Picture Quality - Light Output

First, there must be consideration of absolute picture fidelity.

Traditionally, the standards of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) are used for Academy Screenings (and the Oscar goes to. . .), resulting in light levels that are only as high as 16.5 foot-Lamberts. While adequate (and the industry standard for over 55 years), this level of light is simply too low to appear realistic during daylight scenes, resulting in murky looking blacks and a flat, dimensionless quality. Therefore, the Kipnis Studio Standard requires a minimum of 49.5 foot-Lamberts (3-times SMPTE standard), resulting in daylight levels which produce a sharper, more color accurate and realistic image given our human optical system.

KSS      About Us      Philosophy      Screening Room      Equipment      Box Office      Popcorn      Preview      Titles      Picture      Sound

Cinema Alpha       Cinema Beta       Cinema Gamma       Acoustics        Speakers        Design        Lighting        Power        Sources

Surround Processing       Amplification       Vibration & Isolation       Touch Screen       Epilogue       Credits        Testimonials       Press

The Final Point

... is Unsurpassed Quality & Fidelity!

There are intangible qualities to presentation fidelity that are waiting to be heard and seen by you.

Consider a significant parallel: Rolls-Royce use craftsmen for their automobiles. No amount of

computers and robots can build a car with that indefinable property and quality that is a Rolls-Royce, or a Ferrari, or an Aston Martin. Most manufacturers are trying to build fine motorcars that will do everything correctly, and they will get you from here to there, but they just don't have those indefinable characteristics that define an art form.

You can't become a Rolls-Royce overnight. You can't cause a machine to create a Picasso.

So it really depends on what you want. Are you after something that is an art form—or do you want to just watch movies and listen to music as background or filler? Should it be computerized? Instead of buying records or CDs, one could just buy a program that plays a MIDI [synthesizer] file of your music, and you would have just that - electronically recreated music - but not an unforgettable musical experience. It would be sterile and the same as having a speech recognition system in the phone that then tells the receiving end to regenerate a facsimile of your speech (like Dr. Stephen Hawking), instead of transmitting your voice through the telephone.

The business saying “good is good enough” dehumanizes the real-time life experience of art and all it’s creationary aspects. And then you are no longer involved with quality, fidelity, or integrity.

This almost always comes down to a commercial decision rather than an artistic choice. The same way that television or FM radio operate on a level that satisfies the majority of people rather than all the people. I personally insist upon having the very best! You can either buy a cheap piano or you can buy a Steinway or a Bösendorfer. You can either buy a Toyota or a Lamborghini. You can choose to listen to an ordinary violin or a Stradivarius. It’s up to you!

It’s your Vision

Let’s face it! There’s simply nothing quite like watching your favorite movie on a huge movie palace screen with fantastic wall-to-wall sound. Unless, of course, you can duplicate or even supersede that experience of Picture and Sound in the comfort of your very own home or studio office. The Kipnis Studios will help you do just that - utilizing the finest possible Equipment and creating the most inspired Acoustics for cinema and listening  pleasure alike, anywhere in the world!

We systematically manage every possible detail, like choosing the finest projection system and screen for your space and seating requirements, and performing custom installation to seamlessly set up your audio and video Components to their very best capability. We design your screening room to offer the absolute best in picture and sound fidelity, starting from the ground up! For the finishing touch, we create a Lighting system that allows you to dim or illuminate your cinema in any way or color imaginable, all at the touch of a button.

With the completed installation of a KSS home or professional screening room, you’ll be ready to enjoy the show, regardless of source, in the very best possible quality. Anytime!

The Screening Room Experience

“To Boldly Watch . . . Like No Man Has Watched Before!”

Digital Surround Sound

Since Edison's first successful melding of motion picture imagery and gramophone sound in 1891, the art and entertainment medium have never been the same. Today’s multi-channel sound for motion pictures has been commercially available since 1952, and has the potential to be better now than ever. But is it?

Audio devices should not have a sound of their own. Instead, they should not sound like anything at all. This is rarely the case. But through careful testing, evaluation, and experimentation, the results prove themselves in the theaters and recordings that use my design philosophy - they produce incredibly life-like results: cleanly, silently, colorlessly - and reliably - each and every time!

Whatever the audio or video device is, I examine it and ask, “how can this device’s

performance be improved? Forget about what it costs!” Companies like Sony charge a lot of money for their professional products. But I always ask, “could they have made that product a little bit better and charged a little more money for it?”

Many high-end design companies tend to rest on their laurels and don't bother to take the next logically or irrational step forward. But we here at KSS are leaping ahead, instead of staying on the back burner. And we have the philosophy and the technology to achieve what has previously been impossible - the world’s first 8.8 Surround Sound system!

Defining Your Space

Think about your dream movie environment. What does it look like? What does it sound like? How do all the pieces fit together? By integrating and installing only the finest home theater and professional systems in the world, our exclusive Kipnis Studio Standard design Philosophy will bring your dream environment to life—whether your space is a single room, an entire home or even an office or a palatial movie theater featuring a grand lobby, designed in the spirit and with all due reverence to the great art and History of Cinema.

Suppose you want to transform an existing

space or perhaps you have grand architectural plans for something new and different. Either way, Kipnis Studios will create a custom cutting-edge professional theater that complements your living space and lifestyle. Our promise is that we’re ready to work with you in coordinating each and every step of your project. We’ll perform the installation seamlessly, flawlessly and with the extraordinary level of craftsmanship you can expect from Kipnis Studios.

Touch Panel Control

Technology should be simple. That’s why we give you control of sound and screen,

lighting and security—all through one touch screen remote.

Wireless access allows us to install your stereo and home theater components under ideal operating conditions, offering for ample flexibility in designing the interior of your theater. KSS will also link your Touch Screen system with new or existing security systems, and integrate your shades, HVAC and home computer network into your Kipnis Studio Standard Screening Experience.

To introduce you to our “Beyond Custom” design & installation services, we’re offering a complimentary demonstration at our unique State-of-the-Art KSS screening facilities.

Track 6 - The Enterprise

Jerry Goldsmith / LSO

Sony Columbia Records

Sound Quality - Loud Speakers

Naturally, sound quality must be the equal of picture quality in order to

experience a complete cinema presentation. Most often, a 5.1, 6.1, or 7.1 surround system is ubiquitous in today's screening rooms and movie theaters, as is the use of three identical two or three-way Loud Speakers, placed behind the perforated motion picture screen. The surround speakers are almost always a two-way design, utilize different drivers than those behind the screen, and are located out in the auditorium above the audience and toward the ceiling; sometimes in a stadium type theater the surround speakers will be diagonally arrayed on the side walls.

The Kipnis Studio Standard uniquely features the cutting-edge with an 8.8 surround sound system consisting of hand matched and calibrated arrays of 10 - Full Range Towers, 10 - Super Tweeters, 3 - Full Range Center Channels, and 16 - 18" subwoofers, arrayed in an octagonal configuration

around the centrally located viewer / listener. With a frequency range of 1 - 102,500 Hertz, and the ability to play both extremely loud (125 dB/SPL) and soft sounds (near 0 dB/SPL) in perfect proportion to each other, both music, film, and television (not to mention video games) can offer a totally immersive, three-dimensional aural reproduction of the source that is as authentic and realistic as "being there". Together, the KSS loudspeaker array offers unsurpassed transparency and fidelity from any source you choose to listen to or view.

Movie Screen

The screen is the blank stage on which the image and the story unfold. It is standard for a motion picture

screen to feature perforations, which are 1 mm evenly spaced holes distributed throughout the screen and designed to allow sound from three speakers behind it to be heard. This unfortunately mangles the sound from the speakers necessitating severe equalization, and allows 40% of the light from the projector to pass through unreflected. Both of these are simply unacceptable, and so the Kipnis Studio Standard employs only non-perforated, laboratory grade motion picture screens alongside loudspeaker arrays which precisely recreate the sound mix with unerring accuracy and fidelity.

Masking is the ability to adjust the size and shape of a 

screen's borders to accommodate the various different aspect ratios of film and television, is usually limited to opening and closing the top, bottom, and sides. But each film and television program has it's own cinematographic language, and is why KSS designs support both masking and zoom functions in conjunction with on an enormous, IMAX proportioned screen that allows the viewer to "resize" the image to suit both their viewing requirements and the director's vision of the film.

Screen Gain, or the amount of light level enhancement induced by the screen, has been a requirement since the beginning of CinemaScope in 1952. Without gain, the images produced

on screen would be even lower in illumination than they already are, resulting in completely unacceptable image quality. Yet gain also causes another problem called "Hot-Spotting" wherein the center of the image is brighter at the expense of losing light at the corners, sometimes as much as 80% loss. Luckily, the use of a subtle amount of curvature (as opposed to a simple, flat screen) can eliminate this hot-spotting by almost 100%, allowing for completely even illumination across the entire screen area - a dramatic improvement that creates an unimpeded vista with whatever you choose to view.

Color Fidelity

With three times the light output, and comparable resolution to 35 mm

and even 70 mm Academy Prints, it is just as critical with digital projection to be concerned with proper color reproduction. The latest DCinema projectors all feature a color space which is significantly larger than traditional celluloid prints, offering the possibility to truly experience a range of hues and saturations which can only be rivaled by reality. As there are at least three different color space standards in use today (Digital Cinema Initiative - DCI, HDTV ITU. 709, and NTSC ITU. 601), careful attention is taken during regular projector calibrations to assure the utmost in color fidelity for each and every source. Even digital still photography can look spectacularly realistic, offering previously unrealized levels of accuracy and detail, 3-dimensionality, and color fidelity.

Resolution

Likewise, image resolution of traditional 35 mm and 70 mm celluloid prints shown at Academy Screenings top out at 5000 pixels x 4000 pixels (with actual release prints being closer to 3200 x 2400), and once projected through a lens assembly becomes closer to 4000 x 3000 pixels (2800 x 2100 theatrically). While it is always critical to have a 35 mm or 70 mm projector and platter system available for evaluating actual prints, the quality of Digital Projection (DCinema) has improved to the point of being comparable to or even better than physical prints.

While the SMPTE standards

suggest that 2K (2048 x 1080) DCinema is perfectly adequate as a replacement for traditional film, a more realistic choice of 4K (4096 x 2160) technology can first

start to be seen as the successor to motion picture film. DCinema has the added advantage of being compatible with all professional cinema mastering systems (2K and 4K), as well as all commercially available Hi-Definition sources (1920 x 1080p, 1280 x 720p, and 720 x 480p) such as Satellite HD, Cable HD, D-VHS, HD-DVD, and Blu-Ray Discs, to mention but a few. Now you can pause, rewind, fast forward, and even compare image quality side by side from as many as four different sources at full resolution using the Duo or Quad image modes.

Picture all your components neatly stacked and wired within a modern projection booth and controlling it all from your center seat, inside the Kipnis Studio Standard Cinema Experience!

Audio/Video Writer Steve Guttenberg & Kipnis Studios’ director Jeremy R. Kipnis inside Cinema Beta.

What comes to mind when you think about your ideal screening room experience?

Please call us for more information!