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The Future of Digital Cinema
prostoalex writes "This article on ABCNews talks about two different technologies, aimed at bringing the cinemas up to the standards of this digital age. It points out some interesting information regarding the status quo such as "of the more than 35,000 movie screens operating in the United States today, only 60 are digitally equipped, largely because of the technology's $150,000 price tag"."
I'm paying $6 for 50 cents worth of popcorn and they can't afford to go digital? I don't think so.
DRM can give the movie companies almost total control over how and when movies are shown in all theaters. Which is something theater owners would prefer to control themselves - as you can respond better to your local audience.
So, if "MIB-II" is tanking in Notown, USA, start showing "Minority Report" on an extra screen to bring more people in instead.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Don't forget about the decay of the prints. One showing and the quality goes down. And then add all the mecanical problems of running at twice the speed. 24fps is enough to screw the projector over several times if you don't put a lot of time into calibrating it and making sure it doesn't move around.
These problems are solved by digital projectors. I just wish that they could improve in resolution and frame rates. 24fps (double exposed so 48 updates / second) is not enough when panning for example.
I am just hoping that they could install a digital projector somewhere in Sweden, I will take a little trip then for sure;)
ptomblin: You say that you work on these systems. What are the chances that I as a consumer would be able to legally get hold of the movies in this kind of format? I would love to have a great projector at home for my home cinema, but playing DVDs on large screens are not nearly as fun as it could be.
And do you have any spiffy links? I am sure I am not the only one who are interested in these kinds of things (and in my case not to break it and get a parrot on my shoulder).
For a consumer, the big digital payoff might be down the road when a movie has been through a projector so many times that the quality becomes objectionable on an analog print. But since the majority of a movie's gross is in the first few weeks of the run and the studios get the lion's share of the take during those weeks, the economics may work against digital. The studios reap the long term benefit of digital and the theater owner has to pay for it. If I owned a theater, I think I'd hold back as well.
What? The only difference I could discern between film and digital is that the digital projection didn't have any dust or cigarette burns. It was just....clean. I mean, blue skies were just....blue. No little black spots or anything. So sue me, I'm a perfectionist, but to me digital projection seems the way to go.
I belong to the ______ generation.
Ignoring DRM and distrubution isssues, if I owned a theatre I would definitely _not_ be investing in a digital projector right now. It's still early adopter phase for the technology, ie: expensive, full of bugs and prone to standards changes.
That 150K may buy you a projector that you have to junk in a year or two. I'd sit on it for another couple until some sort of 'standard' evolves. After all you can buy a 35mm projector that will work with film shot 75 years ago, and there is an awful huge amount of back catalog still on film.
640K ought to be enough for anyone.
There are many more uses for digital cinema technology that can even be thought of right now. I see this as another technology that precedes it's demand; uses will be developed for it once it's uptake gathers speed. I won't repeat the quality and distribution benefits already mentioned in this thread.
Theaters could play 'censored' [i.e. no nudity, bad language etc.] versions to get extra revenue from the younger and religious audiences. The in-flight version of Outbreak was quite acceptable, though I can't imagine there'd be much left of the South Park movie ;-) How about audience participation? It's a long shot but it could be a laugh for some stuff. I know some people here would like buttons labelled [bra], [panties], [gravy] and [grits] for the next Natalie Portman flick.
I havent had my caffiene fix and it's way too hot in here so I can't think of many more right now, but I'm sure other people can add to this list. As for the slow uptake of digital projection so far, I'd say it's either because AFAIK there's no finalised standard for digital film distribution, or because some people wouldn't know a good investment when it was staring them in the face. ;-)
Ali
Ph33r m3!!!
I made the effort to see Episode 2 at a digital theater and was very happy with it. I know a lot of people have complained about jagged edges, but I really didn't see any. To me the difference between watching film and watching digital was the difference between watching VHS and watching DVD. The screen didn't jitter up and down. There were no scratches and no dust. The colors were vivid and very clear... I thought it was great and worth the extra drive to get to the theater. Even the "Don't Talk, Throw Away Your Trash" opening sequence was much better.
--
RumorsDaily
Maxivision 48 is just going to compound the problem. The staff in cinemas can't even cope with the current film standard. I see a lot of film previews - the prints are bad even then, with splices and dirt. Even when the print is clean it's often out of focus.
The current cost of digital is high, and the resolution os lower than HDTV, but all this will change. The cost will drop dramatically, and the resolution will first improve to full HD, and then beyond as HD also improves.
The cost of making a movie on HD is dramatically less than film. If they're doing SFX with CGI, then HD makes this cheaper. Even when CGI is added to a film movie, the resolution used is no greater than HD.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
As I understand it, most projectors already show each frame twice -- the film is at 24 fps, but the projector actually shows a frame every 1/48th of a second. Otherwise the flicker would be unbearable.
Reading the article, it's unclear how Maxivision48 differs from this.
Except, last weekend I went and saw a midnight screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It was great, except most of the colors were fairly washed out, and every time it got to a reel change (you know, when the little dots appear in the upper right corner), there was invariably a huge increase in the number of scratches on the print, a degradation in sound quality, and there were also a number of frames missing from each end of both reels (the movie would appear to skip a second or two or time).
Now, if we'd had an original digital print of the movie, it would have looked exactly the same as it had when it came out, twenty years ago (which is to say, a lot better than it did last week). That's half the idea.
As it stands, digital projection (DLP specifically) is a mixed bag. I've come to notice that people like me (geeks) who know what pixels are, know what jaggies are, know what anti-aliasing is, and so on, think the quality of digital is lower than people who aren't familiar with those concepts and don't look for them. On Saturday I went to see (for the fourth time) Attack of the Clones, and I saw it at a digital projection with my parents and two of my cousins (specifically, this was at the Pacific Theaters at The Grove, in Los Angeles). We were sitting on the entry aisle (it's stadium seating), maybe ten rows up.
I'd also seen it digitally at Grauman's Chinese (sitting maybe 17-20 rows back) and at the Loews Century City (15-17 rows back). It looked fantastic at both those theaters. I thought that it looked worse at the Grove (on a smaller screen than either other theater), but I realized it was because I was close enough to see the vertical pixel columns distinctly in a lot of shots (especially high-contrast shots with small details). My dad, however, thought it looked better than at the Chinese (the frickin' Chinese!) and he was sitting in the same row I was. We both wear glasses and have corrected 20/20 vision (in fact, my bare vision is much worse than his).
Anyway, I'm rambling, but my point is that there ARE reasons to go digital. Theoretically in a few years, resolution of digital will increase to the point where you need to be standing right in front of the screen to identify the pixels, in which case it will be visually indistinguishable from film for 99% of the viewing audience -- we'll be in the same situation we are now with "audiophiles" who claim that they can hear minuscule variations in sound quality based on what kind of wires their speakers use. Yeah, maybe they can, but almost nobody else can, or cares.
Plus, long-term (if Hollywood ever could think that way), the studios save huge amounts of money on film prints and distribution. If the studios were to pool together and equip every theater in the country with a digital projector over 5 years, they would have made back their money on film printing costs in another 5 years.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
...at least some think so.
...[cut cut]... "I doubt that I will ever 'seriously' use 35 mm colour film again! When I want to produce a quality result, I will choose digital -- or a larger format than 35 mm."
A quote from: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/d60-first.htm
"I have yet to do extensive testing with the [Canon] D60 [a 6 Megapixel digital camera], but I can say that D60 8X10" prints, and indeed the one D60 11 X 16.5"print I have done so far, are better than any previous 8X10" or larger print I have made from 35 mm colour, no matter how printed. In fact, I would say that the 11X16.5" print is pretty close to similar-sized images printed conventionally (or digitally) from 645 format negatives. In simpler words, I believe the 6 MP D60 is superior to 35 mm colour film-not just the equal. A possible exception might be a really good print from a Kodachrome slide -- but I can't claim to have any that are in fact better"
And as a side note, MegaPixels aren't always a good measurement of the quality of Digital Cameras. For example the Canon D30, a 3 megapixel camera produces better images than Sony F707, 5 megapixel camera. Why? Here is a quote from http://www.luminous-landscape.com/dq.htm
"The reason is simple, it [Canon D30] has a much better SNR. Why you ask? The Sony pixels are much, much smaller. Smaller pixels have less area to gather light. Less light means less signal. For a given semiconductor process, the noise stays the same regardless of pixel size and the signal increases with pixel size."