
Jedi Master Film Handler
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Posts: 688
From: Evansville, IN, USA
Registered: May 2000
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posted 07-28-2007 02:42 PM
Interesting to read the feedback from readers at the links site. Showplace Cinemas Evansville, In. going all digital
Local cinema going digital By Rich Davis-Evansville Courier & Press. Thursday, July 26, 2007
Evansville's largest theater operation, Showplace Cinemas, is converting its 39 first-run screens in Evansville and Newburgh to digital at a cost of several million dollars.
Owner Paul Stieler also said Wednesday he's spending about $600,000 on a 180-seat Hollywood Bar & Grill that will adjoin his IMAX and 18-screen Showplace East theater on Morgan Avenue. Stieler said besides the bar, a family area will seat about 130, with menu items ranging from pizza to hot wings.
In-house restaurants and digital screens are two major trends in the movie theater business.
"Five or eight years from now everyone will be digital. Film projectors are becoming obsolete," said Stieler, noting satellite dishes will be installed atop his Showplace East, North and Newburgh theaters to receive movies. "It's coming. It's the biggest happening in the theater business since talkies in the '20s."
Stieler said Access Integrated Technologies of New Jersey will do the work starting Sept. 1 at Showplace East.
With digital, Stieler explained, not only is the visual quality better "but it's as clear the 5,000th time you show the movie as the first time."
The onset of the digital age may turn cinemas into more than movie houses. "This will let us show not only movies but (eventually) live concerts in 3D, boxing matches, maybe in five years the Super Bowl," Stieler predicted.
IMAX movies are still produced on the larger 70mm film.
Stieler's competition, the Chicago-based Kerasotes theater chain, operates Stadium 16 on the West Side. That theater reportedly has an auditorium with digital capabilities, but Kerasotes officials weren't available for comment Wednesday.
According to Access, the industry leader in deployment of digital cinema programming, Showplace is the 11th theater chain to contract for its services.
Access can deliver nearly 2 million digital screenings of Hollywood feature films and "alternative content" and is in the process of connecting its system to 4,000 screens in 41 states.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
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Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 07-30-2007 11:14 PM
One problem I've noticed with a lot of music CDs in recent years is they are extremely badly engineered -and done so on purpose!
I have a couple of different audio editing computer programs (Sound Forge and Adobe Audition). I can load up an old CD, such as the Ultradisc II 24K Gold release of Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon. The levels look very good on that one. Hardly any clipping at all. If I load a track from a recent hard rock CD I purchased, there's really no damned waveform at all. The peaks on it have been amputated. It's just a bunch of vertical streaks with squared off tops. Shit. The only thing I can figure is the record company bastards deliberately screwed up the audio quality on the disc so it would sound just as good in ultra lossy compression MP3 bullshit or iTunes. It's either that or the ass-hats subscribe to the car stereo blasta-box idiots who believe loudness equals great quality. Dude, I don't care if I can hear your car stereo in the next zip code. It still sounds like stinky ass. You suck. Burn your vehicle you tool. But the record industry guys won't relent, either with the shitty mastering jobs on their discs or the inexcusably bad derivative nature of the types of music they're selling. Hey, it's just as good as a CD. A really shitty quality CD. But they can hide behind that "digital" word and insist it is all perfect.
To me, the word "digital" is just like the word "smurf" in that blue cartoon characters series. Hey digital! Did you know I ate some digital yesterday while walking up the digital to meet digital? We talked about digital while playing digital. Then digital came over to talk about digital while we played more digital. Then we ate some digital and laughed about digital. We farted out of our digitals. Digital had sex with digital. We got high smoking some digital. Then we got in our digitals to digital home. But got arrested by digital for driving our digitals under the influence of digital. We got thrown in the digital and got to spend the entire digital in the digital. Shitty digital, man!
I think that sums up about how stupid and meaningless the word "digital" is anymore. Damned near everything is digital now. There is nothing impressive about it. There is shit quality product that can reside in the digital domain. That's the one point that seems totally lost on all those folks who worship at the digital altar. Digital is not always perfect. Buyer beware. But better yet, buyer...it's time for you to get an education already. Stop being so freaking stupid.
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Damien Taylor
Master Film Handler
Posts: 493
From: Perth, Western Australia
Registered: Apr 2007
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posted 07-30-2007 11:58 PM
quote: Darryl Spicer That's why records, if taken care of, sound better than CD's
Some, not all.
Some of the RCA Living Stereo series for example are extremely well mastered and still stand up to their CD counterparts, if they are played on properly maintained equipment. And it pretty much has to be a sealed copy. Same with MFSL, some of their LPs sound absolutely incredible still.
Then there is the other end of the spectrum, John doe who bought a record player in the rejuvenation they seem to be having lately. Usually with a very low end configuration, usually consisting of an inexpensive magnetic cartridge and a roughish cut diamond stylus. Thats fine, it'll play Sgt. Peppers and Glen Campbell styrenes. But its not the capability that you can harness from a thoughtfully mastered, usually vintage LP.
Towards the 80's the record companies weren't doing crash hot, in the 70's some companies resorted to punching the labels out of old records and grinding the rest back into vinyl pellets. It really shows, records of this pedigree usually wont stand up very well to any repeated play.
Generally speaking, a lot of 80's LPs sound pretty awful, who knows, they may have even been pressing with tapes mastered for CD Seriously CD is excellent, its brought mobility, fidelity for those who don't want to pay for it and music to the masses. You can't stop progress, but you can ignore it
The Vinyl Vs. CD thing will probably never die, I would say the same about film vs. digital, but thats a whole other kettle of fish. Almost everyone in the western world has had at some point both CD's and records. For the most part the records sounded crap on vintage, and or cheap systems, CD was a godsend. But for film, only a handful of people in the world handle the stuff, and its a little biased to say on a projectionists forum that everyone knows/cares, because simply put, many people still think theres a "VCR up there".
So yeah, its all personal preference... I think that was my point. I forget
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