The Future of Digital Cinema

An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times recently had an interesting article on the future of digital cinema. The article talks mainly about the Digital Cinema Initiatives consortium (formed last year by a group of seven major studios) and its work towards establishing a set of standards for theatrical digital projection. DigitalCinemaMag also had an article back in February about the consortium's efforts which included a few more technical details."

Comments

Re:What about framerate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been working with some of the digital cinema technology for the past couple of years. I even worked with the University of Southern California's Entertainment Technology Center which is mentioned in the article. The device we were using operated at 60fps normally. It can run at other rates as well depending on the task. I'm not going to make an quality comments since I was using the system for "non-cinema" work, but the tech is there for increasing the frame rate.

Re:What about framerate?

[DuBois]

Better framerates are on the way. Check this out for more info on higher quality HD video and movies.

A couple of comments

[ptomblin]

1. I was one of those "grain sniffers". I was at a demo of an upcoming 11,000 lumen high res projector standing a few feet away from the screen, and I couldn't see any pixellation. The brightness and sharpness was astounding. Plus this project runs Linux, decrypting the image on the fly.

2. Image quality depends a lot on the projectionists. I sat in the projection booth of a megaplex for a week a while ago and saw three different projectionists opening up in the morning, and while all of them cleaned the lens, film gates and transport mechanism on the projector, not one of them cleaned the glass at the front of the booth. You could see dirt and finger marks on the glass even before they struck the lamphouse. I asked one of the projectionists about it, and he was pretty contemptuous of the type of audience they got at that plex and the type of low brow action-heavy movies they showed there. I got the impression he wanted to be at some arts house, and maybe if he'd had more respect for the audience he would have worried more about their experience. On the other hand, I work with another projectionist who is meticulous about every aspect of the showing.