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Dennis Burger

Review: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

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Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

review | Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

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Yes, it’s a credulity-straining mess of a movie, but it’s a mess that works—and Doom looks and sounds exceptional in 4K HDR

by Dennis Burger
updated May 3, 2023

If you’re looking for a study in ambivalence, you’ve come to the right place. My thoughts on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom are many, and they’re almost all contradictory. This first followup to what I consider to be one of the best action-adventures ever made is a mess. It’s erratic, tonally inconsistent, and utterly relentless. Its over reliance on gags (in more than one sense of the word) does it no favors, and it strains the bounds of credulity at every turn, never quite dipping into nuke-the-fridge territory, but coming awfully close.

And yet I absolutely adore this mess of a movie, perhaps even more than the superior Last Crusade, which was a massive course correction before the series went completely off the rails with its fourth entry, whose name I will not utter here. Temple of Doom may be flawed, but it’s fascinatingly flawed; it’s entertainingly flawed. And for all the nits I could pick, it’s never boring. And perhaps most importantly, it has a certain rugged charm, despite all the ick.

But hey, you’ve had 37 years now to figure out what you think of this movie and I’m unlikely to change those impressions. What you’re here for is a quick and simple answer to the question of whether the 4K HDR upgrade is worth it.

In a word: Yes! Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is exactly how a restoration of a movie like this should be handled. By that I mean that it undeniably still looks like film of its era. Despite some digital tinkering to improve the compositing and clean up a few practical artifacts, it hasn’t been tinkered with to the point that it looks like a modern movie, but it’s clean, well-preserved, and stunningly detailed.

The biggest improvements over the fundamentally flawed Blu-ray remasters from 2012 come in the form of much-improved contrasts and new color timing that doesn’t look like the negative was passed through a cheap Instagram filter. Saturation overall is way, way down from the Blu-ray, but the palette is punctuated by vibrant hues here and there that are way beyond the capabilities of 8-bit video. In that sense, it reminds me of the new remaster of The Wizard of Oz. There’s simply more nuance to the color overall. Every hue isn’t cranked to 11 the way it was in the previous Blu-ray release. The overall cast of the imagery is definitely warm but not cartoonishly so.

Equally important to the effectiveness of this new remaster is the expanded dynamic range, especially at the lower end of the value scale. That’s especially beneficial during darker passages, like the camping scene toward the end of the first act. Previous home video releases of Temple of Doom have either rendered the scene so darkly that you couldn’t appreciate the visual gags or so brightly that it simply wasn’t believable as nighttime. In the new 4K remaster, the scene is appropriately dark, the shadows sufficiently inky, but there’s still enough dynamic range in the image that you can actually see all the critters that torment Willie.

What’s true in that scene is true throughout the picture: The expanded dynamic range gives the image a richness and pop that makes it much more resolved, dimensional, organic, and analog in its presentation.

The audio receives similar treatment in the form of a new Atmos remix overseen by Ben Burtt. Again, the audio is undoubtedly of the era, especially in the way it leans heavily on the midrange, and some of the sound effects sound a bit thin. But I’ll take that any day over newly recorded digital effects foisted upon a soundtrack of this vintage, which almost never sound right.

Height effects are employed subtly but effectively, mostly to give John Williams’ score more room to stretch its legs. Some sound effects also get a bit of a lift but there’s nothing about the remix that’s going to pull your attention away from the screen. In fact, there were a few times when I wondered if anything was coming out of the height channels at all, only to turn off Atmos processing on my preamp and find myself surprised by the collapse of the soundfield. That is the highest compliment I could pay to any Atmos remix of an older film. I didn’t find it intrusive when it was there but I missed it when it was gone.

My only real beef with the 4K version of the Indiana Jones collection is that no new bonus features were created to mark the occasion. Well, that’s not wholly true: Paramount did sanction one new featurette about the sound design of the original film only to unceremoniously dump it on YouTube. Otherwise, the new collection carries over the bonus goodies from the last big release in 2012, of which there are plenty.

I took a sneak peek at Temple of Doom on my Apple TV 4K, and was pleasantly surprised that it looks amazing for the most part. The atmospheric smoke in the dance sequence in Club Obi Wan at the beginning looked a little noisy but not egregiously so. Switching over to my Roku Ultra, said smoke was a bit less noisy and the overall image was crisper and better resolved.

I’m sort of shocked that a bit of digital-looking noise in one shot is the only evidence of compression I could see, and inconclusive evidence at that. There are numerous scenes that function as torture tests of high-efficiency video encoding, like the quick shot of the glistening wet statue encountered by our heroes in the approach to Pankot Palace, or the jewels on the costume of the young Maharaja. Both boast a lot of specular brightness but also a lack of uniformity. In other words, there’s nothing about the patterns in the imagery that’s predictable, especially in motion, and codecs like HEVC thrive on predictability, especially at lower bitrates.

Long story short, if there are any significant shortcomings in Apple’s encoding of the film, aside from perhaps that bit of noisy smoke in the intro, I can’t see them. The bottom line is that the iTunes version in Dolby Vision makes the previous Blu-ray release look like hot garbage in every respect.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Despite some digital tinkering to improve the compositing and clean up a few practical artifacts, it hasn’t been tinkered with to the point that it looks like a modern movie, but it’s clean, well-preserved, and stunningly detailed

SOUND | The audio is undoubtedly of the era, especially in the way it leans heavily on the midrange, and some of the sound effects sound a bit thin, but the Atmos mix, while mostly subtle, is extremely effective

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Review: Season: A Letter to the Future

Season: A Letter to the Future

review | Season: A Letter to the Future

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No fighting, no explosions—you can’t even jump—but this quest game provides a unique experience for everyone who plays it

by Dennis Burger
March 31, 2023

Perhaps the easiest way to explain the concept of the brilliant new PS4/PS5/PC game Season: A Letter to the Future is to deconstruct its title. The “season” to which it refers isn’t a meteorological subdivision of the year but something more akin to the ages of J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium—larger swaths of time into which history is grouped in retrospect. There was, in the past of this game’s world, a season of industrialization, a season of cultural exchange, a season of war, and the season into which your character was born, whose defining characteristics are a bit nebulous.

The “letter to the future” is your mission in the game. The end of your season has been prophesied. You’ve been chosen to leave your insular little hometown to document the world as it exists for the benefit of future generations. Your tools for the journey consist of merely a camera, an audio recorder, a bicycle, and the blank scrapbook you’ll fill along the way—with photos and drawings and quotations from the people you meet in your travels—not for your own benefit, but for the benefit of those who’ll read it long after you’re gone.

Let me underline that point in case it doesn’t resonate. Season: A Letter to the Future is a quest game, to be sure; it is an open-world exploration game. But you have no weapons. You can’t even jump, you can’t punch, you can neither build nor destroy things. Your job is to explore and learn and document—to see the world as it exists and to listen to the stories of the who populate it—and the scrapbook you end up filling by the end of your journey will be uniquely yours. It’s legitimately inconceivable that any other player will construct a letter to the future exactly like yours.

None of it would work if the world weren’t so compelling, but the tiny little indie dev-team Scavengers Studio has created a virtual reality that’s nearly infinitely compelling, not merely in its composition but also its aesthetics. The world of the game certainly seems to be ours in the far future, as its artifacts will look all too familiar to modern eyes—machines of commerce and construction; crumbled superhighways that exist in the landscape but are not part of it. Let’s just call it what it is: A post-apocalyptic earth by all indications. But not since Adventure Time have we seen a post-apocalypse this quirky and beautiful.

The game’s distinctive rendering style certainly doesn’t hurt in that respect. Regular gamers will recognize the graphics as belonging to a tradition known as cel-shading, perhaps employed most popularly in a handful of modern Zelda games but also used in films ranging from A Scanner Darkly to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

As lovely as the graphics are, though, it’s the surround soundtrack that sells the constructed reality of the game. More often than not, it’ll be your ears that point you in the direction of the most interesting discoveries, be it an old windmill creaking in the midst of a storm, creating energy for no one, or a manmade instrument that converts the sounds of the wind into music.

Perhaps the neatest thing about Season: A Letter to the Future is that I think it will be non-gamers who somehow stumble upon it who appreciate it the most. The game begins with the gentlest of invitations: “We invite you to explore and enjoy this experience at your own pace.” Many of us who are accustomed to exploring virtual open worlds will, I fear, rush from one discovery to the next, chasing the trophies and achievements we’ve been trained to view as the point of it all, secure in the knowledge that as soon as we’ve hit the ending credits we can start a new game and discover all the things we missed the first time around.

Season is not that sort of game. Having made it to the end and meditated on its themes—ecological, environmental, societal, historical, and personal alike—I doubt I’ll ever play it again. To do so would be to miss the point. As with life, it’s the ephemerality of this letter to the future that makes it so precious. To attempt a do-over would be to sully the memory of this one-of-a-kind experience.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Not since Adventure Time has there been a post-apocalypse this quirky and beautiful, done in a cel-shading style reminiscent of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

SOUND | The surround soundtrack sells the constructed reality of the game, guiding you in the direction of the most interesting discoveries

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The Problem with Rotten Tomatoes

The Problem with Rotten Tomatoes

The Problem with Rotten Tomatoes

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The online movie review service offers a way for people to feel part of a consensus so they don’t have to think for themselves

by Dennis Burger
March 23, 2023

If, for whatever reason, you’re unfamiliar with Rotten Tomatoes, it’s probably best described as the pop culture equivalent of radon—a colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas that doesn’t directly kill you but which decays into radioactive metals that cause lung cancer. A more charitable though less evocative description would be that it’s a review aggregator that takes film critiques written by a hand-selected pool of professional reviewers, normalizes their scores, averages them, then reports what percentage of writers found the film “Fresh” or “Rotten.”

Ask anyone who engages in film criticism online if they want their reviews included in the official Rotten Tomatoes aggregate score. If they tell you no, they’re lying.

But why? What’s the value in having your thoughtful analysis reduced to a number, added to a total, divided by whatever, plastered on advertisements, and tacked onto the listings for online film retailers as either an enticement or a warning?

The sad truth is that Rotten Tomatoes is the only source of film criticism most people pay attention to these days. So unless your unique perspective is thrown into this particular salmorejo pot and boiled down to mush, your voice isn’t contributing to the discussion about any given film in any meaningful way as far as most consumers are concerned. 

Here’s the thing, though: I don’t actually think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with the service Rotten Tomatoes provides, at least not in principle. The handful of other film reviewers whose work I actually read (and it is a tiny handful), I discovered via RT after having a “Fresh” score for a film I loathed shoved down my throat by Vudu and iTunes and even my beloved Kaleidescape, and I turned to the aggregator for some perspective on why it was so well received. Or, conversely, when a film I was seriously interested in got bombed with a “Rotten” score and I wanted to explore further to see if there was any substance to the criticism or if it was largely politically motivated.

I wouldn’t have discovered my favorite modern film critic, Mark Kermode, had I not waded into the shallow waters of Rotten Tomatoes to discover why House of Gucci—an abomination I described as “the worst movie I’ve suffered through since 1993’s Super Mario Bros.”—was “Certified Fresh.” And let it be stated for the record that I don’t agree with the three-fifths compromise of a score Kermode gave the film, but this line from his conclusion, linked from Rotten Tomatoes, at least gives me a sense of what he saw in it: “[F]or better or worse, House of Gucci is a little too well behaved to become a cult classic. But Gaga deserves a gong for steering a steely path through the madness.” Hard to argue with that, and I think I’ve read everything he wrote since, despite the fact that I disagree with his conclusions more often than not.

But is that really the way most people use the site? I think not. Which is a roundabout way of saying Rotten Tomatoes isn’t the problem; the way society at large uses it is the problem. Is it really so surprising, though? Turn your attention to the largest discussion forum in the world, Reddit, and you’ll find post after post that begins with a sheepish “What’s the consensus on . . ?” when the topic at hand is a purely subjective consideration, a matter of personal taste. And every time I see a social media post that’s addressed to “The Hivemind,” I want to yeet my smartphone into the sun.

Individual expression—indeed, individual thought—seems verboten these days, so of course a service like Rotten Tomatoes has become the opiate of the masses. The problem for independent thinkers, though, is that if your contribution to the discussion at large can’t be chopped up and bundled like mortgage-backed securities that are repackaged into collateralized debt obligations, it seems to be of no use to the groupthink-driven pop culture machine.

Of course, it’s impossible to talk about groupthink without acknowledging that there always seem to be two groups doing their collective thinking, one “fer it” and one “agin it,” no matter what “it” is. As a sort of tech-obsessed dweeb with a background in the fine arts, I am of course fascinated by the Generative Adversarial Networks that are in the headlines so much these days. In fact, I used one of my favorite text-to-image neural networks, Midjourney, to create the image you see at the top of the page. And that fact alone will delight some of you and outrage the rest.

Generally speaking, most of the people who are outraged are outraged for the wrong reason. They’ve been told these neural networks are stealing the work of others, copying and pasting elements of different images to create what the user asks for. They don’t work like that, though. They’ve simply been trained on enough images that they know what a tomato looks like, they know what a cinema looks like, they know what makes a painting look different from a photograph, and they can synthesize images in a variety of different styles based on the words you plug in (although, these days, most users have outsourced any thought they used to put into their prompts to language-based neural networks like ChatGPT). There are some living artists who don’t want their work included in the training data, and I fully support them, if only because having an AI being able to spit out images that could easily be mistaken for their work does cut into their potential revenue stream.

My thoughts on all of this fall somewhere outside the Overton Window that defines the two opinions you’re allowed to have about artificial intelligence. I think it’s fascinating and a real boon to writers like myself who can’t afford to pay an illustrator yet still want our articles to be visually engaging.

I also think these neural networks represent a legitimate threat. But it’s not the services themselves that actually pose the threat. It’s how we use them. And the fact that humanity as a whole seems to have decided that an aggregated average of thumbs ups and thumbs downs says anything meaningful about the quality of a film only reinforces those fears.

In my review of Everything Everywhere All at Once—without a doubt the best film I’ve seen this century and one that most of my acquaintances didn’t bother to watch until the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave them permission to do so—I bemoaned the fact that our “metaphors have lost all meaning. Our totems have lost their functional connections with the things they’re supposed to symbolize and have taken on disproportionate importance on their own. The trappings have come to be the entire point.”

All of this feels like a manifestation of the same dark and soulless trend. Text-to-image neural networks are derivative by nature. They are not in any sense creative. They can only remix what has come before, and they only pose a threat to actual artists if we allow them to. And if they do put living, breathing artists out of work, these text-to-image generators will stagnate because there will be nothing new to amalgamate.

Isn’t it the same with Rotten Tomatoes? If you’re using it to help you cut through the noise and find meaningful film analysis that resonates with you, that’s great. That’s how it ought to be used. But you’re probably not, are you?

If not, consider this: If enough of us stop reading film criticism and just rely on that one idiotic, meaningless spandrel (or two, if you consider the even more politicized “audience” rating) to inform our viewing decisions, and if publications stop paying for film reviews as a result because nobody reads them anymore, where will your Rotten Tomatoes score come from then? Two angry mobs using review-bombing as the new frontline in the ongoing culture war?

No thank you.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

“Rotten Tomatoes isn’t the problem; the way society at large uses it is the problem.”

“Text-to-image neural networks are not in any sense creative. They can only remix what has come before, and they only pose a threat to actual artists if we allow them to.”

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Review: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2022)

review | Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

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Previously the subject of three very short animated films, Marcel translates surprisingly well into a perceptive and unusually optimistic feature-length effort

by Dennis Burger
March 10, 2023

Viewers of a certain vintage will remember Edith Ann, the character created by Lily Tomlin. The bit involved her sitting in an oversized rocking chair and dispensing nuggets of wisdom from the perspective of a five-and-a-half-year-old, first on Laugh-In in the 1960s and later on Sesame Street in the ’70s. If you remember what I’m talking about, imagine taking those segments—which ran from maybe 30 seconds to a couple minutes at most—and expanding them into a feature-length film, and you’ll get a sense of exactly how preposterous an idea it was to turn Marcel the Shell with Shoes On into a movie.

Marcel, in case you’re not familiar, was the subject of three stop-motion animated shorts made between 2010 and 2014, each with a runtime of under four minutes. Marcel is cuter than Edith Ann, to be sure, and a little more mature at that, but the concept is remarkably similar—take a look at the world through the eyes of a naïve-but-wise child (in this case, an anthropomorphic seashell voiced by Jenny Slate) if only to appreciate how weird some of our social conventions are, or perhaps to shine a light on things we take for granted. Truth be told, though, much as I loved those little films, four minutes seemed to be stretching the concept to its limits.

Thankfully, Slate and former husband Dean Fleischer Camp—who cowrote and directed the original shorts and the feature film together—knew better than to simply fill up more time with Marcel’s trademark “guess what . . .” gags. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On—the movie, that is—has a for-real narrative arc, one that organically emerges from the original concept while also expanding it. Marcel and his grandmother (voiced here by Isabella Rossellini) are all that remain of their family, who disappeared when the former owners of their house broke up and moved out. Documentarian Dean (played by Fleischer Camp) rents the house from AirBnB after his own breakup, and decides to make a film about Marcel’s daily life and his distinctive view of the world. 

While coloring way outside the lines of the original premise, the film version of Marcel is true to its roots, and it actually incorporates the shorts into the cinematic narrative quite inventively, as Marcel becomes an internet sensation in this reality sort of the same way he did in ours over a decade ago.

In a larger sense, though, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is a quest film, with the quest in this case being Marcel’s dogged determination to find his lost family. Along the way, the film manages to weave in some truly profound commentary on parasocial relationships and the illusion of connectedness that comes from social media. And far from overstaying its welcome, by the time the credits started rolling at around the 80-minute mark, I found myself wanting it to go on, wanting at least another half hour with this adorable character and his defiantly optimistic outlook despite the profound sadness of his circumstances.

The film also understandably looks a little more professional than the low-budget DIY originals, but I dig the fact that live-action director of photography Bianca Cline and stop-motion director of photography Eric Adkins managed to evoke the look of the shorts without aping them. There’s also a lot more inventive camerawork on display here, but rather than being showy, it all sort of aids buying into the reality of this wholly unbelievable scenario.

The film was shot on a combination of older Alexa digital cameras with rehoused Nikon still-photography lenses and Canon EOS R mirrorless bodies, and it looks like a bit of film-look processing has been applied to add a touch of faux grain and mute some of the contrasts. It was finished in a 4K digital intermediate at an odd aspect ratio of 1.55:1.

Light plays a big role in the film—both narratively and cinematically—and while none of it is eye-reactive, the HDR10 grade of Kaleidescape’s download presents it beautifully. Little motes of dust suspended in sunbeams throughout the film pop a bit more than they would in standard dynamic range, and although the imagery has an intentionally soft look, the combination of the expanded value scale and the enhanced resolution of UHD gives the whole thing a wonderfully textured look. The only flaws are two very brief instances of banding that may or may not have been baked into the original footage.

The Kaleidescape version also comes with a surprisingly aggressive Dolby Atmos mix that somehow manages to work. The surround channels are nearly constantly active, especially early in the film, and the utterly brilliant score by Richard Vreeland (aka Disasterpeace) expands upward into the height channels at every appropriate opportunity. I would normally hate any Atmos mix that throws as much sound around the room as this one does, but it’s always perfectly in proportion with the images onscreen and never distracts from the viewing experience. It’s simply further proof that sound mixers are finally figuring out how to fill this expanded sonic landscape without making a spectacle of it all.

Frankly, though, unless you’re specifically concentrating on the shape of the sound—say, for the purposes of a review—I doubt you’ll notice the technical particulars. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is such a compelling little film that anyone with a hint of tolerance for weirdness will get altogether lost in the experience. It’s refreshing to watch a movie that leans so hard into its adorableness without ignoring the difficulties we all face in life. It’s also a delightfully strange feeling to watch a film made with so much sincerity and so little cynicism. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but give the original shorts a watch if you haven’t seen them a dozen times already (you can find them on YouTube here, here, and here). If they resonate with you in the slightest, I think you’ll love the feature-length Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Light plays a big role in the film and while none of it is eye-reactive, the HDR10 grade of Kaleidescape’s download presents it beautifully

SOUND | The Kaleidescape version comes with a surprisingly aggressive Dolby Atmos mix that somehow manages to work, being always perfectly in proportion with the images onscreen and never distracting from the viewing experience

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Review: All That Breathes

All That Breathes (2022)

review | All That Breathes

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Eschewing conventional narrative and exposition, this Oscar-nominated Indian documentary encourages you to develop your own thoughts and feelings about the subject matter

by Dennis Burger
February 22, 2023

If you want to experience the concept of “show, don’t tell” embodied flawlessly in cinematic form, you owe it to yourself to check out Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes at your earliest convenience. Less a documentary—or indeed, a narrative—than a portrait that unfolds in four dimensions, the film opens with a slow panning sequence that establishes the rules straight away. It’s a shot of urban wildlife in the city of New Delhi—rats, specifically, scurrying around in a concrete jungle—devoid of narration or setup. It is, in a sense, pure cinematic experience—a combination of moving imagery and sound orchestrated to transport you elsewhere and make you feel whatever you’re going to feel without imposing its feelings on you.

Shortly thereafter, we’re introduced to Mohammad, Nadeem, and Salik, operators of a wildlife rescue focused on treating and rehabilitating black kites that fall from New Delhi’s toxic skies. What makes All That Breathes hit a bit differently is that it doesn’t explain who these men are or what they do. We discover the particulars of their lives organically, as they come up in conversation or in the course of their day-to-day lives. We witness phone conversations, only half of which can be heard. We’re privy to private discussions about the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the resulting government overreach without any mention of the Citizenship Amendment Act by name.

The filmmakers, in other words, don’t dot every “i” and cross every “t” because they don’t need to. You pick up from context what’s important—at least what’s important to the subjects of the film.

Scenes of family life and the work of the aptly named Wildlife Rescue are interspersed with a good number of the purely cinematic experiential sequences of the sort that open the film, all of which seem designed to make the viewer reflect on the way wildlife affects cities and cities affect wildlife and both affect humans. The beauty of it is, though, we’re not told how to interpret any of this. We don’t need to be. The images coming straight out of the camera are enough of a prompt.

Those images, by the way, were obviously captured at a higher resolution and with more dynamic range than we find in the HD presentation on HBO Max. The film was shot on a combination of Canon and Panasonic prosumer cameras, both of which record at 4K resolution with 10-bit dynamic range. And you can see the constraints of dynamic range at times, when highlights get blown out or shadows get a little muddied. All in all, though, the impeccably composed cinematography benefits from a bit of processing that seems to have muted contrasts a bit, and the footage is so mesmerizing that it transcends reproduction.

No such caveats are needed for the Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 soundtrack, which is an absolute master class in subtle but effective audio mixing. In fact, it upmixes perfectly into Atmos, if your surround processor is capable of such. Pans across the front soundstage are common, though inconspicuous enough that you might miss them. The surround channels are nearly constantly active but never distracting. Dialogue is beautifully rendered—although, it’s in Hindi, so intelligibility might not matter for those of us in the west who don’t speak the language. The baked-in subtitles are nicely done as well and seem better suited to viewing at cinematic proportions than the standard 55-inch TV on the other side of the room. That’s a nice but unexpected touch.

Overall, the only real complaint I have about All That Breathes is that it ends far too quickly. Granted, the 97-minute runtime already seems brisk on paper, but actually watching it, it doesn’t feel anywhere near that long. Some of that is due to the lack of a conventional narrative but a lot of it boils down to fantastic editing, compelling subjects, and mesmerizing cinematography. One simply hopes HBO eventually releases the thing in UHD/HDR so it can be experienced in its full splendor.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | The images were captured at a higher resolution and with more dynamic range than are found in the HD presentation on HBO Max. You can see the dynamic-range constraints when highlights are blown out or shadows get a little muddied

SOUND | The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 soundtrack is a master class in subtle but effective audio mixing that upmixes perfectly into Atmos

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Great Video Wall Sound–Another Solution

Great Video Wall Sound--Another Solution

Great Video Wall Sound—Another Solution

Famed acoustical designer Anthony Grimani offers his unique approach to solving the problem of where to put the center speaker in a video-wall home theater

by Dennis Burger
February 23, 2023

The problem of how to design sound systems to support massive LED video walls is one that continues to motivate audio professionals working in the luxury home entertainment space. We’ve previously discussed the root of the problem as well as one potential solution, but the fact is this is such a custom domain that it’s hard to imagine a one-size-fits-all panacea that provides optimal sound for every wall in every installation.

I recently spoke with Anthony Grimani, president of Performance Media Industries, Ltd. and co-founder of Grimani Systems, to get his  take on how to best design a sound system to accompany a video wall. Before we dug into his patent-pending solution, though, I asked him to reiterate for me why this is a problem to begin with.

“When we’re looking at images on the screen, we want the voices of the characters to come out of the middle of the screen,” he says. “And the way we do that traditionally is we put three speakers behind an acoustically transparent projection screen. But what happens when you replace that acoustically transparent screen with a big, thick screen that won’t let sound through?”

One alternative Grimani has employed is what he refers to as “Phantom+”—essentially using speakers on either side of the screen to create a phantom center speaker where no speaker actually exists. “The typical problem with a phantom center, though,” he says, “is that if your seat is off to one side of the room, the voices move with you. The character in the center of the screen now sounds like they’re coming from the left side of the screen.”

“But we’ve found that by using speakers with really good sound power—like ours, but also ones like Paradigm, KEF, JBL, and a few others companies that go through the effort of distributing the sound nice and wide and constant—that phantom center doesn’t move as hard and as much as with very directional speakers.” Add a bit of EQ to account for the way the listener’s head changes the sound arriving at their ears and this isn’t a bad solution, says Grimani. But it’s not ideal.

Another option—one that doesn’t share the same downsides as the Phantom+ configuration but has its own quirks—is a single speaker above or below the screen. “You might think it would sound like it’s imaging above the characters’ heads, because that’s where the speaker is. And if the speaker has a very focused directivity like a lot of people think you have to have, you’re dominated by the direct sound and you’re going to hear it as up  above the image. But because of the wide directivity of our speakers—because what you’re hearing is some direct sound and then a lot of really broad sound-power energy reflecting off the lateral surfaces, there’s enough energy flowing around that it fools your sensation of imaging and you hear the sound centered not above the screen but toward the top third of the screen. You still hear the sound coming from the screen, just higher than perhaps it should.”

Then again, that really only works if there’s room above the screen for a speaker. And given that modular LED video walls are often installed floor-to-ceiling, sometime there simply isn’t room. And that’s where Grimani’s new solution comes in. In short, it works by splitting the sound going to the center channel into two parts: The lower-frequency sounds are sent to the speakers on either side of the screen, whereas the higher frequencies—the ones you can really point to and say “That sound is coming from right there”—are sent to a speaker above the listeners’ heads and aimed at the video wall, so they bounce off and seem to come from close to the middle of the screen.

That’s the simple explanation. For a more in-depth look that explains why and how this all works, we’re going to need to get a bit more technical. What follows is a transcript of my conversation with Grimani about the subject, edit for clarity and brevity.

So, with this two-piece solution, how do you keep the listener from feeling like the sound is coming from two different directions?

The idea is to use a directional waveguide placed generally over your head, and if there’s no spillover of direct sound from the waveguide to your head, you can create the illusion of sound coming directly from the center of the screen. If there’s any amount of direct sound that goes to your head from that overhead speaker, though, you will localize that because it’s the first sound to arrive at your head. It’s only three or four feet away from you. So it’s really important that there not be any leakage.

Now, the waveguide needs to be a pretty good size. Laws of physics are what they are. You can’t cheat that. If we want the crossover point at around 800 Hz, the waveguide is about 12 inches tall. But you can bury that into the rafters in between joists.

With the phantom-center information below 800Hz, you do have to time-align everything really carefully because the path from the speaker to the screen and back to your head is longer than the path coming directly to your head from the left and right speakers. So you have to delay the other speakers so everything arrives at your head at the right time, and that’s all done really easily in the digital domain.

In terms of the overhead speaker, we happen to be using our Conic Section Array waveguide because it works well, but any other waveguide that produces good vertical pattern control with no off-axis lobes and wide-enough coverage works.

Full disclosure: If you sit right in the middle of the room, the image is slightly above the middle of the screen because that speaker bouncing off the screen is creating a mirror image, so it’s sort of like the speaker exists in a mirror-image position behind the screen. If it’s 12 feet from the speaker to the screen, it’s sort of like the sound is coming from 12 feet behind the screen, but in the ceiling. And if you move off-axis, that speaker does move with you a little bit. Imagine having a speaker shooting through an acoustically transparent

Since speakers can’t be placed behind a video wall as they can with a projection screen, the higher-frequency sounds are instead bounced off the screen and back to the listeners.

Great Video Wall Sound--Another Solution

Anthony Grimani

Anthony Grimani’s solution splits the sound going to the center channel, with the lower frequencies being fed to speakers on either side of the screen and the higher frequencies going to a speaker above the listeners’ heads and aimed at the video wall, so they bounce off and seem to come from close to the middle of the screen

Great Video Wall Sound--Another Solution
Great Video Wall Sound--Another Solution
Great Video Wall Sound--Another Solution

Renderings of the Conic Section Array waveguide, shown with and without a speaker grille. The waveguide is positioned in the ceiling to aim the higher-frequency sounds at the video wall, to then be bounced back to the listening positions in the theater. 

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screen but instead of right behind the screen, it’s 10 or 12 feet behind the screen. If a speaker is right at the screen, you can move back and forth and the speaker doesn’t appear to move. If the speaker is 10 feet behind the screen and you move off-axis—

There’s a little parallax.

Exactly. So the image of the character speaking onscreen does move with you, but just a little—just to be perfectly clear. I believe in telling the whole story. But I think it’s an acceptable compromise. None of this is as perfect as a speaker behind an acoustically transparent screen. Every alternative has its compromises. It’s about finding the right solution with the fewest compromises. And a lot of times, that’s going to be room-dependent.

Are you installing this solution yet or are you waiting for the patent to be approved?

We have it installed in our demo room. In the world of patents, you have to show you’ve reduced the invention to practice. A patent can be shown to be invalid if the only thing you’ve filed in the patent is an idea you’ve never tested. So don’t patent ideas—patent advancements of the state of the art that you’ve proven to yourself or others works. So we have it working here, and I’m working with an integrator in the Los Angeles area to install it on their big LED wall.

So, you said you’re high-pass filtering the signal going to the ceiling center speaker at 800Hz and sending everything below that to the front speakers. Why 800Hz? That’s not a number I hear people reference when they’re talking about directionality of sound.

Yeah, human hearing has very good localization from about 500 or 600Hz up to about 3kHz. That’s sort of the peak of frequencies you can localize, that you can point at and say, “That sound is coming from right there.”

Below 500Hz, the wavelengths get longer and longer, and your interaural gain—the thing that allows you to localize a sound in 3D space even though we only have two ears—gets fooled because the wavelengths get bigger. You know, a 500Hz wavelength is a little over two feet wide. So, your head is, what, 7 or 8 inches? And when a wave is so much bigger, it’s harder to compare the wavefronts coming from one direction versus another. And as you go down in frequency, it gets harder and harder to point to where a sound is coming from.

In the upper frequencies, a 3kHz signal has a wavelength of just a few inches, maybe half the size of your head, so as you go higher and higher in frequency and the wavelength gets shorter and shorter, the obviousness of correlation between the patterns hitting your left or right ear gets more scrambled because it’s smaller portions of what you’re hearing. And so, above 3kHz or 4kHz, your ability to point toward the source of a sound is also increasingly diminished.

The peak of directionality is from around 500Hz to 3kHz, so if you can take the waveguide down to 500Hz and phantom-image everything else, no problem. But that would be a waveguide that’s much bigger, if you really want good pattern control. It’s just not as practical.

So you go, “What if I try 600? 700? 800?” Somewhere around 800 or 900 is sort of this tipping point where the waveguide is practical and you’re definitely starting to hear more in terms of directionality. That’s not to say it’s the best frequency, it’s just a good compromise between practicality and effectiveness.

We have played with 1000Hz, and if the filters are steep enough and things are controlled enough in the room, you can make it work. And that’s a waveguide that’s about six inches, which is really easy to conceal in a ceiling above the sheetrock in the rafters.

At any rate, if the horn or waveguide is designed correctly, you’re not going to hear any direct energy from straight overhead. Mind you, we’ve seen solutions that involve PA speakers laid on their side, shoved way up close to the screen, and they bounce it off the screen from just a few feet away. That’s just too far forward, because if you look at the specular reflection, that bounce is way too high. It misses the screen most of the time. Also, that speaker playing full-range has a lot of off-axis spill starting at around 1kHz or even a little higher, so you’re hearing the sound directly from that cabinet before you hear the reflection.

I’ve talked to Steve Haas about his experience with such systems. In fact, he wrote an article about it for Cineluxe.

It doesn’t work. It just sounds fuzzy and the dialogue isn’t clear, and it clearly doesn’t sound like it’s coming from the screen, which is the entire point.

Basically, the rule is: With a waveguide or horn—or directional beam-steering array, because that’s also in the patent—there’s a frequency at which you need to roll off and go to a speaker that’s at the front of the screen, otherwise your brain goes, “Oh! I hear it coming from up there.” And you know what? It doesn’t necessarily have to be front left/right phantoms. In the patent, we talk about the fact that it could be just a woofer below the center of the screen, right in the middle. The reason we use the left and rights is because they’re there. Why not use them?

Let’s say you’re doing the sound system in a room for which you’re not the designer and you’re having to work with someone who isn’t willing to budge on aesthetics—what considerations come into play then with a setup like this?

The nice thing about this is that it doesn’t occupy any space at the proscenium. It occupies space somewhere in the ceiling, where we need an acoustically transparent boundary of some sort. And so in the beginning of the design phase, we need to say, “There’s a space up there were we either need a grille or some kind of structure that has fabric and wood and whatever, or a printed fabric that replicates the surrounding materials.” It’s a good way to tackle the aesthetic thing because it’s concealed in the ceiling and functionally invisible. As long as you’ve got the space in the ceiling, it doesn’t have to be a box hanging down like an old projector. In a home theater, more often than not you don’t want a thing hanging up there. That’s ugly.

Bouncing sound off a video wall from a ceiling-mounted speaker creates the impression the sound is originating from a point behind the screen equal to the distance from the speaker to the screen.

“The nice thing about this solution is that it doesn’t occupy any space in a home theater’s proscenium. The waveguide occupies space somewhere in the ceiling instead.”

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

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Review: Fire of Love

Fire of Love (2022)

review | Fire of Love

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A quirky but fascinating Oscar-nominated documentary about two quirky but fascinating scientists

by Dennis Burger
February 13, 2023

If you were looking for the perfect person to review Fire of Love, I’d likely be the last person you’d pick. I say that because I watch nature and science documentaries the way some people watch partisan cable news. I visit the National Geographic tab on Disney+ more often than the Disney tab. I already knew the story of Maurice and Katia Krafft, the married volcanologists whose work is the subject of this film. And more than anything else, that’s what puts me at something of a disadvantage here, as getting to know these two is at least half the thrill of Fire of Love.

It does give me something of an advantage, though, too, as it lends me a bit of authority when I say things like this: Director Sara Dosa seems to understand these weird human beings. She gets what made them tick. In digging through hours and hours of archival footage shot by the Kraffts themselves in attempting to tell the story of who they were, she seems to have let them be the guides. And what’s fascinating about that is that it results in a portrait of two nuanced humans who in some ways contradict the stereotypical caricature of what a scientist is and in some ways embody it almost to the point of parody.

As such, the film is a little messy and a lot contradictory, exactly as a biographical snapshot of two people over the course of more than two decades should be. It captures the scientific curiosity of Maurice and Katia so well that at times I couldn’t exorcise from my head Richard Feynman’s humorous comparison between physics and sex: “Sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.” But it also does justice to the passionate mission that evolved out of their curiosity—a desire to understand volcanos so fewer people would be killed by them.

That duality is always bubbling just under the surface of the film, and it’s reflected in a sort of dichotomous tone that defines its style. On the one hand, there’s a reverence here, not merely for the Kraffts but also the work that they did. On the other, there’s an unabashed playfulness that’s reflected in things like the Gilliamesque animation that bridges the gaps in the archival footage and the Wes Anderson-like style that propels the narrative.

Frankly, a lot of the latter comes from narrator Miranda July, whose work on the film is one of the few things I’m not gaga about. I adore July’s writing, and I’ve enjoyed seeing her in other films, but in this one she seems to have been instructed to read the script with a detached hipster aloofness that is out of sorts with the imagery and the words. She reads lines like “Understanding is love’s other name” with the affectation of a stoned-but-bored Aubrey Plaza doing an intentionally half-assed Sarah Vowell impersonation.

Still, even that isn’t enough to rob the film of its power. I think a lesser filmmaker would have let this one fall apart in oh so many ways, especially in trying to deal with Maurice as a sympathetic figure. He is, mind you. The guy was a hoot. But he was also foolhardy and a bit of a showboat. He was the sort of fellow who could sound completely sane and rational while describing a plot to ride an insulated raft inspired by the Gemini spacecraft down a lava flow and into the ocean, no matter how crazy an idea it actually is. He’s the sort of fellow it’s hard not to have a conflicted opinion about. And yet, aside from the obvious editorial choices of what footage to include and what to leave in the archives, Dosa doesn’t seem to impose her opinion at all.

She also shows restraint in another key way I found particularly impressive. Toward the end of the film—and as such, toward the end of their lives—we start to get a sense of Maurice and Katia’s frustration, resulting from a disaster in Colombia that would have been wholly preventable had the local authorities simply listened to the scientists and evacuated the villages surrounding Nevado del Ruiz before it erupted. But the bureaucrats feared the evacuation would be too expensive, and as a result at least 20,000 of the area’s 29,000 residents were killed.

It’s difficult bordering on impossible to watch this without drawing parallels between the work of the Kraffts and that of latter-day climatologists frustratedly attempting to warn us of the impacts of the ongoing climate crisis, and I think most documentarians—especially in this Netflix era of “documentary” filmmaking—wouldn’t have been able to resist the urge to underline those parallels, italicize them, bold them, and rub the viewer’s nose in them. But the script doesn’t even allude to them, leaving the viewer to connect such obvious dots.

It’s that sort of approach that makes this my preferred film about the Kraffts released in the last year—the other being Werner Herzog’s  The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft. Herzog seems to have cleaned up and processed the imagery a bit more than did Dosa, as the bulk of Fire of Love is comprised of unrestored 16mm footage, mostly shot in the 1970s and ’80s in a 4:3 aspect ratio. While a few shots appear duped (perhaps taken from the Kraffts’ numerous films), a lot of it looks to come straight from the camera negative, and as such is fairly clean. But this is still relatively TV-quality imagery that was (mostly) shot more for scientific than entertainment purposes, so it isn’t exactly home theater demo material. All the same, you’ll likely find yourself awed by the subjects of the cinematography and quickly forget issues of detail, color purity, etc.

The 5.1-channel soundtrack, on the other hand, does get a little big for its britches on occasion, trying to add some dynamic zhuzh to footage that doesn’t need zhuzhing. But the all-important dialogue is clear and the hyperactive sound mix doesn’t detract from the story being told.

Of the two documentary films cobbled together last year from footage shot by Maurice and Katia Krafft over the course of their adult lives, Fire of Love is ultimately the better one for a number of reasons. Dosa doesn’t cram her own personality into the film the way Herzog does, but she also takes a more childlike and irreverent approach to the material that I think suits its subjects and its subject matter better. I’d love it if you watched both because there are some ways in which Herzog’s film is superior. But if you have to pick one, make it this one, whether it wins the Oscar or not.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Comprised of unrestored 16mm footage, the documentary is made up of relatively TV-quality imagery shot more for scientific than entertainment purposes, so it isn’t exactly home theater demo material

SOUND | The 5.1-channel soundtrack gets a little big for its britches on occasion, but the all-important dialogue is clear and the hyperactive sound mix doesn’t detract from the story being told

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Review: Triangle of Sadness

Triangle of Sadness (2022)

review | Triangle of Sadness

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This pointlessly excessive critique of excess is only available in HD on streaming but, given its hypocritical and cruel take on the wealthy, that might be all for the best

by Dennis Burger
February 8, 2023

With Triangle of Sadness, it’s nearly impossible to tell if writer/director Ruben Östlund desires to watch the ultra-wealthy suffer himself or if he simply assumes his audience is cruel and morally bankrupt. Either way, this muddled and overly long exercise in unfocused schadenfreude manages to be both shallow and thematically incoherent, callous and distant, shockingly disgusting and punishingly boring, and even its contradictions aren’t enough to make it interesting.

By the time it finally manages to say something in the third act, after two hours of heartless mockery and seemingly endless scenes of people soiling and regurgitating all over themselves, it’s almost impossible to care, mostly because what it does say is so predictable as to be insulting. The film tries its best to be a sort of Parasite meets Trading Places by way of Lord of the Flies, but ends up being equally ineffective as social commentary and black comedy.

There are bright spots, mind you—mostly in the performance of Charlbi Dean. She brings far more to the role of a spoiled influencer who joins the ranks of the privileged by virtue of her good looks than the role deserves. But one world-class performance (and, to be fair, a lot of other very good performances) can’t save this wretched excess posing as a critique of excess from being as revolting as it is hypocritically banal.

If, for whatever reason, the trailer (which is nothing more than the film with all the boring bits cut out) has so piqued your curiosity that you’re willing to suffer the punishment of the film just to say you’ve experienced it, I might encourage you to wait a few months. For now, it’s only available in HD via streaming, and the limitations of both resolution and dynamic range are distracting at times. Criterion is working on a director-approved UHD/HDR release, taken from the 4K digital intermediate, which was itself assembled from a mix of 4.5K, 5K, and 8K cinematography, but that won’t hit shelves until long after the buzz surrounding the film has evaporated.

Not having seen the theatrical presentation or the 4K home video master, I can only speculate about how much better it would look in UHD, but there are numerous scenes throughout the HD stream on iTunes where detail and definition are lost in the shadows, where nuance seems to be missing from the color palette, where flesh tones look a little sunburnt even when they shouldn’t, and where the AVC codec struggles with material that requires an equal mix of high- and low-frequency information to fully resolve the picture without some hash. To be clear, it all looks fine if you’re watching with a viewing angle on par with the typical TV in the typical living room, but at cinematic proportions it all sort of falls apart on occasion.

It looks like the Criterion UHD Blu-ray will also carry over the same 5.1-channel mix accompanying the iTunes stream—though in DTS-HD Master Audio instead of Dolby Digital Plus—instead of the Dolby Atmos mix prepared for theatrical exhibition. I’m not sure it makes much of a difference, because Apple’s 5.1 presentation up-mixes really beautifully into Atmos.

Subtle and not-so-subtle ambient sound effects abound in the surround soundfield, including some effects that do quite a good job of enhancing immersion. The resonant rattle of the HVAC system on the yacht in which the second act unfolds is ever-present above and behind you, serving at times almost as white noise and as other times as a persistent irritant. Panning across the front soundstage is also aggressive, but so artfully done as to be almost subliminal. All things considered, the sound mix is stunning.

Again, though, it isn’t enough to save this film from its own disgusting compulsion to wallow in the muck, to obsess over the worst aspects of human nature, to throw half-baked ideas at the screen in the desperate hope that any of them sticks with anything resembling coherency. To be blunt, it’s one of the most soulless and repugnant works of cinema I’ve seen in ages, and the fact that it’s getting any attention this awards season is as scathing an indictment of entertainment industry as I can imagine.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | The HD stream on iTunes exhibits numerous scenes where detail and definition are lost in the shadows, nuance seems to be missing from the color palette, and flesh tones look a little sunburnt even when they shouldn’t

SOUND | All things considered, the 5.1 sound mix is stunning. Subtle and not-so-subtle ambient sound effects abound in the surround soundfield, including some effects that do quite a good job of enhancing immersion.

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Making Video Walls Better

Making Video Walls Better

making video walls better

“we can create spectacular whites and phenomenally dark blacks simultaneously, so if you’ve downloaded a 4K HDR movie from Kaleidescape, you’ll be getting everything that picture has to deliver”

Quantum Media Systems’ Ken Hoffman on what he’s doing to create video walls that live up to the technology’s potential

by Dennis Burger
January 31, 2023

It may seem odd to single out one provider of LED video walls as a luxury-focused solution when the entire category operates in the stratosphere of the high-end entertainment market. But as we speak with integrators installing these solutions about the pros and cons of such gargantuan screens, one name continues to rise above the buzz surrounding any nascent technology. Quantum Media Systems is quickly establishing itself as the go-to provider of video walls that stand out not merely in terms of sheer size but also image quality, reliability, scalability, and—believe it or not—comfort. What follows is a conversation with company CEO Ken Hoffman, an industry veteran with more than two decades of experience creating world-class private screening rooms, luxury commercial cinemas, post-production facilities, and more, about why Quantum created its Cinematic XDR LED video wall.

Since there are quite a few video wall solutions already, why did you feel it necessary to develop your own? What problems was the XDR system intended to address?

For many years, we worked in digital cinema either building or being part of teams that built screening rooms, post-production facilities, color suites, etc. But we decided around 2014 that we wanted to get back into the residential space and work with integrators, particularly on projects where the clients were approved to be on the Bel Air Circuit. That required Digital Cinema projectors, servers, video processors, etc.

Over the years, we’ve looked at using LED walls as opposed to projection, but the technology just wasn’t there yet. It looked good, but it wasn’t the high-end image quality needed in installations at that level.

So, after more than five years of R&D, we took the plunge about three years ago and decided to see if we could come up with our own approach, and instead of just buying somebody else’s wall and trying to make it better, we became an original equipment manufacturer working directly with component manufacturers. We specify the components—which diodes and integrated circuits to use—and create our own control and processing systems, taking the knowledge about image science we’ve accumulated from years of working at the very high end and from the motion-picture industry and applying that to video walls.

Which problems with the existing technology were you most interested in solving and how successful have you been?

One of the major advantages—aside from purity of color—is light output. Most LED walls will give you 600 or 800 nits, tops, in terms of peak brightness. Our newest wall is rated at 1,200 nits, and that’s calibrated. Uncalibrated, it’s more like 1,600 nits. Once you calibrate it for accurate color, you do lose a little brightness but that still enables us to do HDR better than not only other video walls but than many televisions.

Most HDR content has been created with 1,000 nits as the peak brightness target, and we’re able to provide that and typically more. By doing that, we can produce spectacular whites and phenomenally dark blacks simultaneously, so if you’ve downloaded a 4K HDR movie from Kaleidescape, you’ll be getting everything that picture has to deliver.

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Many integrators are concerned about the intense heat coming off video walls from many of the established manufacturers. People have joked that they feel like they’re going to get radiation burns standing in front of those things. Have you done anything to address that?

It is a big problem. That was part of our motivation for making a better wall. We wanted to make our system much more power-efficient. Simply put, if you get better results while using much less power, you generate less heat. We also use other techniques to dissipate heat better.

Nothing kills electronics quicker than excessive heat. Is that a contributing factor to the reports we’re hearing about reliability issues and longevity concerns with other video-wall solutions?

It could be. I agree with you: Heat is always an enemy. So, by generating a lot less heat and dissipating what little heat we do generate, that’s not as much of an issue for us. But in addition, we’re basically theater guys, and we’re helping our integration partners with theaters and media rooms where comfort is a real issue. With many video walls, you need a lot more air conditioning. If your front row is ten feet away and you’re feeling all this heat radiating off the screen, is that really conducive to enjoying a film? That was also a big consideration for us. You can walk right up to our wall and hardly feel any change in temperature.

You mentioned seating distance, which brings up the issue of screen size. What are the theoretical upper limits for the size of your wall?

Functionally, there are no limits. Our LED walls consist of a multitude individual cabinets, and within our cabinets, we have multiple modules. Each cabinet is basically a building block and we install those together to create a screen as large as the client wants, or as large as the room will accommodate.

The only issue is that as you get a lot bigger, the video processing gets a little more involved and you need more processing power, but we have the ability to do very large walls. If someone wanted a 100-foot wall or greater, no problem. It just takes a lot more processing power.

LED video walls are sort of akin to what OLED was ten years ago. Back then, people were paying $25,000 for a 55-inch OLED TV. Their failure rate was super high and the longevity wasn’t great, even on panels that didn’t fail within a year or so. But we’ve come a long way since then. So what would you say to the tech-savvy luxury homeowner who assumes LED video walls are going to follow the same trajectory?

I think there are some similarities but it’s not one-to-one. You can’t just treat this like a large TV. Some companies are trying to move in that direction. By making the installation of their video walls simpler, they’re trying to create economies of scale, so instead of a 100-inch TV, they can sell you a 120- or 130-inch video wall and treat them functionally interchangeably. It works, and the pricing is coming down, but the quality isn’t there. You’re going to see lines in between the modular elements, for example.

Do you mean the lines between each module or the lines between each row of pixels?

If the cabinets and internal modules aren’t aligned correctly you’ll see those lines. And the closer you get to the wall, the more you’ll see them. We’re spending a lot of time during the installation process so that we’re aligning the modules and cabinets optimally. We’re also spending a lot of time in the calibration process.

Would it be fair to say that what you offer is as much a service as a product?

It’s a combination of the two. It’s a much better LED wall, it’s a dramatically better video processing system—it’s a complete package. And then we provide on-site installation and calibration where we spend not just one or two but many days getting everything installed, aligned, integrated, and calibrated. It’s a turnkey solution. We’re focused on the pinnacle of image quality in cinematic environments.

What else might influence a high-end client to decide between a luxury projection system and a QMS Cinematic XDR video wall system?

Since we have a lot of experience with all different brands of projectors, we can explain that projectors can’t provide uniform light across the screen. When we do calibration on projectors, on a typical screen we look at 25 locations, and we get 25 different brightness values. Sometimes the differences are small, sometimes they’re large, but with the LED wall, it’s one value. The screen is 100 percent uniform.

Another consideration is convergence. Many projectors use different chips for red, green, and blue elements of the image, and you have to align those three chips as best you can. Usually, you can get most of the pixels converged but some of them aren’t. In movie theaters, there can be multiple pixels off on convergence. In the home, you’re so close to screen that you can’t be off that much. With LED walls, there are no convergence issues. Each red, green, and blue element lines up perfectly with its mates.

Another issue is that no matter how good your lens is, with a projection system, you can’t have perfect focus over the entire screen. You’re going to lose some focus, especially toward the edges of the screen. So having uniform focus, uniform convergence, and uniform light are major advantages. Add to that the truly deep blacks no projection system can deliver, along with the enhanced brightness no projector can give you, which helps with things like HDR, it’s just a dramatic advantage over projection.

“the truly deep blacks no projection system can deliver along with the enhanced brightness no projector can give you, give our video wall a dramatic advantage over projection”

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

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Review: Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing (2022)

review | Where the Crawdads Sing

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Captivating cinematography can’t make up for the many  shortcomings in this all too indie and literal adaptation of a wild-child murder mystery

by Dennis Burger
January 26, 2023

Watching the trailer for Where the Crawdads Sing, you might get the sense it’s sort of a Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe meets The Silence of the Lambs kind of thing. You’d be wrong. This toothless adaptation of Delia Owens’ bestselling coming-of-age murder mystery is so half-baked it’s hard to really figure out what it is or wants to be.

Maybe that’s the fault of the book. I don’t know; I’ve never read it. But in weaving together two different timelines in the life of a so-called “marsh girl” named Kya—whose family deserts her and who mostly raises herself in the wilderness of coastal North Carolina until she learns to read, quicky thereafter writes and illustrates a successful nature book, and is then accused of murdering a local creep—the film fails to justify its own existence. Flashbacks and flashforwards seem shuffled together with no real consideration given to narrative or thematic coherence, and when it all does manage to cohere on occasion, it becomes so implausible as to be insulting.

And all of the above may have been forgivable if there were any real humanity to sink one’s teeth into but most of the characterization is one-note at best and the players have a habit of speaking in almost precisely the way real people don’t. The southern accents also reside deep in the Uncanny Valley for the most part, aside from that of star Daisy Edgar-Jones, a Brit whose performance is just about the only redeemable thing about this whole darned affair.

I say “almost,” because the cinematography by Polly Morgan also deserves some recognition. Mute the sound and simply watch the imagery flow by, and Where the Crawdads Sing is truly captivating. Shot in Arriraw at 4.5K resolution, the footage has been film-looked a bit, mostly through a warm color grade but also with the addition of some subtle faux grain that actually registers as grain instead of noise (assuming you’re viewing this thing at cinematic proportions, that is—otherwise you likely won’t notice it at all). That simulated grain does knock the edge off the crisp edges, but Crawdads is nonetheless a treat for the eyes, and Kaleidescape’s 4K HDR10 presentation is simply delicious, with abundant textures and subtle-but-effective high dynamic range that primarily serves to mimic the quality of natural light.

The Dolby TrueHD Atmos sound mix will also delight home theater enthusiasts who want all of their speakers to make some noise at regular intervals. Deep bass is employed from time to time to ape the quality of sound underwater, and the overhead and surround channels spring to life frequently to deliver the ambience of the Louisiana swamps that stand in for the book’s North Carolina marshlands. The score is a bit too aggressively mixed into the surround soundfield for my taste, though, and dialogue occasionally gets obscured.

Those complaints might carry more weight if the film were more worthy in other respects, but Where the Crawdads Sing is the very definition of a lazy book adaptation where everyone involved seemed to think the best way to convert page to screen was to type it all up with characters’ names centered on the page between lines of dialogue, then cut out the most boring bits and point a camera at what remains.

If you’re super interested, iTunes also sells the film with a handful of bonus features Sony didn’t see fit to release to Kaleidescape, but I can’t imagine anyone being moved by them. If morbid curiosity gets the better of you and you simply can’t resist this one, wait until it’s available for free on Netflix or Hulu or what have you. Or just watch the trailer again for free on YouTube. All the best bits are there anyway.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Kaleidescape’s 4K HDR10 presentation is simply delicious, with abundant textures and subtle-but-effective high dynamic range that primarily serves to mimic the quality of natural light

SOUND | The Dolby TrueHD Atmos sound mix will delight home theater enthusiasts who want all of their speakers to make some noise at regular intervals

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