Titan AE Distributed Digitally

Jett sent us something interesting about Titans AE (a film that looks so cool, I just hope it doesn't suck). Apparently they are transmitting it digitally over the Internet from the studio to an early screening at a tradeshow. It will never touch film, and it'll mark the first time that a hollywood movie will be shown in a real theater, transmitted over the net, and never touching film. Not real time, tho -- it's getting downloaded first: 800x faster then a modem, 4 hour download time, so that's what, a terabyte?

Comments

Wonder if it's encrypted?

[Pfhreakaz0id]

I mean, given the studio's thing, I betcha it will be, even though it's over a private line...
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Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

[Coz]

According to Cisco's press release they're using Qwest's fiber backbone and a bunch of Cisco routers and VPN products, with a whole bunch of other industry-buzzword products involved in the projection:

"Once the TITAN A.E. file reaches the Atlanta theater, it will be stored on a QuVIS Inc. server and projected using a Barco/Texas Instruments DLP Cinema digital projector. Sigma Designs Group has built a state-of-the-art Tørus Compound Curve Screen and Eastern AcousticWorks has provided a customized digital audio sound system for the event."

Groovy, eh?

Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

[Pfhreakaz0id]

can I get that for my living room, please? I got a credit card I could put around $8,000 on :)
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Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

[Chang]

Read that again. It's being transmitted over _an_ IP network, not the Internet. They are aparently using a dedicated connection provided by Qwest and are encrypting the transmission to ensure that nobody with physical access to the connection makes a copy while in transit.

Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

[orpheus]

To me the interesting question is why it's being *transmitted* at all -- except as a technology demonstration. I'm not sure that this will turn out to be the best transfer medium. (Certainly not in this case, where there will be Titan AE execs at the showing, and any one of them could have carried 50Gb of HDD in a jacket pocket)

Currently, it costs about $2K to make each theatre quality film print. The package weighs over 100 pounds, IIRC). Meanwhile a pair of 25GB HDDs costs under $500 in 1000+ quantities, and weighs a few pounds fully shock-insulated. (I'm sure studios will demand return of the HDDs, and reuse them)

Properly encrypted transmission over data lines permits a high degree of security, but shipping a special HDD unit with *hardware* protection may be more secure from certain attacks. This is the method preferred for transfer of government and high level financial secrets -- and a blockbuster film has comparable dollar value!

Envision an HDD with the file stored in a secure encryption, and hardware verification of (for example) the encrypted serial number of authorized theatre equipment. Equipment verification is crucial, because the decrypted datastream can be copied. Your HDD shouldn't play on anything but a self-verifying secured player.

Yes, all this can be done in software, but there are significant weaknesses to self-contained (on media) software-only access control when the media itself is under the total control of the attacker.

Incidentally, under software *or* hardware control the studio can assure license compliance: number of showings, seating capacity (Projector 1111 is in a 500-seat room, 1112 is in a 200 seat room, etc.), and other things theatre are interested in controlling.

Maybe internet traffic won't lag every release day, when 2000 copies of a 50GB film (100 Terabytes) go out over the Net. Maybe they'll build additional secure capacity specifically for teh 50+ major studio movie releases each year (bandwidth which can be used for other things between releases) On maybe not...

Courier- or carrier-delivery of Hardware-secured HDDs may not be glamorous, but it makes sense. If bandwidth-mediated transmission takes place at all, it should be limited to emergency replacement of damaged media, 'updates' 9as described by another poster) etc.

That would be kinder, smarter, more efficient.

Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

[Coz]

The Sony Studios flacks were talking about satellite distribution a few months ago (wish I could find the reference quickly - 3 searches failes already :-( ) - on opening day, a geosync satellite link would start beaming down the movie, and each theatre would have some kind of crypto key to let them play it X times.

As others have pointed out, this is going to make piracy a real concern. Today you have projectionists in NYC theatres with handheld camcorders taping movies for sale on the streets - these folks will just do backups to new $250 hard drives, take it home and let the PIV work on cracking the encryption (or even worse, steal the theatre's key), and start burning videotapes/DVDs/etc. IF the movie folks do it smartly, they'll be able to trace the pirates back to the source theatres through something embedded in the digital streams, and sock it to the folks who let the movie "walk out the back door."

Won't help with the piracy on that particular film, but if that results in that particular theatre losing the right to show movies... they're out of business, aren't they?

Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

[ucblockhead]

As they say, the largest bandwidth that can be achieved is a 747 with a cargohold full of DVDs.

Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

[x1r0k3wl]

As they say, the largest bandwidth that can be achieved is a 747 with a cargohold full of DVDs.

Yeah, but latency is a bitch.

Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

[grue23]

Properly encrypted transmission over data lines permits a high degree of security, but shipping a special HDD unit with *hardware* protection may be more secure from certain attacks. This is the method preferred for transfer of government and high level financial secrets -- and a blockbuster film has comparable dollar value!

I have worked in a secure government environment, and this is simply not the case. Dedicated encrypted network links are preferred for data transmissions. Courier service is a failover solution, and rarely uses anything other than paper.

That said, the government likely has more money to spend on transmission than movie theaters. Or at least one would hope so. The government is also more concerned with delivering data in a timely fashion that might have been produced shortly before it needs to be received - theaters can build physical delivery time into their schedules without having to worry about people dying if it gets there late.

Maybe internet traffic won't lag every release day, when 2000 copies of a 50GB film (100 Terabytes) go out over the Net. Maybe they'll build additional secure capacity specifically for teh 50+ major studio movie releases each year (bandwidth which can be used for other things between releases) On maybe not...

If the theaters have one iota of intelligence they are leasing dedicated lines for this and not just trying to use VPNs over the Internet. Dedicated lines can be encrypted at either end. Your comment about the traffic and how it relates to the Internet is fairly irrevelant.

Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

[mistered]

>To me the interesting question is why it's being
>*transmitted* at all -- except as a technology
>demonstration.

I think you just answered your own question. The linked article mentions that it's being shown at Supercomm 2000 which is a communication technology tradeshow. Saying "Hey, we lugged a couple of $500 hard drives here in our carry-on luggage to show you this movie!" just wouldn't have the same effect when you're trying to impress people looking at expensive routers and such.

Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

[orpheus]

I have worked in a secure government environment, and this is simply not the case. Dedicated encrypted network links are preferred for data transmissions. Courier service is a failover solution, and rarely uses anything other than paper.

I was referring to genuinely sensitive material -- e,g, SAP, SCI, or my favorite, ORCON-designated. ORCON is exactly what the studios are tryng to do

A 'secure facility' is a generic term meaning that it's hard for data walk out the door. It doesn't mean that the material you handle is particularly sensitive. If you were responsible for transfer of highly sensitive material, you would not blandly suggest transmitting 50GB to an unsecured facility like a theater! Ask your site AIS officer if s/he'd certify transmission of 50GB of SCI ORCON.

Transfer of an entire 50GB database to a newly built or unsecured site (theater) is rarely, if ever, done by transmission. You can't use the common crypto algorithms (I had this same argument with a contractor who though triple DES was good enough -- even though DES variants have been specifically disallowed for classified material since 1975, when DES was released!

For the *most* sensitive data 'hardware (which includes human) plus software security' is preferred over software-only access control. Even the most secure software-only one-time pad crypto requires that the OTP encrypting data (equal in length to the data encrypted) be transported by independent channels (never transmitted over any segment used by the later encrypted file). This is often done by courier-transported HDD or media.

I nominate *you* for the job of generating 100 to 150Tb of OTP and delivering it in 50GB chunks by (independent) secure channels to 2000-3000 movie theaters, so that the ecryption can be SCI ORCON secure. But be quick about it! You have to do it for every film at the local 20-plex!

If the theaters have one iota of intelligence they are leasing dedicated lines for this and not just trying to use VPNs over the Internet. Dedicated lines can be encrypted at either end. Your comment about the traffic and how it relates to the Internet is fairly irrevelant.

If you had any idea how much it costs to lease and maintain a T-1 line and the local end equipment (which would take 12 hours to download 50GB under real-world coditions), you'd realize that few theaters would bother to do so. It would eliminate the cost-benefits of electronic distribution.

Maybe you're thinking of DSL -- well, check www.dslreports.com and you'll find out why business still lease T-1 (reliability/service) Theaters don't have sysadmins -- even part-time -- Margins are thin in the Cinema business -- they really make money on the refreshments. They don't want to pay for extras that don't boost revenues.

Dedicated line encryption does not perform the degree of access control that hardware access does. There are too many minimum wage teenage assistant managers. How much do you think the black market would pay a projectionist to copy the decrypted transmission onto a HDD?

-- and BTW, wiretapping DSL is only marginally more difficult that wiretapping a phone line. I built a trivial 2-transistor phone tap when I was 10.

Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

[jovlinger]

So what crypto algorithm is supported, if not 3DES? I thought that was pretty well regarded.

Also, could you perhaps define those terms?I must have missed that the first time around: ORCON, SAP, and SCI

johan

Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

[Mr. Barky]

A container ship or supertanker filled with DVDs would have even higher bandwidth - they're BIG. Although latency would be even a bit worse.

Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

[HP LoveJet]

IF the movie folks do it smartly, they'll be able to trace the pirates back to the source theatres through something embedded in the digital streams....

...which could be circumvented with great ease by the simple insertion of a D->A->D stage somewhere in the transfer. If you can see it or hear it, you can pirate it.

Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

[grue23]

This thread is long since dead, but my point was completely missed so I feel compelled to respond to the void. I worked in one of the more specialized environments you named, not some random secure vault.

What I was attempting to say is that you are incorrect in implying that using couriers carrying hard drives to transmit data is preferred in classified environments. In my own personal experience in such an environment, that was a failover to network links. That is all I was trying to say.

On the topic of the theaters, I was completely willing to acknoweldge that hard drives might be a better way to go. At the same time though, I am pretty darned sure that the demonstration that was being given was using a dedicated leased line. A VPN over the internet would not have made sense for what they were trying to show. I would also guess they were using a T3. That is all I was trying to say about the theaters, I was not trying to argue that it was a cost effective means of delivery because I agree it is not, currently.

I am not sure what you are trying to get at when you talk about projectionists copying decrypted transmissions. If I was trying to argue against HDD delivery (which I'm not), I could just say 'how much do you think the black market would pay for a projectionist to copy the HDD to a second HDD?' I'm also not sure why you are talking about tapping DLS lines if we are assuming they are encrypted in the first place.

Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

[grue23]

SAP = Special Access Program (DoD, DoE)

SCI = Sensitive Compartmented Information (intel)

ORCON = dissemination and extraction of information controlled by originator (e.g. not open source ;-) )

Groovy!

[Hallow]

It's probably not compressed at all. I can't
wait for more and more of this type thing.

I'm sick of going to movies and seeing flecks on
the screen from a poor print, which only gets worse the more it's played.

Re:Groovy!

[jeff.paulsen]

It's probably not compressed at all. I can't wait for more and more of this type thing. I'm sick of going to movies and seeing flecks on the screen from a poor print, which only gets worse the more it's played.

While you won't get the scratches and spots on a digital projection, you also won't get the same color gamut and saturation. I'm hopeful in the long run, and I look forward to actually get a look at it for comparison, but it's hard to imagine it's superior to film already.

Right now film has excellent color and saturation, but is hampered by fragile media and 24 fps / 72 hz refresh. If they can get the colors right, and increase the frame rate, that would be a real breakthrough.

Re:Groovy!

[Tiny Ant]

They still need a long way to go. Right now the projectors needed are very expensive, and they project less light than conventional projectors.
This means a smaller viewing area right now than what you would have with a regular release. Thus you have better images, but at a smaller size. Like listening to LP's on a great stereo system, or CD's on a boom box.

Re:Groovy!

[PantalonesVaqueros]

I'm sick of looking at avi's and mpegs with blocky flecks of color from compression, when are movie theatres going to fix this? Oh, wait... :)

Re:Groovy!

[Tiny Ant]

An LP played 10 times or so looses it high fidelity. It gains scratches, dust, and gets worn.

Similar to a movie. Play it 100 times, and you get dust and scratches on it (though maybe you just need to age it to loose the colour...)

Where as the digital representation of these formats will retain the original data (ignoring medium failure.)

Now, given a used LP (all are after suitable listenings) most people would rather listen to it on a great stereo, then the related CD on a boom box (ignoring situation outliers.)

Similarly, I would rather spend money and watch the film based movie on a big and bright screen, than I would on a smaller screen, even though the copy may be crisper, and have no dust or scratches.

Give us a few years, and Digital movies may replace film based movies (same as CD's replaced LP's.) But not for several years.

To eliminate the saturation problem, maybe dual projectors may help. With digital registration, two projectors could self heal any alignment problems before a human could see the diff.
That would raise the projection cost, but could be a solution.

(like having multi boom box solution for the CD. One cd player, spreading to many speakers of small size.) hmmm

Not the first...

[genki]

Maybe the first exclusively digital, but Disney's Dinosaur was also shown in digital at some theaters.

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Re:Not the first...

[MarkKomus]

The article said its the first movie sent over the internet to a theater to be shown. Not that it was the first shown digitally and its definatly not going to be the first exclusively digital movie.

Re:Not the first...

[jbrw]

One of the recent computer animation films (Toy Story 2, perhaps?) was shown entirely digitally at the Odeon in Leicster Square, London.

It all went pear shaped and they had to revert to film, apparently.

Anyone know what i'm talking about? Links?

...j

Re:Not the first...

[Cramer]

Actually, I think "Lucas, George" gets the prize for being "first"... Star Wars, Episode one was mastered digitally and shown digitally in some limited spots -- there just aren't many places with digital projection gear.

Re:Not the first...

[tgd]

The Starwars showing sucked. The resolution was poor at best (1024x768 stretched wide-screen, from what I remember), it flickered and was full of motion artifacts. Think AVI circa 1995.

I saw Dinosaur at the Arizona Mills theater in Arizona two weeks ago in a 100% digital screening. My jaw dropped when the green "this preview is approved for all audiences" screen popped up. Its that amazing. No hint of flicker, no hint of pixelation, no motion artfacts, perfect focus. It kept getting better and better (the previews were digital, as well as the movie). You don't appreciate how annoying a 24hz flicker is until you see a movie without it.

I'm not sure the resolution on TI's projectors, but it was at least HDTV resolution (1920x1080), and it was clearly not interlaced. I couldn't see any pixels until the credits were rolling, and you could see them on the curves of the letters where it was bright white on black. Other than that the image was nearly perfect.

Rumor has it Dinosaur is showing here in MA out in Framingham. I'd recommend anyone who can see it on a digital screen see it. The movie isn't half bad, and experiencing digital projection for the first time is like seeing an IMAX film for the first time.

Re:Not the first...

[weeblewobble]

It's also worth noting that the independent film The Last Broadcast (oft compared to Blair Witch) was also distributed digitally last year to about 10 theaters across the country. I saw it in one and it rocked. from their website (http://tebweb.com/lastbroadcast/): The Last Broadcast was one of the first feature films to be cut entirely on a consumer-desktop PC. Using Adobe Premiere (and other audio/video processing software when needed), the filmmakers were able to create a broadcast quality image at a low price. In October of 1998, it made history when it became the first feature film to be theatrically released digitally via satellite to theaters across the U.S. ... no celluloid!

Re:Not the first...

[raytracer]

I'm not sure the resolution on TI's projectors, but it was at least HDTV resolution (1920x1080), and it was clearly not interlaced. I couldn't see any pixels until the credits were rolling, and you could see them on the curves of the letters where it was bright white on black. Other than that the image was nearly perfect.

Actually, the current crop of TI projectors are only 1280x1024. Done properly, each of those pixels looks really nice, and points out just how much jitter and defocus there is in traditional film.

Re:Not the first...

[toledo]

Nope, it was 1280x1024

See http://www.ti.com/dlp/pr oducts/cinema/specs_dinosaur.shtml

cuts changes of theft

[djweis]

if it never hits film, you can't snag it and run at the theater. hope their bandwidth is up to it.

WHoops! My bad

[Pfhreakaz0id]

When I first read this article I didn't see that it was actually going over the internet, although it does sound like a VPN. Somehow on first read I missed that. So please don't flame me to read the article :)
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Measuring in at 50 gig

[Hardwyred]

For the Atlanta screening, the 90-minute movie will be projected after it has been downloaded from Burbank rather than shown simultaneously with its transmission over the Internet. ''Real-time'' projection is effectively prevented by the sheer size of the computer file containing the movie -- 50 gigabytes, which is roughly 20,000 times larger than a typical MP3 music file, Schroeder said.

Around 50 gig in less then 4 hours? Gotta love that.

Re:Measuring in at 50 gig

[SgtPepper]

Oh, great, wonderful...the MP3 file is now an industry standard for comparision.

THAT IS JUST WRONG

I mean really, their compearying a lossy audio
scheme to a probably less lossy ( if at all )
video scheme ( wonder what format it is in, no
i haven't read the article )

Ucky.

Re:Measuring in at 50 gig

[levendis]

Its not that impressivwe, about 3.5 MB/s. It'd probably be far cheaper just to FedEx hard drives to the theatres.

Re:Measuring in at 50 gig

[carlos_benj]

"Around 50 gig in less then 4 hours? Gotta love that."

Ah. That's no big deal. Metallica fans download more bits than that over a four hour time frame. (300,000 kicked off for activities within a 48 hour span of time, if only one MP3 per user that's 25,000 downlods in a 4 hour period and 50 gig is only 20,000 times larger than the average MP3)

Of course, all those bits aren't going into the same pipe, but if each Metallica fan were to download his/her share of this movie they could each watch .0045 minutes, get together and try to piece it together -- kinda like reading an interview with Lars.

carlos

Re:Measuring in at 50 gig

[mparcens]

What would you rather have them compare it to? Almost all of today's image/audio/video popular formats are lossy compression, so I imagine they just picked a format that every dumbass was familiar with. Besides, the mp3 quality difference is almost negligible.

If you want to have a problem with something, have a problem with the shitty .ASF format, where they have sacrificed every semblence of quality video for a small file format.

_________________
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Re:Measuring in at 50 gig

[SgtPepper]

I don't know...maybe just say 50 gigs? How about
something like...that's 5 times the size of most
consumer HDs ( figure 10gig is standard right now )

something, it's just....MP3 isn't the end all
be all of everything. It's like...hrm...if i
say MP3 i'll sound cool. *shrugs*

I'm in a ranting mood today :)

Re:Measuring in at 50 gig

[klund]

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of tape speeding down the highway.

That's one of my favorites, even if I have forgotten who said it...
--

Re:Measuring in at 50 gig

[hattig]

50gbytes over 90 minutes is around 550Mbytes a minute, which is about 9Mb a second of imagery. If the film is being shown at 30fps, then that is 300kbytes per frame, so the film is compressed.

A 4096x3072 (I imagine this is the required resolution to make the film not look blocky on a large screen like that) slide in 24 bits takes up 36Mbytes of memory, so that compression ratio of over 100:1 is very impressive. Even if the resolution was on 2048x1536 that is a compression ratio of 25:1 for film quality imagery.

The equipment to show this stuff must cost a huge amount! And I bet you could plug a good computer in and play Quake, Unreal Tournament etc on the best computer games system in the world!

Re:Measuring in at 50 gig

[lunatik17]

If you want to have a problem with something, have a problem with the shitty .ASF format, where they have sacrificed every semblence of quality video for a small file format.

It doesn't even have that. Typically I've noticed ASF's to be a little more than twice the size of a comparable rm file, with suckier quality. ASF just blows in general.

Here's my DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?

Re:Measuring in at 50 gig

[andy@petdance.com]

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of tape speeding down the highway.

I heard it as "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes", which I like better because of the image of a hulking Country Squire, complete with faux-wood body panels, stacked to the ceiling with spools of tape, and a Mom with hair curlers at the wheel, cigarette dangling from her lips.

Re:Measuring in at 50 gig

[cwebster]

i've got 54 gigs of hard drive space in my pc :)
10 may be the standard, but high capacity drives are very easy to get and not that expensive ($300).

Re:Measuring in at 50 gig

[phoebe]

Just to be as technical current tv / dvd is about 720x576 for pal which is 1.2 MB/frame dvd compression (MPEG2) offers typically 25:1 compression which drops it to 50 KB/frame, 1.2 MB/s or 9.8 mb/s.

Film producers are unlikely to want a cinema screen to look worse than dvd and are likely to be user similar technology so the 2048x1536 frames seem best fitting.

This poses an oddity as apparently companies such as Industrial Light and Magic are using 40x TV resolution for their in-house digital conversion of cinema film. If we take that figure we could be looking at 40x extra bandwidth which works out at 47.5 MB / frame uncompressed or a total size for a 90 minute film of 250 GB!

Re:Measuring in at 50 gig

[MassacrE]

seems like your numbers are decent,
50GB/90 = 611MB per minute
/60 (seconds)= 10.2 MB per second
(At this point it is 10x DVD size)
/24 (fps) = 425k/frame
not shabby at all
2048x1536x24 bit= 8.9M
so you would have to have about 25:1 compression, sure

this is hardly a stretch for MPEG. I imagine this is similar to DVD-quality compression, scaled up in resolution

I'm waiting for when this is available in the home :) screw DVDs if I could get a movie playable at 2kx1.5k or 4kx3k

Star Wars II

[Kingpin]

Isn't this the same way George Lucas plans to distribute Star Wars II?

MPAA

[chrisroy]

I wonder if they're pleased with this. "Look, full length movies CAN be downloaded over the net (though your honor, please disreguard the need for the specialized connection/equipment/etc)."

Re:MPAA

[the_other_one]

I wonder how long it will take before some twelve year old posts the movie to a server in Sealand?

Wave of the future...

[codefool]

One of the major production costs of distributing a movie is making the copy of the movie. Say, $2K a copy for 2000 theatres and you start talking about real money. Digitally transmitting the film directly to the theatre saves this cost, as well as other benefits. Can you imagine a film with an offensive scene being instantly edited and redistributed for the next day's showings?

Re:Wave of the future...

[DA_MAN_DA_MYTH]

Digitally transmitting the film directly to the theatre saves this cost, as well as other benefits.

I agree it can save money, up until someone decides to spend the time and effort to start stealing or digitally borrowing the movies. Not every movie theatre is going to have there own private line. At least not now. Well it's going to be encrypted, well laudy frickin da! Everyone knows encryption, (much like rules) was meant to be broken, and think of the rewards you can receive if that were to happen. Probably some jail time for some teenager in Europe, but for the rest of us?

Also don't forget about all the controversy about can information be copyrighted? Movies aren't exactly a trade secret since everyone has access to them in a movie theatre... So if someone happens to steal this cartoon (which looks better than a lot of recent sci-fi movies) although it may be 50 gigs, it might be worth the price of a $250 dollar hard drive to view the current releases in the theatre from the 'privacy' of your own home...

--my Dime and a Nickel

Be mindful of the future,

Re:Wave of the future...

[codefool]

True there are technical and economic problems to solve. But when they are solved, this will be the way that mass entertainment (dare I say information) will be distributed. I would think that they would own their own networks for distributing the films, as the sheer bulk of them would necessitate this. The films themselves will most likely be encrypted vis-a-vis DVD, where only the theatres can descrypt them for showing. Man, what a way to shut a theatre down - just expire their decrypt codes!

Re:Wave of the future...

[Cramer]

Ok, and to send a 50+G movie to the theater in anything near usable speed, you'd need a VERY expensive connection. At 2k$ per physical print, it doesn't cost anything to Fedex it across the country -- plus, you can make the money back by selling the frames. [You'd need about 5Mbps to transfer a 50G movie in one day -- that's about 4 T1s.]

Personally, I like the idea of digital movies. However, it'll be hard to match the image quality of film without having to own part of Seagate, Quantum, AND IBM.

Re:Wave of the future...

[EnderPax]

Eek. I don't know if that's a benefit. So when Donald Wildmon or PMRC-type groups put pressure on a scene, suddenly it's edited out? I honestly think that one of the factors that has encouraged corporate entities in fighting censorship is that the cost associated with reediting a film/CD/what have you is prohibitive enough that it's more fiscally responsible to leave the original product on the market. On the other hand, maybe we could edit Jar Jar Binks the hell out of Episode 1. :> --Pax

Re:Wave of the future...

[Chandon Seldon]

Can you imagine a film with an offensive scene being instantly edited and redistributed for the next day's showings?

This is an advantage?

Re:Wave of the future...

[codefool]

Don't get free speech confused with the movie business. I'm talking about the Hollywood drek produced for mass consumption. Their business is to make money, not films that make important statements. You put out the film and the paying public hates it, you have the power to change it to their liking for very little expense (relatively.)

Not exactly off topic, but what comes to mind is back in the early 80's there as a series on TV called The Greatest American Hero whose "hero" was named Hinkley. Then Regan was shot by someone really named Hinkley. The studio scrambled to redub the series to change his name to Hinley - very funny to watch. In fact, it was funnier than the show was trying to be. Oh, well.

Re:Wave of the future...

[codefool]

See my comments here.

Re:Wave of the future...

[RayChuang]

Given that the costs of hard disk storage has gone literally straight down in the last seven years (you can get a 75 GB ATA-66 IDE hard drive for around US$550!), I think if they do the encryption right, the days of celluloid film may begin its slow decline in popularity.

Remember, unlike film, digital has these advantages:

1. No worries about dust, scratches or damaged prints due to projector problems.

2. Color saturation that is more consistent than film.

3. The ability to encode multilingual dialogue audio AND subtitling on the same copy easily. And the audio will be digitally clear, too.

Indeed, because of eliminating the need to make actual physical prints of the movie (which cost a LOT of money per copy and weigh a lot for multiple reels that encompasses a single movie), the whole issue of "regional" releases of blockbuster movies could be rendered moot. Imagine by 2005 when Star Wars Episode Three is released, they could do a simultaneous release worldwide because there will no longer be a need to strike prints and ship them worldwide--the original will be sent to theaters worldwide in 256-bit encrypted digital format.

Re:Wave of the future...

[fprintf]

Also remember, that unlike film, we have no long term history about data storage in digital formats. I know there have been slashdot conversations about the length of time data can be stored for regular computer data on CD-ROM, but can you imagine the problem with trying to archive a feature length movie?

I can just imagine... damn I dropped the hard-drive. Well, there goes our *only* copy of XXXXXXX movie. :-)

Re:Wave of the future...

[Salant]

copy of XXXXXXX movie. :-)

now thats some hardcore pr0n :)

Re:Wave of the future...

[cwebster]

you make 4 T1's sound like its a lot of bandwidth. A T3 is equivelent to 28 T1's for 44.78 Mbps, and although i dont know if its the case for this transmission, but Qwest boasts OC-192 fiber links. OC-3 is 155 Mb, you do the math.

Re:Wave of the future...

[Braveheart]

Well, you are very, very unlikely to keep your only copy of a digital movie on hard drives (read RAID arrays).
They would be archived on tape.
Most probably Sony DTFs in the movie industry, as this is a common format.

Re:Wave of the future...

[aphrael]

Can you imagine a film with an offensive scene being instantly edited and redistributed for the next day's showings?

I'm *really* not certain that should qualify as a benefit. Sounds more like a nightmare to me --- both from the perspective of the director (who would have to watch his work being altered against his will) and from the perspective of an audience that likes thought-provoking films.

More bland movies that say nothing interesting would be a depressing effect of digital transmission.

Re:Wave of the future...

[delmoi]

Well it's going to be encrypted, well laudy frickin da! Everyone knows encryption,

Erm, no... copy protection was ment to be broken, not encryption. DeCSS dosn't break the encryption, only the protection of the Decryption keys.

The people who are showing the movie would be able to pirate it, but people who, say, tap the line would not be able to. Since they have no clue what the keys are.

Sure, you could theroreticaly break the encryption, if you wanted to spend $40,000 a year for the next four thousand years or something...

Re:Wave of the future...

[GoRK]

Actually the audio system of film *IS* digital and very very good quality. It would be fairly trivial to add multilanguage audio tracks and ditally encoded subtitles onto film as-is; however, it would be incompatible with the current audio systems in theaters.

In fact; about the subtitles at least; a lot of movies already DO have them encoded on the film. Some theaters offer small portable devices (like the trivia machines in bars) for deaf people to carry into the films to read the dialogue.

~GoRK

Re:Wave of the future...

[Cramer]

No, it's merely "minimum sufficient" bandwidth.

One could purchase OC-768 too. My point it one of cost. 4xT1 will cost a few thousand dollars per month and a few more thousand to setup and install. T3/OC-3... add another zero to the monthly cost.

Let's also "do the math" for the aggregate bandwidth for all the theaters around... one studio sending to one theater isn't a big deal. However, one studio sending to 2000 theaters adds up (quickly.)

Just some tariff numbers for your enjoyment:

************ Tariff Query Results ************
Tariff Vendor: Use Preferences

FROM:
npanxx 909614
lata 730
central office CHINO , CA
clli WLNTCAXFDS0

TO:
npanxx 617334
lata 128
central office SO BOSTON , MA

INTRA-COUNTRY
- 909614, UNITED STATES, to
- 617334, UNITED STATES, (2561 miles)

[Line Speed: 15440001 (T1)]
[FTS SPRINT] Lata to Lata Transport charge..0.00..2343.00
[FTS SPRINT] Source access charge........1100.00...746.00
[FTS SPRINT] Destination access charge...1100.00...732.00
............ TOTAL.......................2200.00..3821.00

[Line Speed: 447360001 (T3)]
[FTS ATT]................ Lata to Lata Transport charge..0.00..72000.00
[GTE - CA]............... Source access charge........1800.00...1598.82
[MCI METRO ATS INC. - MA] Destination access charge....998.00...4365.92
......................... TOTAL.......................2798.00..77964.74

***********************************************

[Disclaimer: Those are 1999 FCC tariff charges. They almost never match what the telco charges.]

[PS: I would kill for a <pre> tag.]

Re:Wave of the future...

[codefool]

Well, a director who is being paid by a studio to produce drek knows its drek and likely be in the mode of "as long as I'm paid." Keep in minds that we're not talking free speech here, we're talking the money machine of Holleywood giving the viewers what they want. Think of it as Coke Classic(tm). When Coca Cola decided to make new Coke(tm), the consumers screamed in agony. Did Coke go, "Tough dookie, this is free speech." No, they did the responsible thing and listened to their viewers to both their benefit and embarassment. Movies that are catered to public tastes are the cash cow of Hollywood. This would give them a way to fine-tune the product. Now its a hit or miss scenario.

Also consider what happened with that movie The Program a couple of years back. It showed a scene where football players would lie in the middle of a busy street to build nerve. Some real football players tried it and died. No free speech issue here - the studio yanked the scene at great expense to avoid lawsuits. In a digital world, they could have done it overnight.

As far as bland movies that say nothing, go read the nearest marquee.

Re:Wave of the future...

[jesse.k]

"Can you imagine a film with an offensive scene being instantly edited and redistributed for the next day's showings?"

Good God no, that's a terrible idea. Now, instant Director's Cuts would be a good one.

Re:Wave of the future...

[Apotsy]

Since when do we care about saving the movie studios money? Do you really think they are going to pass those savings on to the consumers?

Besides, what most people do not realize is that film is actually better than any of the digital systems that have been demoed to date. Here are the problems:

• Resolution
  A frame of 35mm film contains millions of pixels. A spokesman for Kodak recently stated at a panel discussion that film has between 8 and 12 million pixels per frame. The digital systems being proposed as a replacement have about 2 million pixels (1920x1080). Does that sound like comparable resolution to you? Doesn't to me.
• Color range
  Film has a much greater color range than the RGB color representation used for digital projection. And the color range for film continues to increase. Technicolor recently revived the dye-transfer printing process that produces even greater color saturation than normal film. You can see this in action if you live in the Bay Area. Go to the Century Cinema 25 at Union City and see "Mission Impossible 2" or "Shanghai Noon" to see one of these prints. (Note: Do not go to see "Dinosaur" expecting to see a dye-transfer print. This is showing with a normal film print.) If you really want to see just how good film can look, this is your chance.

Yes, yes, I know that film is prone to scratches and digital is not. However, if you go to a good, quality theater with good projection, you will not see any scratches except around the reel changes, which will be going away soon since printing houses are moving towards using extended length reels (ELRs) for exhibition prints, which can contain the entire film on a single reel.

Film has higher quality than any currently available digital system (and I say "currently available" because I know that it is possible for a digital system to fix the problems that I mentioned, but I am talking about what is available today, right now -- that is what the studios are pushing for). Replacing film with the digital systems of the level of quality that we are seeing today is like replacing a good analog audio system with 8-bit 22kHz digital audio. It may be "digital", but that doesn't mean it's "better".

When it comes down to it, the only reason to get excited about this is because it will save the movie studios money. Given all the crap going on with the MPAA/DeCSS case and so forth, I find it very hard to understand why Slashdotters are excited about the @#$!ing movie studios saving money!! Can someone explain this to me please?

Re:Wave of the future...

[aphrael]

Also consider what happened with that movie The Program a couple of years back. It showed a scene where football players would lie in the middle of a busy street to build nerve. Some real football players tried it and died. No free speech issue here - the studio yanked the scene at great expense to avoid lawsuits. In a digital world, they could have done it overnight.

Again, that's hardly a feature.

I don't *like* living in a world where if I say "Chopping your arm off is fun" and someone does it, they can then sue me. The idea that technology would make that *easier* is disturbing. Probably true, but disturbing.

Re:Wave of the future...

[Apotsy]

The company you're thinking of is called MaxiVision, and it was founded by Dean Goodhill, who among other things was film editor on the "The Fugitive" (he was nominated for an Oscar for that, but didn't win).

Wonder if this will slow down my pr0n downloads?

[ceswiedler]

I live in Atlanta...hope my pr0n bandwitdh isn't affected.

Bit of a PR stunt...

[scrutty]

Considering all the infrastructure needed to do this "transmission", and the fact that it will still be a four hour download, I can't help thinking that it might have just been easier to courier over a disk array or a server.

Re:Bit of a PR stunt...

[ceswiedler]

Of course it's a PR stunt. They pretty much say that right in the article:

"We're showcasing tomorrow's technology today."

Reminds me of the whole idea behind the EPCOT center...

Re:Bit of a PR stunt...

[singularity]

While partly a PR stunt, this is also an attempt to show the possibility of a completely different method of distribution. Mailing thousands of reels of film for one movie is very expensive. If an infrastructure could be set up to distribute movies digitally, there is a lot of money to be saved.

It is similar to concempt cars. True, on one level they are PR stunts, but they also teach the manufacturer about new fabrication ideas and design ideas. The cars themselves may never be mass-produced, but most of the time you can see their influences later on.

Studios see a lot of money in digital distribution. This could be seen as a test bed to see the possibiity.

Movie theater adoption

[Denor]

The digital projector alone costs about $100,000, not to mention the added price of a special screen, sound system and computer equipment needed to download and show ``Titan A.E.'' in digital format.

I read this same story from a different paper (I don't recall offhand, otherwise I'd add a link) and one thing that story mentioned was the above quote - and the fact that movie studios were balking at it.
Essentially, what this does is shift cost from the movie studios (putting the movie to film and shipping it everywhere) to the ordinary theaters (cost of new projectors, maintainance on fancy new computers). The owners of the aforementioned ordinary theaters were not pleased about this.
All said, I think it's a great thing to see distribution go digital, but - unfortunately - there's always a downside.

Re:Movie theater adoption

[ct]

Essentially, what this does is shift cost from the movie studios (putting the movie to film and shipping it everywhere) to the ordinary theaters (cost of new projectors, maintainance on fancy new computers).

So in other words, theatre owners will be raising prices to recoup their costs - because you know there's no fscking way studios will be lowering their cut or subsidizing the equipment which could be used to show a competing studios blockbuster. Like $13 wasn't a rip off already...

-ct

Re:Movie theater adoption

[reidbold]

Why would you need a new screen and soundsystem? Are they really necessary just because it's in a digital format?

Better hope...

[Leghorn]

...Jack Valenti doesn't get wind of this...He might file suit!

why not realtime?

[ignatiusst]

Any indication why they aren't trying realtime? Does the distributor know they can't do it, or are they just worried they might screw up?

Re:why not realtime?

[anotherone]

It's a 90 minute movie... it takes four hours to download... figure it out yourself.


Don't criticise someone who is attempting to use free software for not using enough free software.

Re:why not realtime?

[AndrewRF]

The size/time ratio would make showing the movie in real-time very difficult and expensive.

First, they would need more bandwidth. The movie is 90 minutes long and 50GB (or 400Gb), so they'd need to be able to pull in about 4.5Gb/min or 75Mb/s. To keep the display from lagging, they would need to be able to maintain that as that as a *minimum* bandwidth for the whole duration (assuming no caching which is, admittedly, overly simplistic). Otherwise, they fall behind and the PR stunt looks a lot less impressive. Now, the quoted "800x analogue modem speed" means they're running on a T3 (56kb/s * 800 = 44800kb/s ~ 45Mb/s), which puts they short by about 30Mb/s. (And they wouldn't be able to pull 100% max. bandwidth anyway).

Second, providing guaranteed minimum bandwidth (more than 0) is difficult and very expensive. A high maximum bandwidth doesn't necessarily guarantee average or minimum throughput. I find it's tough trying to get a consistent lag-free 14kb/s RealAudio connection over a 1.5Mb/s T1. Sure it's being shared, but the problem really isn't available bandwidth. It is that all of the hops between me and the point of origin need to provide consistent throughput, which they generally don't. After all, they're all servicing thousands of other requests as well. Even over a private network, any of the hops between the studio and the theatre could get fail to provide the necessary throughput. For the amount of bandwidth in question, they would probably need a major provider to dedicate fiber and around a dozen hops between LA and Atlanta to just their traffic which isn't going to happen for less than a bajillion dollars. The impact on the rest of their network of trying to reroute all their regular traffic would be a nightmare.

Third, there are server resources utilization issues on the receiving end. Your average Gigabit NIC will eat up a lot of CPU doing 75Mb/s. Plus, if they've got the stream encrypted, then decrypting that volume of data real time would require a very big chunk of hardware. Once you're done with that, you've still got to be able to display the movie.

Could it be done? Probably, but it would be very expensive in terms of setup, money and expertise. They could end up spending more on the stunt than the movie ever ends up making.

Re:why not realtime?

[SpankTech3000]

Personally, I'd love to see a "Network Congestion... Buffering XX%" in the middle of the movie's climactic scene.

Re:why not realtime?

[Braveheart]

Well, that's what ATM networking is all about.
ATM was born to do this sort of thing - video, audio, IP traffic on the same links.
End-to-end quality of service, so you can get a consistent end-to-end reservation of bandwidth for those TIME CRITICAL things like video, and then let the 'store-and-forward' things like email buffer and take a few microseconds longer.
So you never would see 'Beffering XX%' in the middle of a movie.

As someone who knows a bit about ATM I'm pissed that Cisco here is steam-rollering the use of IP connections for things like that. After all Cisco do have a vested interest in IP routers...

Link to Titan AE site

[CSG_SurferDude]

Geez, I wish he had put this up in his story...

Afterearth.com

The imdb link is

us.imdb.com/Title?0120913

Unfortunately the official site requires Flash AND Quicktime, so I can't see the darn site here at work (On my Sun Ultra60)

Evil Intentions?

[HHaygood]

I particularly like the part that states that Titan A.E. features the voice of "Matt Demon".

hello

[Anonymous Coward]

hello i cant wait to see this except i live in zaire. here we only have a 1200 baud uucp link to the itnernet so by my calculations i should see the film by early 2008. it will be good.

sihg boaj

Re:hello

[Picass0]

Perhaps the film board in Zaire could arrange to have it shipped directly on disk (with the movie's legal distributor, of course). Since the computer in Ziare only has a 1200 bps modem, I'm guessing you have a floppy drive and no CD-ROM. It would only take 36,572 floppy disks to send the movie. Problem solved.

Re:hello

[iloveprotoss]

You know what they say about the bandwidth of a van carrying a load of tapes. Now it's film. In a few centuries, digital encoding and transmission of matter will saturate all conceivable bandwidth and the application will have permanently outstripped the hardware.

size of the file

[djrogers]

Wow, now even the posters aren't reading the articles.... The movie is about 50GB

Previews look really cool

[Fishstick]

Interesting. Is there really any benefit from transmitting this rather that shipping cell? Security? Or is it just a PR gimmic?

...

I have been anticipating this movie since my son and I saw the first trailers for it last year (think when we saw Iron Giant). Looks really cool, and I'm taking my son to see this the first weekend it comes out. (yah, I get burned once in a while seeing something before friends give me their recommendation, but usually it works out)

On a side note, ever notice how the movie studios release different trailers and teasers that paint different pictures of the movie? The first 15-second teaser showed mostly space shots and had classical music. Then the next one I saw on TV showed the animated characters with a song by Creed. The latest one I saw in the theater seems to focus more on the evil aliens and has what sounds like the soundtrack from that James Spader, Kurt Russel, Egyptian-like Movie (uh... oh yeah -- Stargate).

This seems to happen all the time. You see a trailer for a movie with a certain mood created by the clips and the music. Then you get to the theater and the soundtrack is all different from what you were expecting. I've had conversations with my wife about this -- do they plan this to set expectations based on how individuals associate with music they recognize? I can't remember any movies I've seen (maybe except some Disney flicks with Elton John tunes) where the trailers had any of the actual score.

Re:Previews look really cool

[gclef]

I can't remember any movies I've seen (maybe except some Disney flicks with Elton John tunes) where the trailers had any of the actual score.

To add to that, I'm getting increasingly annoyed with movies that use Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" to build a dramatic trailer. I only know of one movie (Excalibur) that's actually used the music in the movie, but I've seen several that used it in trailers. It's a great piece, and perfect for the medieval/gothic/dramatic mood...I just don't get why they'd use it in trailers and not in the movie. If it works for setting a mood in the trailer, you'd *hope* that they'd want the same mood in the movie. Clearly that's not the case.

On a side note: if you know your classical music, the occasional commercial can be very funny...a few years ago there was a running shoe commercial that had this very dramatic music behind an image of a runner....I always wondered what they were thinking when they put Verdi's "Requim" (mass for the dead) in that ad....not exactly sending the message they had hoped for...(The discerning dead choose Fila!)

Re:Previews look really cool

[Fishstick]

>To add to that, I'm getting increasingly annoyed with movies that use Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" to build a dramatic trailer.

This is the kind of thing that drives my wife nuts. One a couple of occasions, she has seen a trailer with music that she likes (she is a figure skater and always looking for music to use) and rushed out to buy the CD only to find that the soundtrack does not contain the cut she heard and there is no way to find out what the piece actually is.

My theory: They use familiar music to draw you in. They have an original score, but since no one has ever heard it, putting it in trailers is not as desirable as using something that people will recognize, remember and maybe even form a positive impression of the film. I know that the Titan AE trailer with the Creed song has worked on me. Everytime I hear that song, I think of the clips of the movie I've seen. The soundtrack from Stargate sets a mood and a specific expectation for me that Titan will have some of the same 'feeling'.

I would love to find a site that has references to movies' soundtracks and the music that was used with the various trailers. If I had more time, I might start something like this if it didn't exist.

Re:Previews look really cool

[SatelliteBoy]

Ah, the changing of music from the trailers.

One thing to keep in mind is that many parts of a movie are produced in parallel. To help with the editing, the editor/producer/director (varies by project) inserts temporary music. It is always "found" music, stuff they have already sitting around. The score written for the movie gets inserted later.

Problem is, sometimes, trailers get released with the temporary tracks in place. The Abyss did this with the original, and even used shots not used in the film. 2001 was edited with found music, then Kubrik pitched the score written for it in favor of the music he used to edit.

The found music is supposed to approximate the tempo and feel of the final cuts, but that can change, and often does. Be aware of the earliest trailers, as the music for the film probably hasn't been written by the time they had to ship it.

Re:Previews look really cool

[Golias]

To add to that, I'm getting increasingly annoyed with movies that use Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" to build a dramatic trailer. I only know of one movie (Excalibur) that's actually used the music in the movie, but I've seen several that used it in trailers.

The Omen also used it.

The reason movies seldom use their own soundtracks in promotions is because the trailers are often made while the film is still in post-production. That's also why you sometimes don't see scenes from the trailer in the movie... it was filmed, but taken out of the final cut after the trailer was made.

There are three reasons why the Carmina Burana is used so often:

1) The movement that they use, "O Fortuna", is short. It's the perfect length for a commercial.

2) It is dramatic and kind of frantic-sounding. The Carmina Burana are a collection of old European pagan songs, mostly about springtime, sex, and drinking, and are set to an 20th Centry post-romanticism score.

3) Carl Orff is dead. There are no copyright license issues to worry about.

The public domain angle really saved some cash in Excalibur, because they used Wagner music (mainly from "The Ring" and "Tristan and Isolde") for most of the movie, and the Carmina Burana for one scene. Recycling opera music is really cool if done right, and much cheaper than hiring John Williams.

Just tap in!

[Tebriel]

So, now I can just tap into the lines and snag the data...wait, a terabyte? Whoa...that's going to take a lot of floppies!

Transfer Rate

[Racher]

A 50 megabyte file sent across Cisco's network in 4 hours works out to about 3.5 MegaBytes (Not MegaBits) per second. FYI

Re:Transfer Rate

[Yaruar]

50 megabytes over 4 hours = 3.5 megabytes a second. So what does it do after the 14 odd seconds for the transfer is over??? Or is it 3.5 MegaBytes every 16.6 seconds???

Re:Transfer Rate

[__aaedhn419]

50 gigabytes, not megabytes.

Re:Transfer Rate

[tringstad]

This is not impressive.

Qwest has done far better, as talked about recently on slashdot in "Qwest Achieves 100-Mile IP Round-Trip At 40Gb/sec"

My only question is why is it going to take 4 hours? If Qwest has been able to do so much better than that in field trials, why aren't they using this opportunity to show their technology in the Real World(tm)? Especially since they claimed in the press release:

More than 750 studio quality streaming video channels can be transported simultaneously

So why can't they do just one in less than 4 hours?

BTW, Qwest had another press relese today about their record breaking speeds.

Movies on demand

[DrSkwid]

sod tv on demand how about movies on demand.

get down the cinema and choose which film you want not what's showing.

might have to book in advance and make it movie with the most votes get's shown this week or something like that but there's an opportunity there.

I would go to the pictures if they were showing some films I never saw there.

like, er Mad Max
and well i'm sure I could think of some if there was a menu system!
.oO0Oo.

Problems with this

[Tomcow2000]

I may seem paranoid for saying this, but, no matter how cool it is to see movies distributed digitally, it brings up serious censorship problems. As is shown with home video editing, it is a lot easier to edit a digital video than one on film. Say some theater owner decided he didn't want any scenes of violence in his theater. There goes half the movie. This is a really cool concept, but the censorship considerations are very large.

Re:Problems with this

[Chandon Seldon]

This is one of the few cases where copyright has a good effect. Only the copyright holder can permit the editing of their movie, and hopefully they will refuse to do so.

Re:Problems with this

[gclef]

Yeah, but it'll only take one case of that for the movie studios to impose *very* strict license restrictions. I suspect that they won't even get to the one case. The license that you're granted to show the movie (as a theatre owner) will probably restrict their doing this. Sure, you can still do it, but just try to get another Paramount film after pissing them off......

Re:Problems with this

[Misch]

Do you live in a hick town in the bible belt? Same thing happens there. Small cinema shows objectional movie... townsfolkies get mad... boycott.. *poof*. Little cinema dies. Simply put, in this case, if a film's content is in opposite to the conditions of the community, it either won't be show, or nobody will go to see it.

And if you're talking about a system to edit a movie... you're plunking down another half million dollars for the system to do that, I'm sure.

One other nice thing that the digital format would allow you to do would be actually having the different formats of a movie avaliable in an "on demand" format. You could have a PG-13 version of a movie, as well as a R rated version of the movie...

You can also include captioning right into the movie... another plus in areas with large numbers of hard of hearing/deaf people. (No additional cost to have movies captioned.)

I don't think censorship is an issue here.

See it done!

[don_carnage]

I've done some network packet traces on this sort of thing for a company that was digitally transmitting commercials to it's sales offices on the other coast. The problem was that the bandwidth required to send it was pretty massive, which made sending it overseas near impossible.

Of course, try telling that to the marketing people. "We're sorry, but to send your 1GB file over a 640Kbps link at 60% utilization would take 2 days."

So, when's the hack on DVD to come out? 8^)

dc

--

Don't get too excited about digital yet.

[tcd004]

I'm guessing the pic is made of the RGB color gamut, which means the range of colors they can reproduce is only about 1/10th of what you can do on traditional cellulite.

I'm also shocked they can do this in a 4 hour download. When you consider the incredibly high resolution those frames have to be rendered at, (probably 1200-2400 dpi-totally a guess) I would estimate a film like that would be in the range of 7-10 tetrabytes.

tcd004

Have you been to wwink's BLOG?

Re:Don't get too excited about digital yet.

[flybait]

only about 1/10th of what you can do on traditional cellulite.

From Merriam Webster OnLine: "Cellulite: lumpy fat found in the thighs, hips, and buttocks of some women"

Excited? Not likely.

/flybait

Re:Don't get too excited about digital yet.

[mrehrer]

Just knowing the color space used to represent pixel data is not an indication of the range of colors that can be represented (except in the cases of YIQ, YUV, and CMYK but these are other issues entirely)....What really matters is knowing:

1. The frame resolution (im assuming that its one of the HD resolutions like 1080 since this is the way tarzan was shown digitally)

2. Compression method (most likely some DCT variant)

3. Compression ratio (according to my math tarzan was ~ 50:1)

4.Most important however is bit depth and weather that data is logarithmic (ala cineon) or linear....these can range from 8-16 bits per channel....

matthew

www.rehrer.com

Rumors...

[Animol]

I heard that this is precisely how they plan on distributing the sequel to "Hackers". Except that some scenes will be encoded. And you have to be a blind crypto-expert to decode 'em. And the government is going to attempt to disrupt transmission. And, in spite of all the technology SURROUNDING the movie, it'll still be unrealistic and just plain bad. Some things never change, eh?

Can we say...

[_Nemmeran_]

Can we say... Publicity stunt?

Woo-pee!

[zombieking]

I cant wait to see this and sit there while they are rebooting the projector. "Windows has detected a GPF in module roll_the_film.dll. Please contact the manager of the theater".

Re:Woo-pee!

[anotherone]

Meanwhile, the movie screen is blue...


Don't criticise someone who is attempting to use free software for not using enough free software.

Re:second post!

[anotherone]

Yeah, what do you want?


Don't criticise someone who is attempting to use free software for not using enough free software.

Opens up the door for vandals and crackers

[pauldy]

Can't wait to be sitting in the movie theater and have some 15 year old kid pop up and voice his plans for world domination. Prolly won't be long before that happens I mean given the MPAA's DVD fiasco. It's amazing how poorly they seem to impliment some of the greatest achievements in technology.

I saw a digital projection of Dinosaur

[tgd]

I hope they do the same with Titan AE in the theaters that today have digital projectors.

I was totally and completely blown away by it. Digital projection is to film what CDs were to cassette tapes. Once you've seen it, seeing optical film is just so... flat.

Re:I saw a digital projection of Dinosaur

[fprintf]

Perhaps when comparing CDs to Tapes, but I bet there are still a whole host of audiophiles who prefer the good ole' phonograph record. I know for a while when I was selling CD players, most of the audio guys really didn't like the sound. Not rich enough.

So, there may be some reasons *not* to prefer the digital format - perhaps because it is too perfect, doesn't have the smooth shadows and surfaces and irregular shaped patterns that film has. Just a guess on my part, and also there are still lots of people, myself included, who prefer black and white film to color.

Just call me a Luddite. :-)

Re:I saw a digital projection of Dinosaur

[DrEldarion]

Yeah, I saw a couple movies on a digital projector and was blown away. The image is EXTREMELY crisp, and you don't get any of those annoying lines on the screen.

I wanna hook my computer up to one of those babies... play some Quake ;)

-- Dr. Eldarion --

Re:I saw a digital projection of Dinosaur

[ucblockhead]

Technically speaking, it is not an issue of digital being "too perfect". The issue is that with a digital format, you've got a set level of quality. Below that, the picture/sound gets blocky.

With analog, on the other hand, the theoretical level of quality is pretty much infinite. Those audiophiles who prefer phonographs are essentially making two claims. 1) That human beings can detect something of better quality than CD level digital. 2) That a superior phonograph setup can exceed CD levels of quality.

(The other problem being, of course, that a digital signal can be corrected when it degrades while an analog signal cannot. That's most of what "CD quality" really means. With a phonograph, the needle slowly destroys the record.

Re:I saw a digital projection of Dinosaur

[Golias]

I know for a while when I was selling CD players, most of the audio guys really didn't like the sound. Not rich enough.

To the true "golden ears", the 80's era CD players did sound pretty bad, and it was assumed at the time that this was because of the poorly chosen sample rate of 44.1.

As it turns out, crappy D/A conversion was responsible for most of the problems with the "digital sound" of early CD players. (Although, yes, they did sound better than the mass-produced cassette tapes that kids were buying back then.)

These days, you can buy a Rotel CD player for about $350 that even really picky audiophiles will be happy with... but don't tell them they have to let go of their turntable any time soon.

Anyone who says records are inferior has not listened to a Scheffield Labs album on a good system. They are comparing their CD boom box to their old Mickey Mouse portable record player.

Re:I saw a digital projection of Dinosaur

[Apotsy]

Digital may look good compared to some film projection, but when you compare the very best digital projection available today to the very best film projection available today, film will win. Here is my own personal comparison test:

I went to see "Mission: Impossible 2" recently, and I was lucky enough to see a Technicolor dye-transfer print of it. It was amazing! The color and sharpness were just unbelievable! And, a few months ago I got to see "Toy Story 2" projected digitally, and while the color was close to what a dye-transfer film print looks like, the resolution was awful. I moved around the theater several times, and found that if I sat closer than the halfway from the front to the back, I could see the individual pixels on the screen. You don't have that problem with high-quality film prints. The image from a good film print looks smooth no matter how close you get.

Note that I am not saying that film will always be superior. If the companies that are pushing this would increase the resolution from its current level of 1920x1080 to something more comparable to film, say 4096x1720 for a 2.39:1 widescreen "scope" image, then I think it will be a suitable replacement for film. Until then, though, people should realize that digital actually has less resolution than film.

Is that a big HD in your pocket, or...

[Lizard_King]

I'm gonna download Metallica's 56+ MB "Napster Begone" MP3 first...

Widespread Digital Distribution?

[Crazy Man on Fire]

Although they didn't say explicitly in the article, it looks like the movie will only be sent and shown digitally at this screening in Atlanta. Judging by the comments made in the article, the cost is prohibitive for digital distribution because it costs too much for the equipment to show it and for the connection to download it. However, I'm sure that this is where theaters will go in the future. Perhaps, though, the film will be distributed to the theaters on some physical media so that a download is not required.

Digital Projection - still a gimmick

[ahg]

If I recall digital projection of movies has been discussed here before and those who've personally seen the digital StarWars have reported that the artifacts become glaringly obvious when projected across a 50 foot screen.

More than anything it's the studios wanting to (a) do anything for a little extra attention in differentiating their film (b) save lots of money on the very expensive celluloid film.

Wanna pay $20 for a movie ticket because the theatres have to upgrade thier equipment every couple years while the technology evolves?
Anyone else in favor of a boycott of this ridiculous PR stunt? If they lose money on the stunt a few times maybe they'll wait until the technology is ready before shoving it into theatres and at our wallets...

Just my $0.02

P.S.> CmdrTaco: It's not a Terabyte, they say the movie is 50 GB. If the movie is 2 hours long then the playback rate is on the order of 7MB/s - that video hardware is more impressive than the download time.

I hope they transfer digitally to DVD as well.

[RottenDeadite]

One of my problems with DVD movies (anime in particular) is analog-to-DVD mastering. When a studio has lost all their original prints, or only has final development film available, they loose a lot of quality when they transfer that film to DVD. It's like watching a film in a theater, which isn't the best image quality one could hope for.

One of the reasons why I liked the anime series "Lain" as much as I did was because it was mastered straight from studio digital to DVD, so the image was super crisp and beautifull.

Hopefully we'll be seeing more of this in animation and film.

***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***

Quality

[Nyarly]

Any projectionists in the audience?

I'm curious as to the projection quality of digital movies over traditional silver emulsions. While I'm sure that no lossy compression would be applied to a commercially projected film, what sort of projection technology are we talking about here. Hopefully nothing like the LCD presentation boxes we're using here at work. I can't imagine the image quality being anything near 35 or 70mm film stock.

The other question I have to consider is film processing. I know that Ronin used a lab process to get that wonderful slightly blue, dark and washed out look. How well can that really be duplicated digitally?

Guess this won't be moderated "Informative."

Ushers will eat latecomers.

Re:Quality

[anotherone]

It uses TI's Digital Light Processors. here's TI's press release: http://www.ti.com/dlp/resources/spotlight/


Don't criticise someone who is attempting to use free software for not using enough free software.

Re:Quality

[anotherone]

Here's some more stuff: http://www.ti.com/dlp/products/cinema/


Don't criticise someone who is attempting to use free software for not using enough free software.

Digital is the future.

[anlprb]

I was lucky enough to get to see the digital preview of SW:E1, and I must admit, it has been real hard going back to film. The quality of the picture was incredible. There was no flicker and absolutely NO crud on the picture. I was able to get into the projector room after the showing. Basically, he saw me standing around and looking longingly at the equipment when the door opened and an inportant person came out. Anyway, this was the showing in NJ at the Rt. 4 Odeon. From the information that I was given, it was possible TODAY, to stream the video over a dedicated satellite feed strait into the theater. The form of licensing that they were leaning towards was basically a subscription plan. They would allow X number of showings at X number of screens at X:XX o'clock. The projector itself was based on the TI chipset. The controlling system, which had a giant disk array, could control and stream data to multiple projectors, and hence multiple screens. This would allow theaters to invest in one controlling unit, and allow them to keep their screen number. All in all, it was a great preview, I still have the ticket stub, kind of faded now, but I know what it is. Anyway, like I said before, the next time I saw a movie on film, my eyes had adjusted to the high resolution of the digital format, and felt quite abused after coming out of the fuzzy movie. I cannot wait until this hit final production. They told me that the unit that E1 was previewed on was alpha hardware, and that it would take 18 months to hit full production. Looks like the future of movies is looking really good.

Thank God, in the future, we will not have to scream "FOCUS"

Re:Digital is the future.

[PantalonesVaqueros]

What about Maxivision48? Info on it is here. Looks technically superior to digital film in pretty much all aspects...

High Resolution of the digital format? Cute...

Dinosaur

[LoppEar]

First I ever heard or saw of Dinosaur was the first trailer (saw prior to Toy Story 2 :), and I was awe-struck.

The trailer was several minutes long, all just flying around. No voices at all through the entire thing, a roaring classical track as the only sound. The graphics were incredible, I just sat there stunned as it put up (silently) "Dinosaur" "May 2000".

Then I got home and started researching. What, voices? Some cheesy plot about a dinosaur saving lemmings? I haven't seen it yet, my interest has severely decreased - now the graphics are the only draw.

Luke

Re:Dinosaur

[Fishstick]

>What, voices? Some cheesy plot about a dinosaur saving lemmings?

I was dissapointed by this as well (seen the movie, but no spoilers here). If you don't have young kids, don't bother to go see this. The graphics are cool but the 'cheesy plot' was a let-down. My kids liked it, though. It wasn't bad at the level of a kid's movie, just a let-down from the expectations I had from seeing the initial trailer.

The trailer you mention was actually on a movie I bought also, and my jaw dropped as well (the one where the egg keeps dodging being eaten, stepped on, etc). When I saw a TV promo with the talking limurs and then the Disney channel behind-the-scenes thingy I was *very* dissapointed.

But they aren't streaming it...

[Fessig]

From what I read, they are transmitting the movie over the web, but then are storing it and showing it later. I think it would be more impressive if they streamed 50Gb to a theatre...

Benefits...

[SvnLyrBrto]

>Interesting. Is there really any benefit from
>transmitting this rather that shipping cell?
>Security? Or is it just a PR gimmic?

Well, yeah... a big one: Quality!

Now, I dunno about transmitting vs. FedExing a big honkin hard drive, but vs shipping *cell* (old style film to be viewed on a standard analog projector), the quality of the digital "print" will be much improved.

Now, I know the industry talking heads like roger ebert like to bash digital filming, distro, and projection. But they've got it all wrong. I've seen the difference WITH MY OWN EYES between an analog film print and a digital projection OF THE SAME MOVIE.

Yes, I was fortunate enough to live near one of the theaters that was showing Toy Story 2 digitally. I saw it on a standard film projection screen first, and saw the digital version a week or so later...

And lemme tell ya... cells (film) don't hold ANYTHING on digital! I'm talking PERFECT picture, PREFECT sound, PERFECT sync between the two, more vibrant colors, NO visual artifacts, NO JITTER!!!

Digital film prooved to be superior in every way.

Dinosaurs like ebert and co. need to get off their luddite high horses and get with the times. Digital film doesn't subtract from the "atmosphere of the theatre" or whatever it is that he holds so holy.

George Lucas gets it. Episode Two is supposed to be filmed, edited and presented 100% digitally!!! Just think, it'll NEVER be contaminated with analog! I can't wait.

john

Re:Benefits...

[phong3d]

Digital projection has benefits over standard 35mm film, but the format Ebert and Scorsese have a woody over is called MaxiVision - it's a new format of film projection that has a slightly wider aspect ratio and higher line count than standard film, and moves at 48 frames/second, smoothing out those jittery pans and horizontal dolly shots. Apparently, its picture quality is far better than digital (at this particular time).

The biggest problem with MaxiVision, as far as I can tell, is that anything digital is automatically *better* in most peoples eyes, and since this particular format is still celluloid, it's probably going the way of Betamax, which is unfortunate. I'm sure digital distribution will catch on, and the picture quality will improve exponentially, but right now, this is the leader in projected picture technology right now.

Information from the horse's mouth is here:
MaxiVision's website

Re:Benefits...

[Fishstick]

>Unlike Podgorney, I defeated the blancmange 6-1 6-3 6-0

obscure Python reference?

Re:Benefits...

[Golias]

I've seen the difference WITH MY OWN EYES between an analog film print and a digital projection OF THE SAME MOVIE.

Yes, I was fortunate enough to live near one of the theaters that was showing Toy Story 2 digitally. I saw it on a standard film projection screen first, and saw the digital version a week or so later...

So, what you are saying is that digital projection is a better format for showing digital cartoons.

Not a very compelling argument.

Resolution?

[Clockwork]

2 hours of footage (I guess that's an antiquated term now, eh?) weighing in at 50 GB, but does anybody know what the resolution per frame might be? Is it the same as 1080i high def.? (1920x1080)

Is there a standard for this yet? Maybe Star Wars II will be higher rez....

TS2 and DLP

[cirby]

Toy Story 2 was shown in Orlando at the Pleasure Island 24 cineplex in an all-digital theater. It was the first feature film that was digital from start (the computer) to finish (the screen display with a big DLP projector). It was also shown at some other places that had digital projection systems.

I saw TS2 in both formats, and the digital version was much sharper, had better color saturation, and had *no* defects.

Re:TS2 and DLP

[Golias]

I saw TS2 in both formats, and the digital version was much sharper, had better color saturation, and had *no* defects.

Of course, you are playing to the strength of digital projection when all you are showing is digitally-generated cartoons.

The notorious film critic (and technophile) Roger Ebert has been tracking this for some time. When it comes to photographic images on a massive screen, film still beats the pants off current digital offerings... and better film processes been pattented that will even leave emerging digital formats in the dust, using retrofits of current projectors instead of forcing theaters to sink huge bucks into state-of-the-art digital gear.

Re:TS2 and DLP

[raytracer]

The notorious film critic (and technophile) Roger Ebert has been tracking this for some time. When it comes to photographic images on a massive screen, film still beats the pants off current digital offerings... and better film processes been pattented that will even leave emerging digital formats in the dust, using retrofits of current projectors instead of forcing theaters to sink huge bucks into state-of-the-art digital gear.

Unfortunately, Roger Ebert is just wrong.

Don't get me wrong, I like Mr. Ebert and I can appreciate his love for the traditional medium of film. His views are just not in line with the realities.

First of all, digital projection looks gorgeous. You can argue about resolution not being high enough, you can quibble about artifacts, but when done properly (and at Pixar, we spent some time to get it done properly for our digital TS2 showings) it looks amazing. No pops, scratches, film registration. It is absolutely phenomenal.

Next, film is expensive. Prints are expensive, and wear out, and reproducing them results in generational loss.

Digital film projectors have basically no mechanical parts which need to be serviced (other than bulbs and fans). The technology that allows you to make them is only getting cheaper.

Prints get worse the more you use them. I saw the second showing of the Phantom Menace at a local theater. Scratches, dust, pops. TS2 was mineblowingly clean.

Lastly, it will soon be the case that the original material won't be film either, and that entire films will be shot, composited and delivered in a digital format. This will allow you to get the highest quality delivered to the consumer, and will be a good thing.

I have great memories of being in a flickering movie theater, watching Casablanca, munching popcorn, but the future for digital imagery looks pretty sweet. I can't wait.

Re:TS2 and DLP

[Golias]

I hope you are right, but in the mean-time, the hype of "pushing the envelope" could end up forcing a lot of small-town theaters out of business, if "digital only" becomes a reality before the hardware is cheap enough.

Nitpicking The Article (Call Me Anal)

[Omicron]

No big deal, but the movie is about 50GB as mentioned in the article, not a terabyte. Not too fast of a line either. Granted, it is pretty fast, but I have more bandwidth running into my office....you think they could come up with something a little faster w/ Cisco helping them out.

Star Wars I in digital

[crow]

I saw Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in a digital theater. They set up two theaters with digital projectors to demo the technology. Essentially, it's a lot like watching a DVD on a projection TV. The difference is that the projector has many times the resolution, and the player has many times the amount of data. If you looked back at the projector, you saw the three separate RGB lights.

So was it better than film? Not much. Jar Jar still sucked, but there were absolutely none of the glitches you see (or hear) with film. If you happen to be viewing a film with a new print, it's about the same, but if you're viewing a film that's been showing for a week, you'll notice a lot of wear on film.

Oh, and they had some guy come out and talk about the technology before the movie. I believe he said it was on an 800GB raid system. So if they're putting Titan AE on a 50GB disk, they've done a lot more compression. Either that, or some of the numbers are wrong.

Re:Star Wars I in digital

[utopia63]

there is no rgb lights behind the film in a regular projector. I use to be a manager at a movie theater and its anywhere from a 3000-5000 watt lightbulb that projects the film. The color comes from the film.

Re:Star Wars I in digital

[crow]

Right, with a normal projector. With a digital projector, there is no film, so the color is in the separate RGB.

A digital projector is essentially an extremely high-resolution projection TV. Didn't I say that?

size

[NachMan16]

It's 50 gigs not a terrabyte... RTFA mr. taco ... Well i guess in a few years this can probably fit on CD size media which would probably let the movie goer not go anywhere but his house... pretty neat IMO..

Lucas has been doing this...

[sbraab]

Lucas has been doing this for years to get content back an forth between Skywalker ranch (near San Fran) and his screening room in LA. As a matter of fact the run real time audio from the ranch across private lines and sync it with film in LA for screenings. Good to see that digital distribution is finally going more main stream though.

-Must be compressed..

[PopeAlien]

I'm working on a digital film right now.. It's low-rez -The frames are 1k images (roughly 2 megs a frame) this is far lower than standard film rez.. By my math:

2 megs a frame x 24 = 48 megs a second/2,880 megs a minute

- so unless this film is just over 17 minutes long, it must be compressed- I'm just wondering what kind of compression they are using, and what the hit to quality is like - Unless my math is way off..
-

Re:-Must be compressed..

[DrEldarion]

'Eh, they prolly just threw it into a Zip file ;)

-- Dr. Eldarion --

Star Wars vs. Toy Story...

[SvnLyrBrto]

>those who've personally seen the digital StarWars
>have reported that the artifacts become glaringly
> obvious when projected across a 50 foot screen.

I didn't get to see the digital version of TPM myself, so I can't speak for the quality of Lucas' work. But I *DID* get to see BOTH the film AND digital versions of Toy Story 2.

And the digital print of TS2 *WAS* superior in almost every conceivable way... and *NO* artifacts visible, even on a 50ft screen.

Perhaps all George Lucas needs to do is give Steve Jobs a call? I'm sure Steve would *love* to have Pixar give Lucasfilm a helping hand. Perhaps in exchange for another little Pixar / Star Wars / Apple / Quicktime cross-promotional deal?

john

Re:Star Wars vs. Toy Story...

[Golias]

Star Wars TPM: Actual footage blended with digital FX at photographic quality.

Toy Story 2: A cartoon that was originally intended to be produced for a strait-to-video release.

_Of course_ TS2 looked perfect in digital! It was a perfect reproduction of a digital cartoon.

In TPM, the grass on the battlefield had to look like grass, not cartoon grass, real grass. You noticed the digital artifacts because you were actually looking at what was supposed to be an image of something. When watching the Toy Story movies, you _know_ you are watching computer animation, so your expectations are lower. Sheesh!

more like 63 gigs.

[Cryptacool]

they call it 63 gb in the article but if you do the math its more like 63 (5.6*800*60*60*4)/(1024) also i find it interesting that they they fell the need to convey the size as the number of mp3s (20,000) it would equal. interesting becuase it shows that the average user knows more about downloading mp3s than basic sizes in computer files.

Not Across The Internet

[GeekLife.com]

It's not going across the Internet, just across "a typical fiber-optic network."

According to the C|Net News.com article:
"Qwest will use a private connection to send the file, alleviating the possibility that hackers could disrupt the transfer of the movie."
-----

Re:Not Across The Internet

[hal200]

Sigh...Qwest can't stop a true, dedicated hacker (defined in the classic, non-media frezy, clever person type way)...a TRUE hacker would find the line, cut it just before the transmit, attach his own gear and stream down the latest release of "Debbie does Dallas" to the expectant viewers...Now, THAT would be some hack! Just think of the wicked publicity! Of course, I'm not condoning willfull destruction of Qwest property, but damn would I laugh my ass off...

Not the first, I saw TPM digitally

[CharBoy]

These aren't all firsts. I saw The Phantom Menace at the AMC Burbank 14 on June 19, 1999 projected digitally. It was a special presentation (I still have the badge with next strap I got for it) and used the Texas Instruments DLP Cinema technology.

Here's an excerpt from the back of the badge:
"Welcome to the future of Cinema
Texas Instruments is proud to present the first all digital showing of Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace(tm). Digital projetion replaces film projection for the first time ever in movie theatres equipped with DLP Cinema(tm) technology."

After the presentation, I got to look at an example of the heart of the projector, and it was about the size of a large CPU with thousands of small mirrored surfaces on it.

The only thing this Titan AE presentation might be the first of is Internet delivery of the source, but the rest of it has been done before.

Not the first all-digital presentation

[electronghost]

It wasn't transmitted over the net, but I saw Toy Story 2 at the Leicester Square Odeon, London and that was a digital projector. They made a big thing then about how that particular showing had never touched film...

as bad as us, WRT to spellcheck

[Savage Henry Matisse]

from the article:

The movie, set a thousand years in the future, features the voices of Matt Demon and Drew Barrymore as a pair of teenagers on a quest to save mankind after Earth has been destroyed by alien attack.

Matt Demon? Paging Dr. Freud!

Re:as bad as us, WRT to spellcheck

[CComp]

And the sad thing is, this article will likely be banned in Australia because of that typoo. =)

Can't have that evil satanic stuff, nope nope nope!

Re:Not the first... - corrections

[Anonymous Coward]

First, film projection has a 48Hz or 72Hz flicker rate, not 24Hz, depending on whether the theatre owner installed two-bladed or three-bladed shutters on his projectors.

Second, Dinosaur (and, next, Fantasia 2000) is showing in DLP in several theatres, including the GCC Framingham 14 in MA (screen 9, the largest house). I saw it in DLP and saw the Star Wars screenings in DLP last summer in Secaucus, NJ. I was significantly less impressed with Dino than SW--Dino had way too much video-style edge-enhancement applied to the image, which made the picture "look" sharper than it otherwise would, despite the fact that it made the picture look "wrong" and the resolution of the DLP matrix is substantially lower than 35mm film.

And who is going to pay for all of this equipment? Many theatres are still using Simplex and Century 35mm projectors that were built 40 years ago and still work beautifully when used with new lenses and adequately-sized lamphouses. Why should they go out and spend $100-400k (depending on whom you talk to) for a new machine that doesn't let them do anything more than they are doing right now for a small fraction of the cost?

I do believe that DLP (or some similar technology is the future of film exhibiton, but I'm quite confident that it's "not there yet" in terms of image quality or cost effectiveness.

Looks sucky, anyway

[Spax]

I don't intent to troll, but I haven't been impressed by the stillframes anyway, so they might as well MPG the thing and cut the filesize down to 1.2 GB.

Proof of Concept

[NulDevice]

From the industry buzz that's been going around, digital delivery is the Next Big Thing in film. What this hyped stunt is, basically, proof that it's fairly feasible to do. Now, I'm sure this isn't entirely practical at this point (how many theatres do you know hooked up to thw Qwest fiber backbone?) and 4 hours per film x 10 screens...well, you'll chew up a week downloading friday's new releases.

But the possibilities of an all-digital film...digitally filmed, digitally edited, digitally distributed...no bad film stock problems, no torn sprocket holes, FX compositing and color correction all without slow film-digital-film transfers. And then the trasnfer to DVD...oh baby.

The cost of producing and distributing a movie may actually go down. Although thanks to the bloated film industry, ticket prices will still go up just to increase profit margin that much more. Damn.

----

Are they stupid? I could make a copy!

[startled]

I w1ll h4x0r their feed and n4pst4r this right away!!!!!!!! Search for t1t4n 43 31337 when this comes out, l4m3rz!!!!!!! But only download it if you have a ph4t gigahertz pr0n pipe and 500 megabyte p3ntium like I do, and not if you use A01!!!!!!!

First time over net, maybe. Not first pure digital

[Rasvar]

Disney's Tarzan and Dinosoaurs both were available in pure digital format without being transfered to film first. Tarzan was last year and Dinosaurs came out last month, so Titan AE isn't even the first one to be pure digital this year.

I have seen both in the digital formats. It is impressive.

Info on digital projection techniques

[Sharkey [BAMF]]

First off, the first actual live presentation (non trade show, non test environment) of a digital projection in a theatre was on June 18, 1999, Star Wars Episode 1. When I saw that show, (which wasnt that great, too pixelized at times) we spoke with the DLP projection guy to see how much info we could squeeze out of him. He said that the movie itself was around 500 Gigs, and was stretched across 15 or so hard drives. He went on about it's true XGA resolution, millions of mirrors, and whatnot. If you're really interested you can find all of the white papers here:
http://www.ti.com/dlp/ resources/whitepapers/tech/index.shtml

and all of the press releases here:
http://www.ti.com/dlp/ Sharkey
www.badassmofo.com

Typo?

[questionlp]

Is it me or is the article mis-spell Matt Damon's name (they spelled it Matt Demon)?

I know Yahoo uses FreeBSD, but if they wanted to be FreeBSD correct, it should have been Matt Daemon ;)

Animation, Titan A.E., and Usability

[webword]

We recently completed an interview with Mayo Tirado, an animation guru who worked at Fox Animation Studios in Phoenix on Titan A.E. We asked him questions such as:

* Tell us about your work on the upcoming movie Titan A.E.

* What tools did you use?

* How important are the "small things" in a movie such as Titan A.E., such as texture and lighting?

You can read the interview here:
>> http://webword.com/interviews/tirado.html

John S. Rhodes
WebWord.com (Usability Vortal)

Re:Your .sig

[Coz]

You're actually the first being in this forum to comment on that particular tag line. Congrats!

In RL, I'm a carnivore - just can't stand most vegetation. However, through years of study and research, I have come to one inescapable conclusion - God put cows on Earth to make grass fit for humans to eat. Deer, too. And sheep - with the added bonus of wool, too....

wonders how many veggie-Nazis are going to take these remarks at face value and start flaming...

% that will see it digitally? Where can we go?

[cbuskirk]

There are still very few theatres that even have digital projectors. This movie will probably open up to something like 2500 - 3000 screens. There are maybe a hundred or so digital screens at most. I would love to see it in digital, and living in the Los Angeles Metro I will have the opportunity if I want to, but most of us are still going to be stuck with film. The only relevant liks I can find is Qualcomm's digital cinema site. Does anyone know a site that lists digital theatres?

Titan Not Mpeg...

[changa]

The format for the compression wasn't mpeg here is the company that did the compresion and playback: http://www.quvis.com/press_releases/pr_supercomm.h tml

Some benefits...

[Colin Smith]

Well, no more projectionists required (Need a sysadmin instead :-))

Easy worldwide simultaneous release. Very fast time to market.

Now you're talking

[Mawbid]

I've been longing for this ever since the last local film festival, where they showed some of Kubrik's films along with some new non-mainstream films. I got the chance to see Full Metal Jacket in a theatre. Even though it was small screen by theatre standards, the experience was so much better than I'd get at home. The difference is espacially great with this film because of the outrageous aspect ratio. Then there's the sound system and the popcorn of course. But above and beyond the regular advantages that movie theatres provide, there was something new: all the people there were Kubrik fans too. Everybody knew what they were getting and were tuned into the experience. There were no irreverent teenagers talking too loudly and flinging popcorn at their buddies five rows down. The mood was good. I'd love to be able to get this kind of thing going on a regular basis.

Movie theatres could do much better than just taking votes on what to show and when. If they play their cards right, they can build communities where fans of different kinds of films will talk about the films they like and spark each other's interest in more films they haven't seen yet. They can create a new market.
--

Re:[OT] Digital projectors. Why so expensive?

[riot158]

um, i don't think you've got your melon completely wrapped around the 'light bulb' thing- it isn't a 60 watt Sylvania, for chrissakes...

The difference is...

[Stalemate]

you don't own the movie.


--

Buena Vista (Disney) is doing that for some time

[MKalus]

Well, not over the Internet, but it seems that in North America they distribute all of there movies wherever possible via HD DVD to the Theaters.

The Paramount here in Toronto has two DLP Projectors and they told me it takes them roughly 12 hours to download the DVDs onto the RAID.

The Projectors are impressive (I got a tour of the facility), now looking at my small DLP at home it feels so "wrong" ;)

Mission to Mars was one of the movies they showed digitally, but I must say I didn't notice any differences.

What's the big deal?

[gonzoknife]

Aside from the Digital projection stuff, I fail to see the importance of this. It is simple a large data transfer over a VPN. The transfer was done over ds3's (45Mb). Any decent sized router made in 2000 should handle a ds3 in it's sleep. It takes more power to handle a 100Mb Ethernet connection. Why didn't they use OC-3c (155Mb) or higher? I'm sure Qwest could find the fiber. Maybe the Cisco gear can't handle it...

Cisco and Qwest are acting like this is a cutting edge example. Cutting edge would be a real-time transfer of an uncompressed movie. Curently the only method to do that is an ATM OC-48c (2.5Gb). The real-time transfer would be more impressive because it requires QOS guarantees on bandwidth and delay. There is no way to provide those guarantees with IP, especially over the Internet. With a file transfer there are no bandwidth or delay requirements. Hell, you can even re-transmit if necessary. Re-transmissions during a live stream are not pretty.

This is another case of Cisco doing a very normal activity (transfering data) and their marketing department making it sound like they just cured cancer. It reminds me of another company whose initials are M$...

Re:What's the big deal?

[Braveheart]

> Why didn't they use OC-3c (155Mb) or higher? I'm sure Qwest could find the fiber. Maybe the Cisco gear can't handle it...

Why not indeed? Cisco routers have OC-3 interfaces
(unless I'm very, very much mistaken).

> Curently the only method to do that is an ATM OC-48c (2.5Gb). The real-time transfer would be more impressive
> because it requires QOS guarantees on bandwidth and delay. There is no way to provide those guarantees with IP, especially over the Internet

Yes! You said the magic word - ATM.
You can get the bandwidth and delay guarantees using an ATM link - AND have the IP traffic flowing on the same link too.

Jeezzz... I'm spitting tacks here. IP isn't appropriate for everything. IMHO, its just that Cisco, being a router vendor, have a vested interest in squashing all the good things that an ATM link can do.

John Hearns

Harddisk?

[Pooh22]

Isn't it a lot cheaper to put the movie on a harddisk and ship it using snail-mail?
Or do they have such a tight JIT schedule?

Re:Your .sig (OT)

[Wah]

my favorite bumper sticker touches on this issue....

"My ancestors didn't fight and claw their way to the top of the food chain so I could eat vegetables."

--

Re:Not the first... - corrections

[Golias]

A lot of times when people think they are seeing "flicker", what they are actually seeing is the result of the frames not lining up correctly, or snapping back into place while being projected. I seem to remember reading about a firm in California that found a way to modify existing projectors to avoid this, making images easier on the eyes, and edges much more well-defined.

Anyone happen to remember the name of this design?

The thing with digital tho...

[SvnLyrBrto]

>The biggest problem with MaxiVision, as far as I
>can tell, is that anything digital is
>automatically *better* in most peoples eyes,

Well, I can't speak as to the quality of maxivision, having never seen it myself. What I *CAN* say for certian is that the digital projections we have NOW are far superior to analog celluloid NOW.

The problem with Maxivision, though, is dreadfully sluggish development. Maxivision is a relatively recent innovation in the analog film industry. But just HOW LONG has celluloid stagnated at the same old 35mm, 24fps, jittery, easily out of focus, rapidly detiorating film stock, tech level??? Seventy YEARS? LONGER?

Meanwhile digital projection can be expected to advance according to some variant of Moore's Law (ie, improvement will be exponential, but the interval might not necessarily be 18 months).

So assume that Maxivision is twice as good as digital NOW (and therefore at least four times as good as standard celluloid NOW). Epidode 2 is due in summer 2002 IIRC. By then, Moore's law will have gone through one and a half iterations. The digital print will, by that time be only marginally better than a Maxivision print.

So, to make the math easier, lets assume that Maxivision actually offers a little better than 2x digital NOW, so that digital will just have caught up by Episode 2. Episode 3 is due in 2005. That's time enough for TWO FULL ITERATIONS of Moore's Law. That makes a digital projection of Episode 3 FOUR TIMES BETTER than the equivelent Maxivision print!

Now, I KNOW that Moore's law doesn't necessarily correspond directly to a doubling of actual *performance*. And video processing and decoding might not keep the same 18 month interval of microprocessors. But the point still stands. Digital image technology advances on a (very steep) exponential curve, while analog film technology has advanced only linearly (and with a VERY SHALLOW slope as well).

For whatever advantages Maxivision might have NOW, it just can't keep up.

john

The problem with movie trailer and soundtracks

[Averye0]

There is a very good reason why the music in the trailer and the actual movie soundtrack are seldom the same. You see, the last thing to be put into a movie (excepting musical-type movies, i.e. any recent Disney release) is the soundtrack. Couple that with the fact the trailers are released 6 months or more before the movie is released, and you will see that often the actual movie soundtrack isn't even finished when the trailer goes out! This leaves movie studios little option but to plunk in some pre-produced music. Usually they go with well known classical music (Orff's Carmina Burana seems to be a favorite), or else use the soundtrack from a previously released music. Personally, I find it amusing to see a preview for next summer's blockbuster-hopeful with the music from last summer's big hit.

This is why we need to ban DeCSS!!

[psxndc]

To stop people from pirating movies like this! 50 Gig will fit on approximately 10 writeable DVDs which we all know your average hacker has lying around! Ban DeCSS now before its too late!!! For only several thousand for a DVD writer and $50 a writeable DVD ( x 10), don't you people see the money that the movie industry could lose over this?? Why pay $25 for it on sanctioned DVD when they can copy it for a "small" price?!

-psxndc

No number can convey the amount of stupidity I see in the world around me

Re:This is why we need to ban DeCSS!!

[psxndc]

ummm... duh. This was a joke.

-psxndc
I have no random sig generator

They could've done it faster...

[Lurking Grue]

If they used DeCSS. You know, that program that makes copying movies easy!

Aarrgghh!! I hope that trial judges everywhere are paying attention to what exactly had to be done to move an 80 minute movie from one location to another across data lines. Sure, every DeCSS user has fancy Cisco equipment at home, and point-to-point fiber links as well.

(Sorry, I'm still miffed about the ridiculous MPAA claims.)

spending money

[RoLlEr_CoAsTeR]

Why should they go out and spend $100-400k (depending on whom you talk to) for a new machine that doesn't let them do anything more than they are doing right now for a small fraction of the cost?

They shouldn't (of course, I realize that's what you were hinting at, since your question was rhetorical).
I think this is when it gets to the point of being ridiculous - that bigger isn't always better. Of course, if you were building a new theatre, had the money, and the urge, I'd say go ahead and buy all the digital movie projection equipment you wanted to. However, I don't see why theaters in existence should bother. I don't notice problems with movies in theatres now, except for when you can sometimes see where someone needs to reposition the film (you know, when the bottom half of the movie is above the top half).

Oh well, to each his own.. that's just my $0.03 worth.

What is it with you? (offtopic)

[SvnLyrBrto]

That's twice now in the same topic where you bash Toy Story 2 and flame people for being impressed by it.

What's the story? Do you have REASONS for hating Toy Story 2 so intensely? Or are you just another one of those "I hate Apple/everything Steve Jobs has ever done sucks" types?

john

Re:What is it with you? (offtopic)

[Golias]

I love Apple. My G3 probably sees more use than all my other systems combines (especially now that I have a Linux dual boot on it). I also really enjoyed the Toy Story movie.

I'm just baffled why people think that a digital cartoon is a good litmus of whether digital film projection can replace film.

Show me something along the lines of "Lawrence of Arabia" on a digital prjector, and we will have something to discuss. Until then, all you are saying is that computers are good at rendering computer-generated images. Do you follow what I'm trying to get across here?

Re:What is it with you? (offtopic)

[Tassach]

As I see it, it has nothing to do with the particular movie involved - it's the TECHNOLOGY. Saying that a digital cartoon looks better on a digital projector is fine, however that in and of itself is not a valid basis for comparison. A statistical universe of 1 is insufficent. You need to see several different movies, of different cinematic types, in order to make an accurate, critical assessment.

Perhaps we could devise a test suite of ~5 films (or clips) that would really test the capibilities of any given playback medium. TS2 plays to the strengts of digital projection, to be fair you'd have to include somthing that shows it's weaknesses, as well as clips that show the strengths & weaknesses of film
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

Re:You halfwit

[carlos_benj]

"Ok, for the last time, moron:"

Really? Promise? You are correct though. I am so dumb. Should have checked the article again instead of just using the 300,000 number and assuming one download per account since the article was very clear it was downloads they were monitoring:

"It's very very simple. One of the -- when we monitored Napster for 48 hours three weekends ago, we came up with the 1.4 million downloads of Metallica music, there was one, one downloading -- one! of an unsigned artist the whole time."

I am clearly no match for your dizzying intellect.

carlos

Now for the next trick...

[Cookie Monster]

Getting theaters to stop showing that damn THX robot.
I have stopped going to the local THX theater
beacuase of dreading seeing that damn thing.
Unfornatly they have they comfy seats :(

Problems with digital projection...

[nedron]

Has anybody here actually seen a digital theatrical presentation. Underwhelming is putting it nicely. The current state of the art would be fine for most home theatres (we're talking home theatres in the Konka-vision realm, not Home Theatres in the Runco realm.)

Two siginificant problems plague theatrical digital projection:

• The light valves used in the most common projector are not dense enough. When the image is decompressed (even 1.85:1 digital shows must pass through an anamorphic lens assembly) the vertical spacing of the pixel elements becomes exagerated and very visible at all but the smallest screen sizes.
• The projector that will most likely be fielded (using TI's DLP projection technology) uses a color wheel in front of the light valve panel. Because of this, you see a significant amount of color smearing on anything the involves horizontal movement.

The unfortunate thing is that the US is the land of the lowest common denominator and this technology will roll before it's ready.

Thankfully, the startup cost is monstrous and this will prevent a wholesale move to digital projection.

indeed.

[MenTaLguY]

We don't have Free Software (in either sense of the word) because people decided to "liberate" copies of the commercial stuff.

We have Free Software because ordinary software users (who also happened to be coders) like Linus and Alan and RMS and ESR and the wonderful BSD folks (even Theo) and Larry and Tom and Rusty and many others put their code where their mouth was.

That's really the only way Free Media will succeed, too.

Media "by the audience, for the audience and of the audience" will only succeed if the audience makes its own art. Napster-style appropriation gets us nowhere.

The one thing that we _will_ have to overcome is the idea that artists must either be paid for their hour of work continuously for the rest of their natural lives[1] as the resulting work is used, or not paid for it at all.

Before I get shouted down, I will say that I speak as a visual artist, coder, musician, and writer.

There is a middle ground.

It is becoming increasingly feasible for us to be paid for the work we do itself, like any other profession, rather than having to stand as perpetual toll collectors to the fruits of our labor.

We're not there yet, but self-publication things like the (ill-named, IMO) "Street Performer's Protocol"[2], group comissions, certain types of subscription arrangements, and other systems that do not trample on the freedoms of the audience are becoming increasingly feasible.

The requisite payment/micropayment and audience-gathering systems are are beginning to fall into place.

We ought not to treat the audience like the enemy, and I think it is possible that we may not have to anymore.

I, for one, plan on putting my art where my mouth is.

---

[1] Copyrights on works published today run 96 years for publications by corporations or those published under a pseudonym, or 120 years for individuals otherwise. If the legislative decisions of the last four decades are any indicator, they will be retroactively extended even further.

[2] http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_6/kelsey/i ndex.html - I highly recommend reading at least the first part of this essay; it addresses the very real implications of the current "malicious until proven innocent" approach that we have been obligated to take with copyright protection.

Re:800GB v 50GB

[crow]

Yeah, I was thinking that animation might compress much better than live action, though I agree that a 10:1 compression isn't likely. Of course, you should also consider that SW:TPM was 133 minutes, plus trailers (which were also digital), while most animated movies are shorter (90 to 100 minutes).

It was almost a year ago when I saw it, and I didn't take notes on the presentation, but I think he said that either the audio or the video wasn't compressed, but the other was. That could make it all make sense.

Also, think about it in terms of DVD. DVD uses, what 2G/hour for 520 lines of resolution? So if we're looking at 30G/hour, that's 15 times the resolution (actually a little more, as the audio doesn't need to scale up). Since we're dealing with 2D, that's about 2080 lines of resolution.

I would think they would need better than that; even today, most theater screens are more than 4 times as tall as my TV screen. Of course, that may not be true by the time digital becomes wide-spread. :( [I wish there were a requirement that theaters advertise their sound system and screen size.]

But can i see it?

[aenomie]

So does anybody know if this will be making the same rounds that films like Toy Story 2 and Dinosaur did (i.e. the theaters equiped with the TI DLP systems?) I'd love to see this on a digital projector at the Harkin's here in Phoenix...

uh, because they can't?

[MenTaLguY]

The area for the CSS keys is already burned out on any DVD-R blanks you could buy on the open market, meaning the resulting discs would not play on most (all?) DVD players.

A terabyte? Come on, figure it out...

[Myrrh]

A terabyte is actually a really good estimate. Did you do that in your head?

I figured it:

Average modem speed is 56kbps (well, actually, I get 50,667 max, but for our purposes we'll say 56,000 bps).

800 x 56000 = 44,800,000 bps =~ 45Mbps (roughly the speed of a T-3, completely maxed-out, which would be difficult to do if more than one hop were involved).

4 hours = (60 sec x 60 minutes x 4) = 14,400 seconds. 14,400 seconds x 44,800,000 = 6,451,200,000,000 bits, i.e. 6.451 terabits.

To get the number of megabytes, we divide by 8: 6,451,200,000,000 / 8 = 806,400,000,000 bytes, which is 806.4 gigabytes, which is 0.8064 terabytes.

I'm impressed...

Napster.

[Tingler]

Would someone please e-mail & let me know just as soon as this thing hits Napster?
Thanks.

Re:Loaded 747 data rate

[DanielRavenNest]

Assume 5 DVDs per pound. 747 cargo capacity is
200,000 lb. Therefore you can carry 1 million
DVDs coast-to-coast. Flight time is 4 hours.
That's 69.4 DVDs per second = 300 Gigabytes/sec.

How does that compare to the Internet's backbone
rate?

Daniel

Controversy

[Animats]

The industry is divided over this. Theater owners don't want to buy the equipment. One startup proposes to put in all the equipment and fibre at no charge to theaters, then collect a fee for each showing. Theater owners are terrified of being under the thumb of that distributor.

Arguments continue over encryption, billing, standards, resolution, etc. A big question is whether the movie industry wants to go higher than HDTV 1080p x 24fps. (Some of the stuff shown so far isn't even 1080i). Nobody is happy about compressing video for theatrical presentation. There's also the worry that in a few years, after all the theater gear is installed, the technology will be obsolete.

Anyway, Dinosaur is showing in digital projection using the TI moving mirror array projectors at a few major theaters. It looks good compared to 35mm 24FPS. But IMAX is far better.

filesize

[delmoi]

Um, the movie, is about 2.417terrabytes uncompressesed, if you go by the bandwidth/download time posted on the fron't page. You'd need a lot of 50gb hard drives in jacket pockets to pull that off. 49, infact, and then it would kinda be a pain to hook them all up in the theater as well.

We arn't talking about a DVD file here. This a moive, and I'm guessing losslessly compressed as well

rm. ug

[delmoi]

Yeh, but you don't need to install realmedia's crappy-ass player that spawns all over your hard drive, and probably reports you're activitys to real...

Re:rm. ug

[lunatik17]

I doubt Windows Media Player is any better. It doesn't have to spawn--it's everywhere to start :)

Of course, I go with Mpeg if I have the choice--but you can't beat rm's for their size/quality ratio.

Here's my DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?

No, it's not a Terrabyte

[daitengu]

It's only 50 gigabytes (ONLY!) .. which roughly translates to: 9.3MB per second .. I wonder if perhaps they are going to .tgz the movie to transfer it?
DaiTengu
--------
Damage Inc. BBS

Re:You halfwit

[delmoi]

Yeh, so now you're taking technical advice from Lars? A guy who says he's only used the net once?

And anyway, even if they could monitor downloads (whitch I doubt), they banned people who were serving mp3's not downloading them. I'm certan that the quote represents a missunderstanding on Lars's part, a person who probably only leanred the diffrence between uploading and downloading about a month ago.

Corporate Unmentionables

[GoRK]

I'd be willing to bet my firstborn that they will also truck a copy of the movie over there on HDD's just in case the download craps.

~GoRK

Re:Loaded 747 data rate

[ucblockhead]

You're initial assumption is bad. A DVD weighs about 1/2 an ounce, or 32 to the pound. That gives 1.67 Terabytes/sec.

noo!!!!

[ronaldyang]

It's disappointing to see so many people excited about the advent of digital projection in movie theaters without examining both sides. It reminds me of the debate about marijuana, where the proponents go totally overboard, wildly advocating unfounded benefits and telling stories about Thomas Jefferson, while their opponents don't do much better. Digital projection is fine for home use, since it's mostly affordable, lightweight, and puts up a decent picture. But if you were familiar with the home theater enthusiast's domain, you'd know that their holy grail is to find a "film-like" image. Even Roger Ebert's best endorsement of a projector was for one CRT based ("looked like film"). More interesting is the idea of running film at something more like 40fps. Roger Ebert saw this and was floored by the improvement over traditional 24fps film. One of the great benefits of this approach is that retrofitting existing projectors is easily affordable; I'm thinking around $5000. Also, it's easy to retrofit existing cameras. I don't know anything about business or money, but $100,000 for a single new digital projection system just doesn't sound right.

download ~@ 28Mbits/sec

[ddstreet]

...it's getting downloaded first: 800x faster then a modem, 4 hour download time, so that's what, a terabyte?

No, they said it was 50 Gbytes. 50 Gbytes * 8 bits/byte = 400 Gbits
400 Gbits / 4 hr = 100 Gbits/hr
100 Gbits/hr / 3600 secs/hr = 1/36 Gbits/sec
1/36 Gbits/sec ~= 28Mbits/sec

Hmm...somewhere between a T1 and a T3...

Re:You halfwit

[carlos_benj]

"Yeh, so now you're taking technical advice from Lars? A guy who says he's only used the net once?"

Nah. I'm sure he got the numbers from someone else and I'm equally sure that he didn't monitor anything, much less for 48 hours. My guess is that the numbers came from the company that did the monitoring. Don't know much about them but the fact that they said they could monitor the service caused a bit of a stir here.

The fact that they used the term 'monitor' in the interview and other articles certainly implies that they were doing something other than checking to see who had what available. It's possible they monitored for new submissions rather than downloads and the difference was lost on the self-described 'smart' drummer.

I've never played with Napster, but I'm guessing from what I've read that mere submission != transfer of a file and until the file is distributed 'intent to distribute' copyrighted material can't be established.

As far as chasing the ones serving the files, they were the ones distributing the material.

Shoot, I was just trying to be funny, not write O'Reilly's "Napster in a Nutshell"! Sheesh.

carlos

Re:Wave of the future... variety or censorship?

[plastik360]

Codefool said:
Can you imagine a film with an offensive scene being instantly edited and redistributed for the next day's showings?
There are several ways to receive this comment. The first, defensive, scary reflexive response is the Big Brother is watching you, "how will we ever know if we're watching true blue version", conspiracy theorist's, "dogs and cats living together," reaction. For me this is always the first response I have to a comment like this and oftentimes I can get caught up in the conspiracy theory hype.

But after the idea sets in, and one has taken the time to explore the possibilities of such a technology, a lot of neat scenarios come to mind.

Can you imagine a world where people who can't handle graphic violence in cinema (the type of people who would rather watch a film after it has been edited for network television) could watch a lighter, fluffier version of a film sans violence? There could be whole theaters dedicated to showing light versions of films.

Also, wouldn't it also be a lot easier to distribute "Director's Cut" versions of films? Not only would the public have a lot more variety (imagine going to the ticket booth and being offered tickets for the short, medium or long version of a film) but it could make the editing process easier too. The producers would have an easier time convincing the director that this or that scene has to be cut, but only for the matinee version.

I obviously have no real-life knowledge of the film industry, does anybody in the movie business have opinions on the subject?

i'm afraid it does suck

[boris.gordon]

I saw a preview session of Titan AE last week and although it does look amazing as expected from the teasers the story and music is in the realms of Pokomon - 'crap for kids' quality. Still, worth seeing for the animation which is stunning.

Re:[OT] Digital projectors. Why so expensive?

[FiNaLe]

Most normal projectors run less than $4,000. $4,000 being a nice video projector. I imagine those $2500-$5000 figures are missing a decimal point or two? otherwise they'd be reasonably priced...

And wasn't Phantom Menace projected digitally for their daily review and some premieres?

Assuming 56k....

[CoolAss]

Assuming it's 800x faster than a 56k modem, the movie would be about 76.9 Gigabytes.

((56/8)*800)*14400

Which would be

56Kb --> 7KB
(7KB * 800 times faster) * 14400 seconds in 4 hours.

That's assume ghetto transfer rates on a modem... hehe.

That's contact v's non-contact (not D v's A)

[Kris_J]

The other problem being, of course, that a digital signal can be corrected when it degrades while an analog signal cannot. That's most of what "CD quality" really means. With a phonograph, the needle slowly destroys the record.

You're talking about non-contact media v's contact media, not digital v's analog. That's the main reason that I believe VHS tapes suck. It's not that they're analog, it's that the wear out. DVDs resolve that problem and go digital. It's not joined at the hip. Laserdiscs are analog and non-contact. I've seen new tapes made from old laserdiscs and the quality is surperb, while an original tape of the same vintage is unwatchable.

Security of 3DES...

[rjh]

I am an InfoSec consultant IRL; and in the course of my job, I've occasionally stumbled across some interesting tidbits (which credit-card companies use repeated-XOR encryption, which HMOs keep medical information secure with DES, etc). I have heard reports, but have not been able to verify their accuracy, that at one time Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces were using 3DES (with three independent keys) to secure their nuclear-launch codes.

If true, that suggests a very high degree of confidence in 3DES.

I've got to say that 3DES isn't my favorite algorithm, but properly implemented, it's an extremely secure algorithm. Unfortunately, many software DES implementations manage to screw up the DES spec (probably, I think, due to the infernal complexity of DES).

Re:You goddamn halfwit

[Platypii]

Actually you're wrong -- they only monitored downloads of the files... try some research before flaming!

The Digital Advantage

[DragonHawk]

There's a lot of discussion over whether digital or analog is the better medium to use. I want to point out a few things most people are missing.

It is true that, in theory and all other things being equal, analog gives you better reproduction. Digital (by definition) requires you to sample a signal periodically. Changes occur in discrete steps. Analog gives you smooth transitions, as it isn't limited to a particular rate of sampling.

However, digital has other advantages that, IMNSHO, outweigh the advantages of analog in practical use.

First, digital can be reproduced, stored and retransmitted, without limit, without experiencing any signal degradation. Digital signals can also be encoded with redundant data for error correction. Digital media is also generally more resistant to physical degradation from repeated use then analog media (although that is more by accident then through conscious design).

The end result is that while, in theory, an analog signal offers better reproduction, a digital signal will often have better quality, because analog media tends to get worn out quicker and more easily then digital. This is why I like CD over vinyl records; CDs don't pop and hiss like my records used to. This is why I like DVD over VHS; DVDs do not degrade with multiple viewings.

With proper care, you can generally prevent analog systems from degrading in this manner, but neither I, nor your average movie theater teenage projector jocky, treat media that well.

One other thing: The analog purists argue that digital is inferior because digital is sampled. It is interesting to note that motion video of any type is already sampled: What we perceive as motion is really a series of still frames. If a sampled signal is automatically disqualified, then all motion video is disqualified.

Stupid Hollywood

[WorldMaker]

Why not use DVD for digital moving of films... They've paid what can only be millions of dollars to have a high amount of control in DVD, but now they are saying, hey, instead of using this nice cheap technology we've developed, we're just going to go ahead and waste some Internet time and bandwith. If I were a studio technologist right now, I would be laughing my donkey off.

WorldMaker