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"."

Comments

Not just the cost, but control

[richieb]

I think one of the reasons that movie theaters are not eager to convert to digital format, is that this will give the movie companies additional control over what and how things are shown in theatres.

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

Re:6 years???

[forgoil]

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).

Digital not that big an improvement

[jmichaelg]

When CD audio came out, there was no question the sound was cleaner. We were so used to hearing snaps and underlying noise on vinyl that the CD sound was simply gold compared to lead. So expecting a similar quality payoff from Digital Video, three of us made an effort to see Attack of the Clones in a digital theater. We were disappointed. In retrospect, it isn't that surprising. A new vinyl record sounds wonderful. It's not until it's been played a lot and collected dust and scratches that the CD/Vinyl gap favors CDs.

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.

Very happy with it

[DoorFrame]

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.

Film is Dead.

[nattt]

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.

Re:bsod

[Dirtside]

So what's wrong with movies the way they are now?

Oh, there's nothing wrong with the way new movies are now.

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.