Hi,
We're preparing to experiment with DOM for a small film festival. We have mixed content flat/scope. In prior years we've just connected Macs to the theater projectors and manually zoomed the content to avoid cropping while playing because the films were in random flat/scope playlists (we used VLC). Of course, this was a very manual process.
We have a number of media and projection formats that are submitted...but primarily flat and scope.
The goal is to find a way to prevent the projector from performing lens changes between films. The fallback plan is to group all the flats and scopes in a film block into groups so there is only one lens change.
Are there ways in DOM, using settings/scalings, to ensure that flats do not exceed predetermined vertical boundaries and scopes never exceed horizontal boundaries. In other words, scopes would define the horizontal boundaries for all plays and then flats would be letterboxed to ensure they don't exceed vertical boundaries? Hope I'm explaining this right...sorta new to all of this.
Thx,
Jim
Suggestions for scaling?
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Carsten
- Posts: 2804
- Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2014 9:11 pm
- Location: Germany
Re: Suggestions for scaling?
I am not sure wether I fully understand what you are after. Usually you should start with the actual screens that the festival will be shown on. I do understand that short film festivals can't follow the habit of adjusting lens and masking like it is done for feature films, because there would be too many format changes within a block. There are machines that will change format very fast nowadays, but even if you'd have them, masking can never follow that pace.
I also think it is a very bad idea to squeeze formats into blocks because of their technical aspects instead of their themes or programatic intentions.
I would say, put flat and 1080p into flat, and scale scope footage into flat as well (scale to scope, use flat container). That way, scope movies will have the same width as flat movies, and only height will change. This is the same systematic as cinemas use for a mixed flat/scope preshow/trailer show. While trailers for scope movies are usually available in both scope and flat format, the typical trailer actually shown for a scope movie is 1998 wide. Wether to crop from 2048 or to rescale is up to you.
I would suggest you prepare your own framing guide, with 2048/858, 1998/1080, 1920/1080 and other intermediate formats as colored boxes to prepare for this. Keep in mind that many productions nowadays aim for 'cinemascope', but effectively deliver every imaginable aspect ratio between 2.0:1 and 2.8:1
But DOM can deal with that (use no stretch/original ar options).
Then project everything in flat format and with flat masking (if at all available). Maybe the festival programming allows for some special movies to be presented in real scope format, but that is only viable if the screen is a constant height screen with moveable horizontal masking. It makes little sense to change from flat to scope on a fixed width screen.
Btw - whenever I am not exactly sure what the effective active image area in letterboxed footage is, I create a snapshot in VLC and count the active pixels in an image editor (e.g. Preview on a Mac), so I can dial in the exact numbers in DOM. VLC snapshots are created and saved at source resolution.
- Carsten
I also think it is a very bad idea to squeeze formats into blocks because of their technical aspects instead of their themes or programatic intentions.
I would say, put flat and 1080p into flat, and scale scope footage into flat as well (scale to scope, use flat container). That way, scope movies will have the same width as flat movies, and only height will change. This is the same systematic as cinemas use for a mixed flat/scope preshow/trailer show. While trailers for scope movies are usually available in both scope and flat format, the typical trailer actually shown for a scope movie is 1998 wide. Wether to crop from 2048 or to rescale is up to you.
I would suggest you prepare your own framing guide, with 2048/858, 1998/1080, 1920/1080 and other intermediate formats as colored boxes to prepare for this. Keep in mind that many productions nowadays aim for 'cinemascope', but effectively deliver every imaginable aspect ratio between 2.0:1 and 2.8:1
But DOM can deal with that (use no stretch/original ar options).Then project everything in flat format and with flat masking (if at all available). Maybe the festival programming allows for some special movies to be presented in real scope format, but that is only viable if the screen is a constant height screen with moveable horizontal masking. It makes little sense to change from flat to scope on a fixed width screen.
Btw - whenever I am not exactly sure what the effective active image area in letterboxed footage is, I create a snapshot in VLC and count the active pixels in an image editor (e.g. Preview on a Mac), so I can dial in the exact numbers in DOM. VLC snapshots are created and saved at source resolution.
- Carsten