The New Hope

~ Monday October 06 2008 00:00
Remember two blogs ago? The End of Traditional Cinema...for me Well, I’m still thinking the same way about film projection. But not that long after I wrote that blog, a friend mentioned a Cinema in Belgium: Utopolis in Turnhout. Which is about 50km from my home town. But it is worth the drive. It is one of the best cinema’s I have been to.

So why is this Cinema so great? Well in one word: THX-Certificate. For people who don’t know about this, THX is a certificate for Cinema’s and Equipment and was part of George Lucas’ companies. It was sold to Dolby, but the main goal remained. A quality certification system, which for cinema’s means that the theatre itself must be build with a lot of specifications, like isolation (so you won’t hear the big explosions in the theatre next door), Viewing angles from every seat must be within acceptable parameters. Yes quality nuts like me will still look at the speakers to figure out where the best seats are. But if the best seats are taken, it is good to know that the worst seats still have a really good view. Another thing is callibration. The equipment is callibrated on a regular basis, which really shows.

So in the mean time, I have seen Wall-E and The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight is hands down the best movie of the year, and although it was projected on film, Utopolis had the best quality of film-projection I have seen in years. Wall-E on the other hand was projected digitally. Utopolis has 2K Barco Projectors that give a really good picture. Ok, I have seen 4K projection, so I know it can get even better. But 2K is acceptable. It looks good, it looks sharp, film is dead. Quality wise, 2K is so close to Blu-Ray that I probably won’t see or hear the difference. but I don’t mind that.

Cinema is more that just the movie. It is the movie-going experience, a night out. Driving to Belgium makes it feel more special. Like when you go to an amusement park. You park your car (free parking beneath the complex !! ) and you go into the complex to buy the tickets, the food and drinks and go to the theatre. You take your seat, have a talk with your friends and then the movie starts. The world around you doesn’t matter for a couple of hours, they tell you someone else's story. Afterwards, you talk to your friends again, talk about how they experienced the story and slowly you make your way back to the real world.

As a person that works with video and film, you may wonder if I can watch a movie without analyzing it in the mean time. Well, yes I can. But quality nuts, like me, get distracted by technical stuff. When we get distracted, we tend to concentrate on other things that are wrong with the movie. And afterwards, that tends to be our experience and thus the thing we talk about. So maybe the best compliment I can give to Utopolis is that I finally didn’t get distracted. I could enjoy the movie. And to be honest, that was a long time ago since that happened.

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