Recently, my first feature as DP was released in 25 cinemas. We decided to release digitally due to budget issues, and we really saw digital projection as an answer to the cost of printing to film, which is enormously expensive. A digital release costs less than 1/20th of a film projection, and to indie filmmkakers this is a dream come true. We shot the film on Sony HDCam and I was priviledged to have a brilliant Engineer and Gaffer, and we achieved about 80% of the look in-camera. Before the film was completed, the Apollo festival agreed to screen it. When festival time arrived and the film was still not complete we screened a pal offline copy, which is never done (don't know what projector they used). The film in its incomplete low res state still earned me a nomination for best cinematographer.Eventually the film was finished and I went to the press screening. What I saw horrified me, to put it bluntly and if the admin of this site will forgive me, it looked ****. It was dark and there was no detail in the shadows. I went up to the projection booth thinking the projector was not set up correctly and was shocked to find the projector was a 1.3K projector, same as the one a friend of mine has on his boardroom table. So I set the brightness way up and let the film screen, and it looked a lot better, but it was still not the film I had graded. Over the next week we brightened the grade of the film and did a few tests, and it looked great (the tests were done on brand new projectors, since one would assume that all the projectors should work at the same specs). Premiere night came and the film looked nice, it was slightly amber/warmish and a little bit dark, but it really looked good - it was 95% there and it got a lot of compliments. I read in the paper a while later a review from a critic that said, the film's cinematography looked dark and like a horror and was poorly lit. Then another review said the cinematography was outstanding and it was very beautifully lit. I was confused and started doing a bit of research, and I found that digital projectors in SA are below spec, way below. Also, the lamp in the projector is only supposed to run to around 500 hours, while local cinemas are running their lamps to between 800 and 1000 hours, making the pictures dark, losing detail in shadows and the picture gets very amber. When everyone is raving about digital cinema, and overseas theatres are already installing 4k projectors, how can we have such ****, under-spec projectors. And when local cinemas who claim to be "committed" to building the local industry run their lamps like this, how can we put any kind of quality on the screen when we are being screwed by the very people "trying" to help us. Digital projection is still new, and granted there will be teething problems, but this is just outrageous. A friend of mine saw the film in Cape Town in a small cinema a week after release, and said it was dark. There must be some sort of standard that can be enforced. I won't mention any names but a senior person at the NFVF said (off the record) recently that he is mostly interested in creating a service industry in SA for the rest of the world, and that local production is not his key priority. How are we supposed to build anything of value for future generations when faced with this type of thing. I tell you, the grass is starting to look very green overseas.Posted by 4K Hub member: MvG