On HDR Displays and Grading

Today, Samsung and Amazon announced yet another HDR standard for televisions. In case you're not familiar with the idea of a High Dynamic Range display, it's—get this—brighter than a normal display. That's it. This groundbreaking idea apparently needed about four competing standards, one from Dolby, the sound company. Now there's a fifth.

I couldn't resist chiming in on Twitter.

More ways for your TV to show everything incorrectly and suck. HDR is the end of any prayer that consumers will see our work as we intend. https://t.co/IPAVKkWOJs

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 20, 2017

I’ve been biding my time before I go full “old man + cloud” on HDR, but I’m not a fan. I love me a nice highlight rolloff.

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 20, 2017

Look at this beautiful, low-dynamic range shot from SICARIO. (Shot by Roger Deakins, graded by Mitch Paulson). pic.twitter.com/JBYZ0tQUCO

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 20, 2017

HDR thinks that shot is broken. It’s bright outside dummies! Let’s “fix” it with technology: pic.twitter.com/HcBHiWjZND

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 20, 2017

To be clear, that's me HDR-ifiying the shot. There is an actual "HDR" edition of Sicario on 4k Blu-ray, but from the looks of it, it has the same intentionally compressed dynamic range as the HD version these stills were pulled from.

That's a good thing. That's the filmmaker's intent.

Update 2017-04-21: Be sure to read all the way to the end for more on this. Seriously, you don't want to miss it.

Look at the scope. The standard Rec709 version of Sicario leaves tons of dynamic range on the table. In a low DR format!

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 20, 2017

Are the bright windows more realistic? Sure. Do they ruin the shot? Damn right they do.

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 20, 2017

The frame is a container. It’s the tool the filmmakers use to express their intent. It has edges. Left, right, top, bottom — and brightness. pic.twitter.com/YU4cyGzilp

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 20, 2017

A maximum brightness lets you tell the story of “bright” without having to literally be bright. Literal brightness steals focus. pic.twitter.com/vSMh12Fhbd

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 20, 2017

Revel in the glorious, low-dynamic range cinematography of SICARIO.https://t.co/DJVzyTjzdB

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 20, 2017

If your impulse is to “fix” those gloriously restrained images with the technology of MORE, you don’t understand filmmaking one bit.

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 20, 2017

Notes on this Rant

To be clear, I created a straw man by taking a beautiful movie, Sicario, and coarsely applying the only area of quantative “improvement” that HDR allows: brighter highlights. This was only possible because Sicario doesn't even use the entire dynamic range of HD video. The filmmaker’s intended look fits entirely within the low-dynamic-range container of HD Rec709. It’s a low-contrast, low-saturation film. The “HDR” 4k version is no different, and seemingly enjoys only the qualitative benefits of enhanced color fidelity and resolution in the 4k Blu-ray edition. Those are real benefits. And there are movies with bright, poppy colors that would happily occupy the greater dynamic range of an HDR TV. And working to that standard, a filmmaker would, of course, still be welcome to opt out of the brighter highlights, and choose their own dynamic range “box” to work within.

But...

...in practice, that won’t be the case. Because even without HDR, TVs already ruin movies by trying to make them look “better.” HDR is just another axis for your relatives’ TV to be set up wrong. And just like modern TVs try to “fix” 24p with motion smoothing, you can bet they’ll also offer all kinds of delightful modes to “HDR-ify” your LDR content. And if you think that will look better than my coarse examples above, you haven’t seen how bad TVs already are.

HDR has the potential to be a useful tool. But TV manufacturers will absolutely screw it up.

Follow Up 2017-04-21: All the Ways I’m Wrong

There’s been a lot of great response to this post, and some thoughtful disagreements. I opened the door for the disagreements by structuring my argument rather sloppily; conflating two different ideas.

Argument 1: I’m not personally Interested in the Creative Potential of HDR for Cinematic Images

I can’t be “wrong” about this one, because it’s my opinion, but of course you are welcome to disagree.

When I took the intentionally, creatively LDR images from Sicario and brightened up their highlights, I wasn’t saying that your HDR TV will do this to Sicario. Nor was I saying that an mastered-to-HDR-standards version of Sicario would look like that.

What I was saying is the good old Prolost argument that less is more with cinema. Sicario is widely regarded as a very beautiful film. It intentionally uses a very low dynamic range, less than even Rec709 allows. The only way the HDR-ness of HDR can “improve” that is if some idiot tried to brighten up the highlights. What I was trying to show is that the flagship feature of HDR has nothing to offer Sicario.

But I mixed that argument in with my distrust of consumer television manufacturers, which opened my up to rebuttals like this:

To be clear, the transfer function of DolbyPQ won't change things like this. *Sigh* https://t.co/mwNiZM5hb7

— t̲̻͕̲̼r̙̥͎̲o̱̣̼̫y_s̳ (@troy_s) April 21, 2017

He’s right, there’s nothing about the HDR standards themselves that should mess up our movies.

Chris in the comments below said “There is beautiful potential for artistic expression in HDR.” I’m sure that’s true. But this is just another case where I don’t think the way movies look is broken. I like rolled-off highlights and constrained palettes. I imagine Kylo Ren’s lightsaber could look amazing in HDR, but I’d probably prefer the way if would look if it was shot on a vintage roll of Kodak 5218. If your idea of a pretty movie is more along the lines of Pacific Rim than Arrival, you’re going to love HDR.

So on argument 1: I’m not wrong, but neither are your disagreements.

Argument 2: HDR is Another Axis for Consumer Televisions to Ruin Our Viewing Experience

I kinda started my argument with the creative, “Sicario is pretty and doesn’t need HDR so why would anyone ever” point and then concluded with the “Samsung will just screw this all up anyway” point. Which is not how you’re supposed to write convincing arguments. Oops.

But I remain concerned that HDR will simply mean that TV manufacturers will forget all about making blacks blacker and colors more accurate and simply try to blind us with how bright, sharp, blue, and smooth their images can be.

Rod Bogart, one of the smartest imaging nerds I know (we met at ILM, he’s now at HBO, and his actual initials are RGB), replied:

@5tu I won't try to convince you otherwise. But I will say that HDR has more potential to be displayed correctly than any preceding video format.

— Rod Bogart (@RodBogart) April 21, 2017

A number of other people chimed in here as well to point out that since HDR comes with metadata that tells the TV what it is, there’s a greater chance that the TV can show it correctly.

In the marketing site for LG’s flagship OLED HDR TV, the actually state that “With[...] Dolby Vision, you can be sure that your entertainment is viewed the way it was meant to be seen.”

I want to believe. But I’ve been hurt so badly.

Before five competing standards of HDR, there was only one HD color standard in the US: Rec709. Just one. A really easy one. A 27-year-old one. And no consumer TV shows it correctly by default. They all try to make it brighter, sharper, bluer, and more saturated.

Guess what HDR-capable panels let them do? That’s right, make images even brighter, even bluer, even more saturated.

There’s also another danger, which is that studios could get in$pired to sell us HDR retransfers of library titles. I hadn’t mentioned it, but Todd Vaziri (another ILMer) picked up on it:

Sloppy, aggressive HDR 'transfers' of library titles will ruin the intent of the filmmakers.https://t.co/Kj1O6czsQ2 by @5tu

— Todd Vaziri (@tvaziri) April 20, 2017

The temptation will be there to contravene the original filmmaker’s intention for the look of an important film, just to demonstrate the value of new TVs and new opportunities to buy a movie you’ve already bought three times.

The good news is that that for all the brighter-is-better LCD panels out there, there are also these amazing new OLED panels, which are being used more and more for professional grading and really do look great. They are HDR-capable, but they are also very accurate and have great contrast. Prices are coming down too.

The other good news is that the folks transferring Sicario to HDR 4k seemed perfectly happy to ignore the opportunity to create poppy, bright highlights where there were none before.

@5tu @ashleylynch As an old school photographer, I so feel you. The pressing of "sometime tools" to Everyday Standards" hurts me.

— T Karney (@pecunium) April 21, 2017

So if HDR gets anywhere close to helping home viewers see what filmmakers intended, I’ll be delighted. But you’ll have to forgive my skepticism, as history indicates quite the opposite. I just spent a week traveling, and every hotel TV I saw was showing letterboxed SD channels stretched to fill a 16:9 frame. We can’t even get the simple stuff right, and five competing HDR standards are anything but simple.

So on argument 2: Too early to tell if I’m right or wrong. History is on my side. But I hope I’m wrong. I may need to buy a new TV someday.

Maybe I should start doing some research before I write stuff, because this is gold:https://t.co/sJgqh377yn pic.twitter.com/ttmX15eQYN

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 21, 2017

The Frame’s the Thing

“The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively—because, without this humble appliance, you can’t know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a ‘box’ around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?”

– Frank Zappa

At this year’s CinemaCon, projector maker Barco has revealed “Escape,” a projection system that adds screens to the sides of an otherwise ordinary movie theater. Ted Schilowitz, formerly of Red Digital Cinema, demoed the system for me a few weeks ago. Here’s what he told Variety:

“The goal is to provide a bigger, more intense, more encompassing canvas,” Schilowitz says, “to extend the boundaries of cinema, to open the possibilities of what happens when you break out of the rectangle.”

If you can’t make it to CinemaCon, just check out the photo accompanying the Variety story. That’s exactly what it looks like in person. The side screens stick flat to the walls, and can show whatever the filmmaker chooses, from naturalistic periphery to juxtaposed imagery.

Dome on the Range

Growing up in the Twin Cities, one of my favorite treats was a trip to the Science Museum of Minnesota, with its awesome dinosaur fossils, interactive exhibits, and, most memorably, a combination planetarium and Omnimax theater.

Omnimax is a special kind of IMAX that uses a domed screen. You shoot on the same 65mm, 15-perf cameras as IMAX, but with a special off-center fisheye lens. A similar fisheye lens on the projector throws the image onto the 180-degree domed screen. And it’s a big dome — just walking into an Omnimax theater is an experience.

We’d gleefully soak up a rather dry documentary about the Grand Canyon, because each new scene would begin with a helicopter shot racing down the Colorado River. Below you, white water. To either side, craggy rock walls racing by. Above you, clear blue sky — and even a glimpse of the helicopter’s whirling rotor.

It was like flying.

An Omnimax movie is much more of a ride than a film. In fact, one of the most popular Omnimax theaters isn’t even billed as a theater — it’s the “Soarin’ Over California” ride at Disney’s California Adventure park. Adding suspended seats and scented wind to an Omnimax film feels as natural as popcorn in a traditional movie theater.

At its best, the experience of Barco’s Escape felt a little like Omnimax, but with some notable technical issues yet to be resolved. In an Omnimax theater, it takes you only a minute or two to get used to the distortion of the image if you’re not siting in the “sweet spot” near the center of the theater. In the prototype Escape setup I experienced, I never quite got used to the way peripheral images played on the side screens. Horizons kinked at the large seams, and I was often more distracted than immersed, no matter where I sat. There was no “sweet spot.”

Between Escape and all the excitement around the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, it seems clear that some in the cinema world feel the natural next step for movies is to break free from the confines of the rectangular screen. Maybe 3D flopped (for a third time) because objects leaping out of the frame wasn’t “immersive” enough. Maybe the problem is the frame itself.

Sauce for a Steak

My brother-in-law makes the best steak.

Making good movies is hard. But when it’s done well, there’s nothing like it. I cry at movies. I cry three times in Finding Nemo, like clockwork. I cry at I Love You Man.

When that happens, I am immersed. There’s nothing better. The desire to help create that experience for others is what drives everything I do professionally.

Filmmakers fail often in their attempts to immerse their audiences with character and drama, and those failures are expensive. So I understand the impulse to search for a more concrete, reliable way to captivate the audience. Technicians love movies too. It’s only natural that they should try to use what they know to make the experience more immersive.

But the problem with these attempts is that they run contrary to the very fundament of filmmaking. They undermine precisely what is so effective about cinema.

Nothing about cinema is real. It’s all gloriously, magically fake. Acting is fake. Lighting is fake. Sets, concepts, levels of attractiveness and charisma, ease of parking, thematic relevance of small details, amount of lipstick on the leading man’s face after a kiss — all fake. Once one aspect of the experience breaks rank from that dream-like unreality — say, by going 3D, or increasing the frame rate, the experience becomes disjointed and uncomfortable. The edges of the frame are sometimes distracting in even a great 3D movie like Gravity. The high-frame-rate version of The Hobbit made daylight exteriors look tantalizingly real, but revealed lit interior sets for exactly what they were.

Go into a great steak restaurant and ask for steak sauce. See what kind of looks you get. Adding “reality” to cinema is like putting hot fudge on a steak. It’s the wrong sauce for a dish that, when prepared well, needs no embellishments.

Framing is Authoring

Scott Stewart directing the pilot of Defiance for Syfy

An event happening in a room is reality. When you put a box around it, it becomes storytelling. The conceit of the frame is what makes cinema possible. Yes, it makes composition possible—a pleasing arrangement within the frame, but more importantly, it makes a cinematic voice possible. Removing the “limitation” of the frame is actually removing the storyteller’s most important tool—the ability to show us exactly and only what matters. The ability to tell the story, rather than merely present it.

Movies Are Broken

I’ve said in the past that movies aren’t broken, but that’s not entirely true. Movies don’t need any technical fixing, but they are a bit broken. Schilowitz may be right that “if cinema stands still, it will lose,” but what cinema is losing to in my household is not roller-coaster experiences in a theater, it’s TV. Specifically, premium cable and streaming TV series with complex, captivating characters, adult content and themes, and zero risk of not providing a good time. I’ve still yet to convince my wife to watch a few of last year’s well-reviewed three-hour movies with me, but we’ll happily plow through three episodes of House of Cards in a night.

We watch it on a big, rectangular screen. We’re captivated by it. Immersed. And never once do we turn to each other and ask, “I wonder what’s just outside the frame?”

If movies want to compete with TV, putting extra stuff on the edges of the screen isn’t going to do it. They’re going to have to put better stuff in the middle.

They’re going to have to learn to make a steak as good as Game of Thrones, or True Detective.

A Place for More

So is Escape worthless? No, nor is Omnimax, or virtual reality, or any other “experience” that may borrow some tools of cinema to work its magic. I loved those Omnimax films as a kid, but they didn’t make me love normal movies any less. They were something else entirely.

There is a place for these non-cinematic, kinetic experiences. I’ve seen some pretty cool stuff lately behind closed doors, and I’m excited about the experience — and even storytelling possibilities — of these new platforms. They’re not movies, but they can be pretty cool.

See, I love ice cream. And I love it more with hot fudge on top. So keep doing what you do, saucemakers. But leave my steak alone — and leave us steakmakers to the worthy challenge of making a steak so good you’d never dream of saucing it up.

CES 2014: TVs You Don't Need

I bet you have a pretty sweet TV. It’s probably big, and bright, and connected to the internet. It plays movies and TV and streams stuff and is probably paper-thin.

And that’s the problem for TV manufacturers. Your TV is more than good enough. But they only make money when you buy a new one (unless they’re Panasonic. selling ad space on their menu screen). So imagine their desperation to get you to think your awesome TV is worth discarding in favor of a new, several-thousand-dollar model.

Oh, wait, you don’t have to imagine — because the annual Consumer Electronic Show (CES) is happening right now in Las Vegas, the land of let’s-see-if-too-much-of-a-bad-thing-turns-out-to-be-a-good-thing.

It’s not that it’s impossible for a new TV to be announced at CES that would actually improve your movie watching experience at home, but that’s not the actual motivation of the manufacturers.

Last year, it was all about 3D. You must have a 3D TV! What are you, an animal? This year, Vizio, one of the largest TV manufacturers, announced that it is dropping 3D completely.

Dolby announced Dolby Vision, an HDR display method that allows crazy-bright images. While this might be fun for some special venue projects (where the creator dictates the exhibition method), I doubt it will become a standard for movies or TV. But it sure is a wonderful distraction from the simple fact that blacker black levels would be a much better way to improve our home viewing experience—and would require no new standards.

What we should want from our TVs is accuracy, but that’s hard to sell. An accurate TV placed next to one in torch mode would look positively sad.

3D didn’t work last year, so this is the year of 4K. Actually, it’s the year of Moar-K—with Sharp announcing that they can type just about any number followed by a K into a press release.

There’s nothing new to say about 4K in the home—it’s stupid, just like it was last year. Seriously, go back and read this article. Here’s an update: I’ve since set up my home theater. I chose a high-end 1080p projector from JVC, the RS46U. My screen is 132“ diagonally, and my seating distance is about 12.5 feet. The universal reaction I get is ”wow, it’s so sharp!” That’s because the JVC has a great lens, and industry-leading black levels. Eventually you’ll be able to buy an affordable 4K display with no compromises in black levels, but that’s probably a couple of years out. Heck, maybe by then there will actually be some 4K stuff to watch. But beware: there will be a lot of crappy 4K out there as the technology is introduced. Good 1080p (from a low-compression source, like Blu-ray) will beat crappy 4K every time.

Sometimes these new TV gadgets demo well. But that often has little to do with their staying power. Beware the Cream Soda Effect.

CES is also a great time to be reminded that people use TVs for all kinds of stuff, not just watching movies. Many of the announced technologies might make sense for displays used in hotel lobbies and museum exhibits. Keep in mind that manufacturers are trying to create buzz in a more-is-more environment. If they happen make something that’s good for filmmaker or film-lovers, it’s a happy accident.

Oh, and the photo above? It’s a 40-foot-long road-cutting chainsaw that was parked in front of my hotel one year at NAB, also in Las Vegas. It’s really fun to look at, possibly of use to someone, undoubtedly quite expensive, and would be stupid for me to buy. And I didn’t have a photo handy of a 4K TV.

The Perils of Home Theater

I love movies, and have always wanted a great home theater. This year I decided to build one. It’s been a daunting, exciting, and ultimately rewarding process. I’ve wanted to write about the experience of researching and installing this combination studio and theater, but I honestly haven’t known where to start.

Not knowing where to begin is such a classic form of procrastination that I’ve decide to skip “beginning” entirely. Instead, I’m going to jump into the middle, with a tiny detail of my setup—one that vexed me for days and caused me to watch movies incorrectly for about a week.

My Blu-ray player is a Sony Playstation 3. It is connected via HDMI to my pre-amp, which is in turn connected to my projector via another HDMI cable. It’s about the simplest possible configuration, and yet each noun in that last sentence is easily worth an entire post on its own. You can see why I’ve found the prospect of documenting this so daunting. Nevertheless, I’ll dodge the ratholes and plug onward with my two-day ordeal that boiled down to one incorrect setting.

My theater is in a large room, so I opted for a 7.1 system. This means that in addition to left and right surround speakers, I also have a pair of rear surrounds, for a total of seven primary speakers. I figure most of you know all about this, but if you’d like a refresher, here’s a good article on the basics of 5.1 and 7.1.

Most home theaters not only don’t require 7.1, but they could even be compromised by the addition of rear surrounds. The purpose of the surround channels is to provide an immersive, ambient soundfield. In many home settings, it’s hard enough to position two surround speakers correctly. My theater room is large enough and has enough space behind the viewer that I could add the additional two speakers for 7.1.

But I didn’t do it at first, because I needed to build custom mounts to allow the flat-backed speakers to hang vertically off my pitched, open-beam walls. I documented this process on Twitter, from my SketchUp plans to my first cuts, and finally to staining and hanging the mounts.

Prior to this project, my rear surrounds sat in their box for months, and many a movie was watched in “only” 5.1 channels. I assure you, no one complained.

When I finally got the rear surrounds mounted and wired (speaker wire is another perilous rathole to dodge for now), I popped in Pixar’s Brave, which features an optional 7.1 Dolby TrueHD soundtrack. I waded through the punishing pre-menu crap that defines the Blu-ray experience, selected the 7.1 option, and played the movie.

And no sound came out of my rear surrounds.

The 7.1 of Silence

This launched me down a two-day path of trying various disks and various settings. I won’t bore you with the details, but there are a few salient points:

Many Pixar Blu-rays come with a home theater setup “maximizer,” lovingly made by some very smart folks at Pixar who care about your home viewing and listening experience. Found under Setup in the menu, it features discrete test tones for all six or eight of your audio channels.

In my case, different disks failed in different ways. Brave and Monsters University sent no sound to the rears, but Cars 2 (a DTS disk) did, just mixed up with the other surround channels.

There are also discrete channel test tones on the Digital Video Essentials: HD Basics disk, and my system passed their test. HD Basics was able to send a discrete sound to the rear surrounds. So not every disk failed.

At some point you have to stop futzing and start enjoying, so the wife and I popped in Tron: Legacy (a DTS disk which did send sound to the rears), and watched it. Or rather, listened to it, because as pretty as the film often is, it’s the soundtrack that inspired me to buy the disk.

The Daft Punk soundtrack filled the room. It sounded great. I was singing the praises of 7.1—despite a nagging feeling that something was still amiss.

There’s a scene in Tron: Legacy where someone knocks at a door positioned directly behind the viewer. The knocking seemed to originate directly from the back of our theater. Michelle even turned her head, perfectly illustrating one of my big reservations about aggressive 7.1 mixes. Localized surround events can sometimes be the opposite of “immersive,” reminding you that the visuals, unlike the sound, are happening only in a window in front of you.

As a home theater nerd, you want a disk or two on hand that will really show off the system, but, if you’re like me, you’ll find that your favorite movies are more reserved in their surround mixes. Surround should be subtle, and when you install 7.1 at home, you’re paying twice as much for a little more subtlety.

The next day, I did some more troubleshooting. I suspected that Tron, like the also-DTS Cars 2, was being mixed down somehow and sending identical signals to the surrounds on each side. I found the scene with the door knock, and stood next to my LR surround. The knock played equally in the SR and the SBR.

Confident now that I had yet to actually hear true discrete 7.1 in my theater, I resumed my research, and found this article at Engadget, which contained the answer.

In the video settings on my PS3, I has somehow set HDMI to output digital audio as “bitstream” rather than Linear PCM. Read the Engadget article for more on what that means—but in my case, the ramification was that I wasn’t getting true 7.1.[1]

Even though I knew that the PS3 needs to decode 7.1 itself and output it as uncompressed discrete channels (LPCM) as opposed to sending the unprocessed audio track and letting the receiver do the decoding, which already put me into a niche group of well-researched home theater nerds, this incredibly critical audio setting was buried in the Video settings, so I’d missed it.

I switched my HDMI audio output to LPCM and returned to the knocking scene. Now the knock came discretely out of the rear surrounds.[2] The Maximizer on both the Dolby and DTS Pixar disks sent discrete signals to each channel. Victory!

A Chapter About a Bolt

In The Hunt For Red October (the book), author Tom Clancy begins a chapter with a detailed description of a single bolt in a helicopter—how it works, and how, on this particular day, it failed. Here, I’ve written over a thousand words to describe how I got one simple setting wrong on my Blu-ray player, and wound up stuck for days not getting the most out of my home theater. While no one will make an awesome movie about my experience, I do think it was worth sharing, and I hope you agree.

Setting up a home theater is fraught with just this kind of pitfall, and clear, concise articles like that one from Engadget are rare. But even more rare is clear, trustworthy information on some of the less pushbutton-oriented aspects of home theater. There are endless debates about speakers, endless opinions on how much you should spend on cables, and hundreds of “experts” with fringe opinions and loud voices. There’s an entire industry of home theater and audiophile exploitation that I waded through in order to get to the point where I could be one, simple setting away from hearing movies correctly in my home. If you’re interested, I’ll write more about this in the future, in the hopes of cutting through some of that noise.

Right after I comb through my Blu-ray library for another 7.1 movie to watch.

1. The HD Basics disk didn’t fail because it’s only 6.1, which can be sent over HDMI as Bitstream from a PS3.  ↩
2. Why did the door knock seem so perfectly isolated to the rear in our initial, mixed-down viewing, when it was actually evenly distributed among all four surround channels? That’s a great rathole for a future post.  ↩

Taking The Movies Out of The Movies

The Hollywood Reporter, in an article called IBC Wrap: “We Would Be Fools if We Didn’t Learn From ‘The Hobbit’”:

Audience reaction to Hollywood’s first high frame rate movie, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was decidedly mixed, but frame rates—along with higher resolution, laser light, immersive sound and second screen experiences were very much on the minds of digital cinema leaders last week at the International Broadcasters Convention.

Audiences didn’t like it, so let’s keep talking about it, and other crap that isn’t movies.

“The audience response might have been mixed, but there were many examples of audience numbers increasing because of the technology, and we could charge a premium for the experience,” [Phil Clapp, president of the International Union of Cinemas] said.

So apparently, what we’d be “fools if we didn’t learn from The Hobbit” is that we can charge more money for stuff people don’t actually like.

Exhibitors, here’s how to take more of my money: build more theaters like the ArcLight, where they show movies—just regular movies—and show them well, and charge me whatever you want for tickets.