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Will Digital Cinema Wipe-Out Today's Movie Theaters?
Phantoman asks: "I work for the Campus Cinema at University of California Davis and we are looking into getting a Christie or Barco DLP system for Digital Cinema projection. Now if this is the wave of the future I ask you all to compare 35mm to Digital. The price tag on a digital setup is roughly $140,000. Without content. 35mm isn't all that cheap, but if my old Century 35mm projectors break I can get replacement parts for usually less than $100-300. If something goes wrong with the DMD (digital micromirror device) I have a feeling those digital projector parts are going to cost me big. Are the movie theater chains going to get stuck with big costs down the road because Hollywood producers want to save money and have tighter control over distribution? As if they didn't a monopoly already: it costs us between $500-1000 (or half of our profits, whichever is more) for each night we show a movie!" At those prices it doesn't sound like digital theaters will overtake 35mm theaters anytime soon, but what would happen if Hollywood suddenly got the "bright" idea to limit 35mm reel distribution within the next few years?
"Digital is all well and good for the production end, but is anyone going to be able to foot the cost for digital on the presentation end or are we going to end up a straight-to-video world? Also, If anyone wants to help donate to a nonprofit for our digital system, email me. We were the second school to have 35mm, I would like to be the first to have digital."
I might be the odd one out, but I actually prefer watching movies on 35mm. Maybe it's similar to some peoples' preference to recordings on vinyl as opposed to tape or CD. There's just something about digital that seems, well, off. I don't know if it's something like an almost imperceptible but consistent digital artifact in the encoding that my subconcious is picking up on or what. Maybe my mind just prefers imperfections.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
i'm waiting till they hide a subliminal watermark in the digial version (maybe able to be done with 35mm .. that will only be seen when a movie is cammed..
.. next time someone watches a camed movie it says busted right across the middle of the screen in big letters..
ie human eye can't see it but when a camcorder records it and plays it back it covers the screen.. just imagine
the question is can they pull that off??
The big advatage of Digital is being freed from having only a set number of titles you can run. Digitial takes up no space, doesn't wear out (media, not projectors) and you can run any title at any time. Quality isn't the big reason, flexibility is.
-E2
The evil monkey commands you to dance.
I've seen two movies with digital projectors. One was in Paramus, NJ several years ago, and the picture was absolutely perfect. The other was in Framingham, MA last month, and the picture was poor. You could see the pixels in some scenes, and it was obvious in the closing credits. The image just didn't feel as sharp as I would have expected.
Apparently the newer and cheaper digital projectors use a resolution slightly lower than that of HDTV (I'm sure someone will post the resolution). That's just not good enough.
So stick with film until the digital resolution is good enough that you won't have people complaining. I, for one, will not be going to a digital theater again anytime soon.
Here's to hoping that digital cinema will be put on hold until it's better, and that Lucas will never be allowed to write love scenes again.
But there was a company that was souping up analog film beyond belief.
Basically, they added extra machinery to stabilize the film as it was wound through the projector, make sure the light was adjusted properly and colors were correct, etc. Can't remember if they upped the framerate, or not.
Think it might have been Ebert reviewing it? Anyway, the guy said it was *at least* on par with the best digital projection, and this was the prototype. Not to mention incredibly price competitive (think chopping the legs out from underneath digital) both on projector equipment, and film distribution (uses tried and true plstic film).
So, no, the future isn't necessarily digital. Then again, how many times have we seen a superior product die because someone influential pushes the inferior product (Lucas, in this case) ?
Just think of books - does it really matter what sort paper the book is printed on? Of course, it may matter at extremes - books on toilet paper probably wouldn't be readable and books on fancy paper can be really beatiful. But ultimately the contents is what's important.
Would "Blaire Witch Project" be any more effective on a digital screen?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I have a feeling those digital projector parts are going to cost me big.
The cost of digital may start out high, but it will rapidly decrease. Why?
First of all, you're not using nearly so many moving parts. A digital projector is either going to read from a larg capacity hdd or some sort of laser media rather than a large, prone to failure, reel-to-reel system.
For those who haven't been inside a theatre projection room in the last little bit, these 'reels' are actually complex turntable systems that cost thousands to maintain.
Also, as LCD projectors become more and more common, the bulbs and other projection equipment are coming down in price. You can already set up a reasonable home digital projection system for under $5000. Scale that up, and you'll see that as more and more of digital projection equipment becomes commodity hardware, prices will plummet.
There is one caveat to this. Hollywood may see this as a bad thing since it lowers the bar for theatre ownership and therefore, control of theatre revenue. They may leverage their influence against hardware manufacturers or buy legislation that makes it prohibitive to buy the equipment, even if the prices would normally fall.
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The price on the digitial projection equipment will not stay high forever.
Besides I suspect that your current equipment cost nearly the equivalent in today's dollars when it was new. Or at least the early 35mm sound projection equipment did.
Also, considering the cost savings in avoiding film prints alone, it seems pretty likely the movie distributors are going to push this technology pretty hard. Hopefully they will offer some kind of incentive to getting the equipment into the theatres.
Jack William Bell
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Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
The DLP projectors that they use in a theater have a resolution of 1280x1024, and that's progressivly scanned of course. So, you get approxmiately 1.3 megapixels out of it. For comparison, a 35mm print has around 4 megapixels of resolution, and a 35mm negative can have around 20 million megapixels of effective resolution. See why I don't like digital?
Love him or hate him, he is a famous voice in the movie review business. Here he says "Digital images contain less information than 35mm film images, and the more you test their limits, the more you see that."
I have read (in another of his reviews that I can't find now) that movies that are "filmed" (vs. digitally recorded) look better on film, where as digitally recorded movies look better on digital projectors (duh). He also stated that film seems more suited for real life (vs. digital recording) where as digital projection is better for digitally created works (much of Clones, Monsters Inc., etc.).
Wish I could find that commentary...
As noted current technology is both too price and still too low in quality to outpace standard 35mm film. There is a lot of mindshare built around how to make film look good on celluloid. Tossing it all out just for the alluring gloss of digital projection is stupid.
However there is a legitimate and embraced usage of digital film making. The small time indy film makers have seen the costs of making films go *way down* by using digital cameras and a simple computer(think iMac) in post production.
So the question in my mind isn't whether or not Digital film making is worth while. It is. It is whether or not projecting it in a theater is worth it, which currently it isn't.
And lastly, why does anyone want to believe Lucas on this cinema technology? This is the guy that questions the wisdom of Scorsese on constructing sets that recreate 1850 New York(I believe the movie he was refering to was Gangs of New York). Lucas would rather see it all digitized except the actors. I'll take Scorsese's attention to detail than Lucas' SFX team anyday.
A few months ago I attended a SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) meeting held at Pixar. The meeting was held in their screening room. The screening room is equipped with both a traditional 35MM film projector anda DLP projector with a resolution of 1280x1024.
For the first part of the demonstration they showed a clip from Monsters Inc. split screen, with the left half the digital projector and the right half the film projector.
It became immediately apparent the advantages of the DLP projector over the film projector.
With the side-by-side showing, the jitter of the film became immediately visible. The detail of the DLP image was better. Also, the DLP is capable of much better contrast than film.
Now the film that was shown was of higher quality than that shown in the theaters, and the projector was also better than that in most theaters (and is also better maintained).
This isn't to say that there were no DLP artifacts. There were some, but they were not very noticable compared to the artifacts that usually appear in film. The film shown had no dirt or scratches, but in the typical theater this is not the case.
Unlike film, there's nothing to wear out in the media.
As far as the projector lasting a long time, the only real problem I hear of is that the light bulb must be periodically replaced (which cost around $100). The DLP should last a long time.
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Uh, not really, unless you count your computer monitor pixels three times because it handles three different planes (red, green, and blue).
What using three DLP devices gets them is a brighter image, which allows them to project onto a huge screen. Consumer DLP projectors use a wheel with red, green, and blue filters on it. The DLP device will rapidly switch to the correct channel when the corresponding filter is in the light path. That is why there is a "whirring" sound when you are operating a DLP projector (well, there's also the fan sound).
Everyone likes the AOTC digital version better because Lucas made the film transfer from the DLP instead of from the original HDTV 1900 pixel wide source. If he had used the higher resolution source, the film version would have looked better. And he didn't want that, since he's trying to promote his interests in digital cinema.
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Wow, normally people assume I'm a moron, but this response really takes the cake!
Do you really think I thought 24fps movie could be expanded to 60? Didn't it occur to you that I meant that using digital technology movies could be captured at 60fps like they are with both HDTV and even NTSC? I mean seriously, why would you think that I meant converting old movies from 24 fps to 60? Didn't the fact that I mentioned a specific # of FPS to begin with clue you in to the idea that I might already know that about movies? Failing that, everybody knows that old movies wouldn't be reshown in theaters. At best I could catch these magically expanded movies on TV, negating the need to go find a digital theater to see them on. I think this is the stupidest that anybody has ever assumed that I am. heh.
Just so you know, it is possible to expand 24 fps video to 60 fps through interpolation.
There are products on the market today designed for interpolating the in-between frames of video for smoothing out slow motion sequences. Frankly, it'd be easy to use this to increase the frame rate of a video like you suggested I meant. It wouldn't be as accurate as simply filming at 60 fps, but it would certainly look smoother.
"Why shoot things at 60fps when you're going to either more than double your film costs or have something that has to be downsampled for everyone else?"
Becuse there is no film? With digital techonlogy, it's simply a matter of capacity. I don't know if you've heard about it or not, but HDTV is going to support the resolution of 1920 by 1090 (or some resolution like that) @ 60fps. Seeing as how this resolution exceeds what's being shown digitally today it's a safe bet that the technology is there to make full length movies at 60fps.
As for the benefit of it: Ebert had an opportunity to sample footage shot on a camera running at 48fps. He was extremely pleased with how much smoother the video was. The example he used was a moving truck drove by. In the 24 FPS version, he couldn't read the name on the side of the truck. At 48 it became clear.
It's not a question of if, rather a question of when. One day movies will be captured and shown at 60fps.
"Derp de derp."
HA!!! That's IT? That's watching a DVD at full-screen on a 17" monitor! What a fsckn joke!!!!
I don't know why George Lucas is so damn gung-ho about digital...it hardly sounds like a big improvement technologically. I'm sure for commercial reasons it's better (no more need for couriers to send around the big 35MM film cans, no more 35MM prints that cost Kilobucks a pop) but technically that's pretty damn lame.
You could take a $5,000 XGA computer projector and get that kind of resolution. To quote Johnny Rotten, "Ever get the feeling you're being swindled?"
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I saw AoTC at the Cinerama in downtown Seattle last Friday. The Cinerama is set up to do 70mm and it's damned impressive when they do (LoTR was
completely awesome). Yet I was unimpressed with AoTC, there were digital artifacts scattered throughout the film which I assume are caused by the TI DLP system used for projecting the movie.
If digital can make it easier to distribute films great, but not if the quality is going to suck.
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