Warren Theatre

[keving]

If anyone wants to see a preview of the Warren, you might want to take a weekend trip up to Wichita, KS to see the Old Town Warren Theatre which is located in their entertainment disctrict called Old Town.

I spent 6 months in downtown Wichita for work and enjoyed it. Old Town is not that far from downtown. Since work only pays for meals, I would often go there to eat and also enjoyed a movie on the expense account.

It's pretty nice, you push a button on your armrest and a waiter comes over to you. You tell them what you want and they input it into a wireless handheld device. From what I was told, when it gets entered into the handheld, someone starts working on the order. So, you can usually expect to get your food pretty quick.

It was very enojoyable to drink beer while in a theater watching a movie. The sports bar inside is also decent. Lots of TV's and they had a buffett during certain hours.

[Easy180]

kevin...the two words I remember from your thread

1) beer
2) sports bar

[metro]

Thanks for the updates guys. I emailed them as well. They need to hear it from several people so they stay on the ball. Perhaps they will announce a start date soon.

[metro]

Apparently that is there canned response. I received the following:

Yes the project is still on. We just finished up the plans and will be
starting very soon. We apologize for the delay, but we want to make
sure that we are building something that the people of Moore will be
extremely proud of.

Thanks,

Dan Gray
VP of Operations Warren Theatres

[SoonerDave]

All:

I think this thread might have gotten some indirect notice by the Oklahoman. There's a substantial article in today's (Saturday) Oklahoma about the Warren Theater project, wherein they interview Bill Warren himself about the delays in construction and persistent rumors in Moore that the project has fallen through. As we've discussed here from Warren company emails, that's not true. The project is still on.

In a nutshell, the project was originally budgeted for $20 million, but construction bids came in at closer to $30 million, necessitating a restructuring of the project. Warren stated that the theater will be slightly smaller than they had originally planned, encompassing something on the order of 125,000 square feet with a smaller lobby. It is still being cast as a luxury theater with adult-only balconies, special amenities, etc.

Construction, which is expected to take about one year, will begin as soon as bids are let/received for the revised drawings. The project is very much on, as Warren indicate they had already sunk something on the order of $2 million on the land into the project.

-SoonerDave

[writerranger]

All:

I think this thread might have gotten some indirect notice by the Oklahoman. There's a substantial article in today's (Saturday) Oklahoma about the Warren Theater project, wherein they interview Bill Warren himself about the delays in construction and persistent rumors in Moore that the project has fallen through. As we've discussed here from Warren company emails, that's not true. The project is still on.

In a nutshell, the project was originally budgeted for $20 million, but construction bids came in at closer to $30 million, necessitating a restructuring of the project. Warren stated that the theater will be slightly smaller than they had originally planned, encompassing something on the order of 125,000 square feet with a smaller lobby. It is still being cast as a luxury theater with adult-only balconies, special amenities, etc.

Construction, which is expected to take about one year, will begin as soon as bids are let/received for the revised drawings. The project is very much on, as Warren indicate they had already sunk something on the order of $2 million on the land into the project.

-SoonerDave

Good info, SoonerDave! I missed that in the paper.

---

[traxx]

Bobby H, I appreciate you setting the record straight as far as digital vs. film. Too many times these days when people here digital they automatically think it's better quality.

Film has so far been futureproof. Look at a well preserved silent film and it still looks beautiful. Look at the varying technologies of tape through the past 30 years (and digital from the '90s) and you can see a noticable difference from technological improvements through the years.

Just google film vs. digital cameras and/or photography and you'll find sights that speak to the differecnes in quality. Again, you're comparing apples and oranges but some conclusions can be drawn. Now they're coming out with some high end cameras that are 20mp but still don't come close to the detail of film.

By the way Bobby, how is it that you know so much about the mediums? Is this something you do in your job or what? Just curious.

[Bobby H]

I'm a computer graphic artist and illustrator. That, combined with my strong interest in high quality movie theaters and their technology, along with previous experience working in television, is what gives me a more "balanced" insight on the subject, IMHO.

Digital and analog both have their strengths and weaknesses. Most of the folks who actually work with both mediums know that. Unfortunately they are not the ones who write the press releases and craft marketing plans.

The main improvement truly objective observers will notice in new D-Cinema systems is improved sound quality. Any video-based setup will feature uncompressed Linear PCM 5.1 channel surround sound at 20-bit or even 24-bit depth. That's a big jump above the versions of DTS, Dolby Digital and SDDS common in many commercial theaters.

[traxx]

Roger Ebert reviewed Attack of the Clones having seen it in a regular theater and said it looked murky because it was digital transfered to film but later saw it again on a digital projection system and said it looked a hundred times better, but he still prefers film done right as do I.

I read an article several months ago about a firm in Japan working on the successor to HDTV and it said (I don't remember all the specifics so don't hold me to it) that they created their camera and put it on the back of a truck and went around and shot footage. It said that it took something like 2.5 terabytes for a 20 minute video and then they showed the video at a trade show (with a projector built specifically for this) and it was so realistic that people were becoming motion sick.

I think video and digital have their uses and purposes but they are too realistic. That's what's great about film is it has an other worldly dreamy feel to it. If you look, you can find software and techniques to make digital video look like film. I think that says something about how we think about digital vs. film. Digital may be the future over film but it's got a long way to go before it gets there.

[Luke]

The power of OKCTalk.com!!!!

[SoonerDave]

it's got a long way to go before it gets there

Maybe at the very high end, that's true, but in the broader market, it won't take that long.

I remember a friend of mine who worked in a commercial photo lab telling me how digital photography was a fad, that film would never go away. The lab where he worked is now out of business and he's out of the industry. Granted, that's retail photo publishing/production, and I realize that's a different breed of cat from the motion picture industry, but the migration, technological, and financial issues all resonate in much the same way.

I think making digital look like film primarily requires shooting at 24fps rather than 30, although that's probably a gross oversimplification.

I wonder if the test you read about was something like this:

http://www.freshdv.com/2005/11/super...r-to-hdtv.html

a 7680x4320 native image!!! Yikes!

-SoonerDave

[traxx]

Actually here is what I was referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UHDV

Yes, just converting to 24 frames per second is a bit of a simplification but it is definately one of the steps. In addition you have to give it that photographic look that video doesn't provide and that's where software and/or workaround techniques come in.

As far as my statement of digital not being there yet, I guess I should have made myself a little more clear. I meant it's not there as far as quality is concerned but, yes definately from a marketing standpoint and the public view, digital is the buzzword now and many people can be sold just by using the term digital. Such was the case a few years back when dish companies were advertising 100% digital picture. A lot of people took that to mean HD in quality which it wasn't. They were sold on the buzzword of digital.

[SoonerDave]

Traxx,

It looks you and I were looking at opposite ends of the same telescope. There was a link in the article you reference back to the article I had seen referenced in a *different* blog. Ah, the Internet...

Sure enough, it's 4x current HDTV (on both axes), from 1920x1080 to 7680x4320...the wiki article estimates a 6GB *per minute* data requirement with signals in the 21Ghz range...yikes...

Man, they *insist* making these newer hard drives seem smaller...

-SoonerDave

[Bobby H]

"UHDTV", as it is being called, is NOT at all a functioning, operable system. It has never actually been fully demonstrated from a video sourced image.

Currently, NHK television in Japan and Lowry Digital Images (associated with DTS in the US) is developing the standard. They don't actually have the technology to make it work digital-in and digital-out today. If they do anything to demonstrate a 32 million pixel image, they must start with an analog film-sourced image -preferably with something shot on 65mm film.

As it stands, there are no 32 megapixel CCD or CMOS devices capable of recording full motion video. The highest resolution CMOS imagers (sold by Kodak) feature 40 million pixels but only function as "digital backs" for large format film still image cameras. They don't have fast enough exposure times to sample full motion video, much less have the bandwidth to output the stream in uncompressed or mildly compressed form.

Right now Panavision and Arri make the highest native resolution video cameras available. Both can shoot as much as 3000 RGB lines natively. But they're normally confined to the typical 2048 X 1080 pixel "2K" format (such as Superman Returns for instance). Their advantage is similar to D-SLR cameras. Those camera bodies can use 35mm motion picture camera lenses.

22.2 channels of sound? I'm skeptical it would even be used.

SDDS boasted 8-channel capability. But few theaters put up the five channels of speakers behind the screen necessary for the format. Very few films were mixed for SDDS-8. Nearly all releases these days are 5.1. Some only add a discrete 6.1 mix later in DTS format for DVD release.

DTS introduced their "XD-10" processor a couple years ago. It can support 7.1, 8.0, 10.2 or even higher sound formats -even with no data compression. But that has gone pretty unused. Most sound mixes are still 5.1 regardless.

Even if 10.2 surround or even 22.2 surround was ever widely supported, where would anyone place all those speakers? How could most people even afford that many?

The data rate of UHDTV at 3.2 terabytes per second would require one heck of a RAID system, well beyond the capacity of any normal RAID data server setup. Right now the DCI specification for 2000 line and 4000 line D-Cinema mandates a bandwidth of 150 million bits per second, but no more than 250 million bits per second. That's still several times greater than the new Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats. But way way below 3.2 TB.

Although the current 1920 X 1080 top end limit of HDTV is over a decade old, it is still pretty much cutting edge. Few people have televisions capable of displaying all those pixels. Very very few have HDTV monitors capable of showing that detail in progressive scan. It takes a really high end computer system to even capture a pretty compressed HD-quality video stream. Pick your format, whether it's HDV, HDCAM, DVCPRO-HD, etc. and you'll need a RAID setup and an expensive after market accelerator/capture card (like an AJA Kona|HS or Xena|HS) to do the job.

HDTV itself is still a high end niche thing. I would not get my hopes up in seeing UHDTV anytime in the next 10 years, if even that.

I'm just hoping standard movie theaters that embrace "digital" will go to 4K systems before too many home users consider their nearly 2K home HD setups just as good. At least film projection has some paradigm of separation in the whole numbers race of all things digital.

[SoonerDave]

Bobby

Please understand that I am completely aware that UHDTV is barely even a lab concept. I was merely taking a mental note at the sheer volume of data implied in a resolution of that magnitude. I mean, I'm thinking in terms of that initial personal computing era, when I built on computers wherein a 20MB hard drive was high-end and high-dollar, and comparing that to how much capacity you can get for those same dollars now....but then *contrast* that against how newer applications are making the new drives "smaller" every day...

The sheer volume of data in a theoretical UHDTV concept doesn't just imply bigger drives, but orders-of-magnitude higher bandwidth data transfer systems, networks, processors, the whole bit...

-SoonerDave

[traxx]

Bobby,

You bring up a good point about the sound mix. Enough is Enough already. I have 5.1 and that sounds great. People tend to think (and of course it's marketed that way) that more and higher numbers is always better. I have friends who always have to have the latest/greatest and went out and bought 7.1 and 9.1 setups when they came out. When faced with the question of how much those extra channels would help since most DVDs are mixed in 5.1, there was no answer. So thos extra channels just repeat information from the other channels.

[xpertinfun]

I will try and be the first to report when (if) they break ground on this project. I am by there everyday.

We are very much looking foward to this wonderful theater.

[Easy180]

xpert...I think there will be an accident on I-35 when we finally see some dirt being moved

[animeGhost]

UHDTV can wait a while we dont need TVs becoming like computers where u have to upgrade every couple yrs just to keep up with the standards

[traxx]

UHDTV can wait a while we dont need TVs becoming like computers where u have to upgrade every couple yrs just to keep up with the standards

It is several years off. Like 20 or so years. Afterall, HDTV began development in '68 (by the same company that's developing UHDTV) and it is still not universal. The majority of people still use a standard definition TV.

[animeGhost]

It is several years off. Like 20 or so years. Afterall, HDTV began development in '68 (by the same company that's developing UHDTV) and it is still not universal. The majority of people still use a standard definition TV.

ur right... i got lucky with mine (got it for $250 bucks at sam's)

[Midtowner]

TV manufacturers would love that.

[Bobby H]

That's already the case with HDTV.

Many of the older existing HDTV sets, bought for very large sums of money, are incompatible with the new HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats. Many of the discs being sold in those two formats require digital HDMI connections to display the hi-def imagery. This is due to "5C" copy protection efforts mandated by movie studios and music publishers. If you hook the player up via analog component video cables in most cases your movie will get downsampled to mere 480p DVD quality.

Many of the early HDTVs (and most of the existing ones still) do not display the full 1920 X 1080 pixel image of 1080i or 1080p HDTV broadcasts and video streams. Most are well below that. Many of those LCD TVs you see in Wal-Mart really only support 852 X 480 native pixels. That's all.

I have held off for years on buying an expensive HDTV monitor because all the existing sets on the market don't satisfy all my demands.

I want a monitor that fully supports 1920 X 1080 imagery in full progessive scan. That ability would allow one to attach a computer monitor output to the TV set. Some HDTVs will allow one to attach a computer, but the set will display a computer desktop image nowhere near that 1920 X 1080 level. The new HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats typically feature 1080p video streams. The TV set should fully support that. Virtually none of the HDTVs on the market do today, in part because of limits with the current HDMI cable connection standard.

Sony's Playstation 3 may be the thing that finally gets the television makers to get their act together. The console will feature a built-in Blu-Ray drive and the games will reportedly support full 1080p HD output. The console has some monster computer horsepower to output that data.

Anyway, those who have already bought in to HDTV will likely have to upgrade at some point.

[SoonerDave]

I want a monitor that fully supports 1920 X 1080 imagery in full progessive scan.

It isn't the sexy flat screen like LCD or Plasma, but the current generation of DLP's (and available at retail) do full 1080P...

-SoonerDave

[Bobby H]

Not all DLP equipped TVs will do full "1080p" resolution. In fact, most do not. Most are merely 720p. That especially goes for many of those DLP driven plasma and LCD sets.

While a few DLP models deliver native 1920 X 1080 display, some other LCD and LCOS systems can as well. Sony's latest "SXRD" monitors are a good example.

Still, virtually none of them can show 1920 X 1080 in progressive scan -which makes that moniker the marketing people are using, "1080p", very stupid and extremely misleading.

Basically, there's nothing on the market right now I find suitable for purchase -at least for my needs. Gotta have full progressive scan at maximum HD resolution and the ability to run a computer through it at the same resolution or there just will simply be no sale.