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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."
"Some say a film print is equivalent to 5,000 lines of resolution, but by the time it's been shown a lot, its effective resolution may be no more than 800 lines," Mr. Darrow said.
With today's projectors around 1,300 lines, it seems there's a long ways to go before picture quality or cost make this a viable option for most theaters. As a moviegoer, I really don't care whether the projection is digital or film - picture and sound quality are what's important.
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I'm totally stoked about the possibilities of Digital Cinema, but my one big gripe is that there is no discussion of going to a higher framerate.
Keep in mind that a higher framerate equates into larger files and more processing required which then equates into higher costs. You have to transfer a larger file, have more space to hold it, and have more processing oomph at the theatres to decode it. Hopefully whatever standard they come up with allows them to have variable framerates (as you would expect them to have variable resolutions and compression ratios, ala DVD). So Mr. Lucas can release his stuff at 60fps at 8192x2048 using lossless compression while some indie can do theirs at 24fps at 720x480.
Absolutely yes without question.
Which is to say, it probly won't have any effect on the major studios, since the vast majority of their expenses aren't related to film. George Lucas might have saved a million bucks when he shot Attack of the Clones digitally, but at that point who cares?
However, digital processes open up a vast new potential for low-budget films. It will soon be possible to shoot a million dollar film for $100,000, a $100,000 film for $10,000, and a $10,000 for $1,000, with no loss in picture quality whatsoever. It is difficult to overstate the impact this will have. I might go so far as to say it will impact film in the same way that the printing press impacted the novel.