Last night I went on the "Elephant" page of Illico and watched a 30 minutes documentary on the project. There was some interviews and stuff, not unlike those you'd find on a DVD, and then for the last 10 minutes or so it showed samples of the movies. On a side note, all the movies that they digitalized are available both in standard and HD format.
First impression on the quality of the images, it looks like they've done a good job at cleaning the original material and with the transfers. In the interviews someone mentioned that often the colors aren't as good in the digital version than on the film version and that they often have to re-colorize the whole thing. On the few samples I saw it looked like they did a nice job.
Some of the scenes from different movies were "jerky" though and strangely that was not necessarily on the oldest movies. On certain scenes from different films it looks as though some they've lost 1 frame out of 20 or so and when the actors move it gives a stroboscopic effect. From the samples they showed in the documentary it's hard to make an opinion but I hope it's only on a few scenes because if a whole movie is like that it would be very annoying to watch.
I'm having a pretty bad flue and I plan on staying at home and quiet this week-end so I'm gonna watch a few of those movies and come back with more details throughout the week-end although it will only be useful for a handful of members.
I think the Elephant project is a great idea and since Quebecor is paying for it I guess it's only normal that the movies will only be available from them but I wish they people could have access to them in PPV streaming from the Elephant's web site. It's really a shame that our entire cinema will be digitalized and available both in SD and HD formats but only to people who decide to get their digital tv service from a particular provider.
There are people in Quebec who can't be Illico subscribers because Videotron is not in their region, these people won't have access to the Elephant movie database even if they were willing to change their TV service provider........a real shame.
