Robin Hood at the cinema

Last week I went with my family to see the new new Robin Hood movie at Hoyts at Woden. Pretty unimpressive experience, really. The movie itself was okay, if a  little Forrest Gumpy in the way that Robin was responsible for everything (hey, the Magna Carta was his — or his dad’s — idea!)

But the print was not very good. There were random specks, which didn’t worry me too much, but there was consistently almost horizontal thin dark lines across the sky. Every time there was some visible sky and I remembered to look (maybe twenty times throughout the movie), there they were, looking like an ethereal flight of arrows shooting through the air.

I was trying to work out what kind of print damage could produce this effect, when a marked signal dropout occurred, taking out for a couple of frames the full width of the picture, but only for about one tenth or less of the picture height, about two thirds of the way up, in what looked a lot like a burst of static or interference.

This repeated itself twice more through the course of the movie.

Very weird. I couldn’t see how this could happen with film. It looked like a brief signal interference in an electronic projector, with the signal fed in scan line format (ie. by component video, say).

So I had worn-film dust flecks, analogue video drop-out in the signal to an electronic projector, and weird dark thin lines with no obvious explanation at all. The lines didn’t seem to be horizontal, in which case a video signal interference doesn’t seem a likely explanation (since this would take out sections of scan lines, which are horizontal), but I could be wrong.

Bemused, I waited to the end and when the credits were rolling, went up close to the screen to examine it. And there was a clear regular pixel structure visible. At first I thought that sealed the deal: that this was an electronic projector. But then it occurred to me that a digital intermediate production step was probably used, and that this may have left a visible pixel structure when you’re a metre away from the screen. (A quick check of IMDB discloses that, yes, a 4K digital intermediate was used.)

In addition, the white text on black credits seemed to have a doubling of their horizontal strokes in a way reminscent of some low quality home theatre projectors.

I shall have to call Hoyts next week and ask them what projector they were using.

By contrast, a few weeks ago I saw The Hurt Locker at our local cinema, Limelight, which proudly uses digital projectors, and the picture quality (and sound) was fine.

And last night I watched Avatar on Blu-ray. With the Epson EH-TW5500 projector, it made me wonder why I had spent $16 to go to Hoyts. That was how a modern movie should look.