Slashdot Mirror
Brazil Takes Lead in All-Digital Cinema Projection
securitas writes "The CS Monitor's Andrew Downie reports that Brazil plans to open in May the world's largest digital movie theater network. About 100 theaters will use Sao Paulo-based Rain Networks' KinoCast digital theater DRM software. Rain based its system on Windows Media 9 software with MPEG-4 video compression. 'The MPEG-4 software can squeeze a feature film onto a file of just five gigabytes, 15 times smaller than the MPEG-2 technology presently used' at one-third the $150,000 cost. It takes 20 minutes to distribute a 90-minute film over a VPN and the system avoids the costs associated with transporting physical copies to areas largely inaccessible by road - it can cost up to $750,000 for 500 copies of a Matrix-type blockbuster to be distributed. Interestingly, in the affluent USA the fight between the 35,000 theater owners and Hollywood is about who will pay for cinemas to switch to digital projection. In December 2003 the Guardian published a story with more financial and technical details of the KinoCast digital cinema system."
Rain based its system on Windows Media 9 software
"Man, independant films are so weird. I totally didn't understand that one part where right in the middle of the car chase, it showed that big blue screen. What was all that weird text on it, the credits?"
Vonal Declosion
It takes 20 minutes to distribute a 90-minute film over a VPN and the system avoids the costs associated with transporting physical copies to areas largely inaccessible by road
I have a feeling that if some area is inaccessible by road, it's not likely to have DSL or fiber running to it either. So they'd still have to bring the hard-disks (or whatever media) by hand.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Its nice to go to the Cinema and have amazing sound, now we can watch the films and not have scratchy, popping, projected images!
I remember when I first heard that movies are filmed at a very slow 24fps. Compared to tv which changes the display at 60fps, the 24fps is very slow. However it is a result of the high resolution as well as the movement of the actors (as opposed to multiple still-lifes) which makes the movie indistinguishable from normal movement.
Now take digital with its ability to blit high resolution graphics at very high framerates compared to traditional film. As good as these systems are, the loss in resolution due to compression is a killer. Though we may have all been agog at the CG used in the Star Wars prequels as well as the LoTR trilogy, much of the compression artifacts were still clearly visible. I don't think digital is ready for widespread usage yet. MHO, of course.
In Brazil, it fascinates me that there are movie theaters where there are no roads.
I have been pwned because my
that they choose to base this kind of project om Windows Media Player, since most poeple still look at linux, with for example mplayer, as untested and possibly unreliable technology. Although a system running linux/mplayer would probably be better, people still hang on to what is familiar to them.
That's a fast VPN.. 5 Gigabytes in 20 minutes works out to about 4.3 Megabytes/second, or 34 Megabits/second.
Episode III, not coming to any theaters near you anytime soon. How many will just go to see it even if they know it's bad when they can't even drop down to their local theater? Nobody will inconvinience themselves for a movie who's draw is mainly "I just want to see how the thingends already". Of course maybe it won't be bad, but what are the odds of that?
Wonder how long before it's cracked? This is going to bring a whole new meaning to Screeners ^.^
Can someone comment on the security and encryption of WMV9?
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
wow, a troll that can't even link to an image properly. You must be new...
More than mere navel gazing.
Due to it large unpopulated areas, the only suitable means of transportation is often to fly by plain instead of driving by car.
I run an independant Cinema and the cost per film is approximately 200-250 per showing. A lot of this cost is distribution and storage of the prints, so if digital projection happens then I would expect to see a suitable reduction in costs.
Prints wear out, which is why the image gets worse over time, however the resolution of 35mm is much greater than that of most digital systems that I know of.
DVD and DiVX look Awful on a big screen as you can see the artifacts on the system. This asks the question how it can be suitable for the large cinema screens.
Also converting a cinema to digital, while still having the ability to show film is going to be expensive. So who should pay the cinema, or the company that is saving millions on costs.
Another interesting point is do the distributers and films companies apporvie of the system?
If not it will die on it's feet before it even starts.
Call this a biased opinion from somebody who maintains windows servers (The cinema is in my spare time) but I can't see it being that long before the MS DRM (or any other system for that matter) is broken.
If this happens then all releases will go back to film as piracy is such a concern.
I think it's great that the movie industry finally wakes up and smells the java. Cudos to Brazil for this bold move. So - now they have this fancy all digital top notch movie theatre - where are the films? With Hollywood being overly paranoid over piracy, will they agree to upload their new blockbuster hit to a server in Brazil?
And - while we're on the subject - will this result in more piracy? Or just better (picture) quality piracy? I think the answer is the latter. So - if this doesn't mean *more* piracy, then what's there to be afraind of, Hollywood?
Even though most digital projection systems are lower resolution than film they appear higher resolution when projected since there is no film gate weave as the film moves through the tranport mechanism of the projector.
It takes 20 minutes to distribute a 90-minute film over a VPN and the system
The distribution system used by Rain Networks is available for free here...
The films are then beamed by satellite from Rain's central computer in Sao Paulo to picture houses across the country. Depending on bandwidth, it can take as little as 20 minutes to send a 90-minute film to a theater.
5GB for a whole movie? Assuming the movies goes for 90 minutes thats 7.5Mbps.
That's only a little past the bit rate of the average DVD. Sure MPEG-4 is more efficient than MPEG-2 but when you take into account the high definition resolution (1280x960 or higher) there are sure to be visible artefacts.
data on disc is about the smallest thing you can imaginable. there is no place on earth with a digital projector to which such a disc can not be delivered along with whatever other items come in to the outside world. no exceptions.
at this particular state in time, should we really be cheering technologies that, however impressive the compression, actually deliver a lesser qualtiy image? how long will it take for the march of progress to make 5gb vs whatever the normal standard is seem as out of date as formatting 1.44mb floppy discs to 1.6mb or whatever that trick is that we used to play was..
That was a troll? I thought a troll had to actually make an attempt at getting someone to click on the link?
Surely just putting an obvious link to an image in your post with text that basically says "Hey, click this link! It's a picture that has nothing to do with the article!" is just lame. Not a troll.
I live in Brazil's capital (which happens to be Brasilia, not Buenos Aires :), and there's not even a THX movie theather.
(8-DCS)
Cool. Now where can I download this movie ?
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
I have a feeling that if some area is inaccessible by road, it's not likely to have DSL or fiber running to it either.
To quote from the article:
Rain Networks has developed a system called KinoCast, which downloads films into cinemas via satellite and then controls projection through a central computer working remotely on a virtual private network (VPN).
I apologise for my apalling use of your great english language. And for not being able to spell apalling ;)
Well from the article they are using satellite, and to compare, a *single* HDTV stream is 20 megabits per second, so I don't think this is too unrealistic. The films just have to be queued up for delivery at some stage before projection, and we are talking about a network with a limited number of endpoints (e.g. only cinemas, rather than everyone).
Windows Media does not support standards compliant MPEG-4. What Microsoft calls MPEG-4 is their version of a early draft of the standard with their own transport mechanism.
Envivio used to offer a MPEG-4 plug in for WM, but no more (or at least not for free).
I wish people would not perpetuate this confusion.
What's it to you?
They may as well start releasing all movies direct to DVD now. You can easily put together a nice home theater for under two grand these days and the cost is continuing to drop. If all future films go digital, theaters won't have any reason to exist anymore.
That's why they aren't talking about DVD/DiVX but rather much higher resolutions. The new Star Wars films were shot entirely on digital and then converted to 35mm for projection, and I didn't hear people complaining about the low resolution.
Indeed, digital projection is likely to be better in most cases due to the fact that the film will not be scratched, etc. (here in Ireland, depending on the cinema you can see some truly awful 35mm presentations, particularly after a film has been out a while.)
Brazil is a nation where technology costs much: US$ 1,00 can buy R$ 2,90 (Real - local currency) and there are heavy taxes on imported material. When running low on budget you have to be creative to solve problems and reduce costs. That's why the elections here are all digital for more than 5 years ago (it costs less and it's more secure than the classic way) and why banks here have more clients using internet to access the bank systems than anywhere in the world. Can this system be the best? Maybe not... but surely it can help to make easier to distribute the movies faster while lowering costs. And it can also help the local cinema industry to increase the audiences and revenue.
who will pay for cinemas to switch to digital projection
Hmm...ultimately the customers will.
I have one thing only to say to the people who complain about "piracy" {the industry's preferred dysphemism for "independent distribution"}.
Look at the ready availability of photocopiers, scanners, printers and the like. And look what's on offer at your local W.H.Smith, or Waterstones, or any independent local newsagent, or remainder store.
Now ask yourself "why don't newspapers, magazines and books have a piracy problem, with all these copiers and so forth out there?"
Whatever the Printed Word industry has done to protect itself from "piracy", the music and movie industries have to do the same thing to protect themselves from the same threat.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Actually, both are "kind of" right.
It changes a "field" (only the odd or even lines) every 1/60th of a second. So the image changes at this frequency, but not completely.
Why is it that everyone always insists upon using approximations? Even with the highest quality mpeg encoder, the approximations that mpeg 4 employs will be visible on the big screen at that bit rate. Of course you could use a small enough resolution that the bitrate wouldn't produce artifacts, but that would not come near the effective resolution of the analog media that this is replacing.
Approximation has it's place, but at this bit rate quality anywhere near 35mm prints is nye impossible. Approximation techniques such as mpeg also allow for irresponsible use. Using these techniques content producers must spend large amounts of time on quality assurance, making sure that each portion of the content receive at least the bitrate required. For a glaring example of improper usage of approximation, find the original DVD release of "The Wizard of OZ". The one in the plastic keep case, not the remastered one in the cardboard snap case. That release was just awful. There was gibbs effect (those little squares) everywhere during the sepia tones portion (as opposed to the technicolor portion) of the film.
In this case, there is absolutely no reason to use this much approximation. In fact, in this case it would negligable in cost to cut out all approximation. This does not mean the movie can not be compressed or encrypted, just that it shouldn't be approximated. If the approximation step were removed, the quality assurance work that goes with it would also be removed and possibly save more money than the additional one time costs of extra storage for the theaters. It would take longer to feed the data to the theaters, but I don't beleive theaters are changing films so often that they would come anywhere near saturating their distribution VPN even 50% of the time.
City of God is a 2002 movie, not a 2003 movie.
(8-DCS)
What's the DPI on this thing? If it's any lower than my TV, I might just as well stay at home.
Hey, wait a minute... There are pure digital megaplexes with internet connectivity that allows 5G in 20M (what's that 700kbps?), but you can't get there by road??? Seems odd, no? Can someone expand on that point? (Or maybe I should break tradition, and RTFA... Nahhhhh, I want to fit in here.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
But not with photocopiers. This trend is getting more common, a decent quality small digital camera or a cellular phone with built-in one, youth just pick the magazines, flip pages making photos, then leave the paper version and read the new issue of their favourite $20 magazine for free, from screens of their computers.
If they like it, they sometimes buy the dead tree version.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Approximation has it's place, but at this bit rate quality anywhere near 35mm prints is nye impossible
We're not talking about the US where digital is pushed as a "superior format" to that of film. When we go do digital movie houses, we expect quality that exceeds that of "regular" 35mm. That the theatre owner saved some bucks by having the film downloaded is irrelevant to us, and it doesn't mean that my 12plex is going to get movies that it wouldn't normally otherwise. NOW Brasil on the other hand, is a different story. The problem they are trying to solve is one of logistics. They are talking about the difference between many theatres either not getting a film at all, or having to wait a significant amount of time, or having to pay very large sums to get them delivered. A previous poster that lives in Brasil mentioned that the city he lives in doesn't even have THX theatres, so they are not going for the ultimate in quality here.
They decided on their primary requirements (ease of distribution) and chose a technology that met that particular requirement. In the states the primary requirement probably isn't going to be the same, so the technology chosen will accordingly differ.
One last point. Your example of the WOO dvd release is important here, because it shows that one of the advantages of digital is that you can adjust compression ratios accordingly. If they decide at some point that the current compression ratios are too aggressive, they can always loosen them up to get better quality.
Seriously, who's going to be able to afford the $50,000 equipment ... ... ... ... ... ...
Do you have any idea how much costs a current, analog projection gear?
... and DSL connections
if you had RTFA you would know the connection is satellite-based.
... when they don't have accessible roads.
what the fsck? the digital gear is way lighter, and it can be transported by air, water... now, if you were talking about DSL/fiber...
... Obviously, this won't be an affluent area.
? this has absolutely no logic. BR is a country bigger than continental US. don't you think we have big cities in less-acessible places (p.ex. Manaus)and to which digitally sending the movie is way cheaper?
... How do the theater owners actually plan on making money off this?
Hmmm... it's better than an analog refit to an old theater? it's cheaper in the long run, and we can keep fees low (in a middle-sized town, a movie fee is, like U$1-U$2 down here).
And, something you prolly don't know, cinema is in in BR lately, and many mid-sized and small towns are getting new/refitted movie theaters...
... And as for the $1500 cost of physical film, that's a moot point. Places like that will likely get it 3-6 months and 3rd or 4th-hand after the film has been circulated throughout other countries.
Only now they can get the film as fast as the other places, because there is not only one copy that has to be transported!!
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The flow on effect is that DVD releases of the movies also end up staggered between markets - which I've always figured was one of the main reasons for studios wanting regional encoding on DVDs.
My big hope for digital projection is that it will eliminate the need for staggered release schedules and regional encoding - as movies will be able to be released world wide if needed for negligable additional cost. Obviously the studios will save a packet along the way too. So they should pay for it.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
MPEG-2 is a lossy codec also, and I can't see any artifacts (e.g. blockiness, etc. - as opposed to limited resolution) with a well-mastered, high bitrate DVD (and that's on a 150" projected screen). It's only on the badly mastered/low bitrate DVDs that artifacts become apparent. I can generally see more in the way of artifacts in most 35mm films (poor Nth generation copies, burn-outs, scratches, etc.)
The resolution (and maximum bitrate) of DVD is pre-defined (and I was taking his reference to DiVX to mean 'at normal resolutions'). In cinema-type systems they are talking about a higher resolution picture: although Raincast don't give out resolution details, here's an example of a 3840x2480 system described as superior to 35mm.
Raincast's system appears to be high-resolution MPEG-4/WMA running at slightly higher than normal DVD (MPEG-2) bitrates (but with a more efficient codec). While it may not be good 35mm quality, it is likely more than usable, especially for hard to reach locales that otherwise might not have a cinema at all.
The transmission cost/time for a 5-Gb file isn't the only problem they face
It just occurs to me that a lot of 32-bit Operating Systems won't like a file with a size of greater than 2Gb
Probably there's a hack that lets it be done... Is the film shipped as 3 video files which play consecutively? I would love the irony if the only mainstream machine that can play these Windows Media files was a Mac G5
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Tom's Hardware
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
don't be stupid. india also have the same problems with poverty we have here and they have a thriving technology industry.
this move to digital theater is done with private money, while poverty is a state issue. and trust me, our current socialist govt is taking steps to reduce this problem.
plus, technological advances like these means it'll be easier to open movie theaters in far away places like Acre, Para, Amazonas (the state, not the forest. Acre and Para are also part of the forest), Mato Grosso and the "caatinga" (semi-desert region that takes large areas of several states in the north-east) which means more jobs and entertainment options there.
so shut up. you don't know our coutry enough to make such coments. this digital movies initiative IS good for us. period.
What ? Me, worry ?
Why would the private sector invest in solving poverty? That's not profitable. This is not a government initiative.
If the movie industry is going digital is because there is money to be made somewhere along the lines, not because they are trying to do a good deed.
By the way, it works the same here in America, bud.
What's a theater doing in an area inaccessible by road? If the populace can't afford to maintain roads why are they splurging on movies? I would assume the lack of roads is due to poverty. Roads are usually built leading to areas of even meager prosperity.
Developers: We can use your help.
>The MPEG-4 software can squeeze a feature film onto a file of just five gigabytes, 15 times smaller than >the MPEG-2 technology presently used'
Cool when can I expect to find it in use on gnutella?
A while back Roger Ebert pointed out the difference between watching tv at 60 fields per second and movies at 24 frames a second (actually 48fps since each frame is shown twice). The short period of black between frames in a movie theater has an effect on the brain and makes the experience more enjoyable and relaxing. I wonder if digital projection will take that away. even at 24p, there is not short 'black space' between frames.
Here, of course, you're talking about PAL, the mostly European format. All those posts saying "hey, it's 30 fps, not 60!" are referring to NTSC, the mostly American format.
...
Interestingly, the only place PAL equipment is common over here is with independent filmmakers -- because it's much much easier to turn 25 frames into 24 than 60 interlaced frames into 24. This creates a demand for cameras that shoot footage that's useless on most of the TVs we have
please wait....
rebooting in progress....
...that Brazil also leads with 100% electronic voting.
Sometimes less money leads to more simple and viable solutions. US should take a look on what is going on below equator and maybe save lot's of money using solutions already tested. Just't becouse it was done here it doesn't mean it's not worth a look.
Socialistic goverment taking steps to reduce powerty ?
...
Hahahahahaha
It seems whenever socialists take over, powerty really takes off - give it couple more years and you will "catch" up with Cuba.
As a point of reality, NTFS on Win2k/XP (32-bit OSes) has a maximum file size of just under 16terabytes on volumes of just under 256 terabytes (and even these are implementation limits, rather than theoretical maximums.) I deal with single-file backups, ISO images, and databases of well over 2gb with no problems whatsoever on NTFS.
Second, there is in any case no reason why the bitstream could not be split up into multiple files - DVDs do this, splitting the bitstream into VOB files of max. 1gb each.
Coming soon to a theater near you!
Seriously these guys should get together with the guy who asked about how to demo his terabit bandwidth! If you suppose the Brazilians are sending 5 gig cinema files one theater at a time, he could deliver them all simultaneously, live to the audience, and not worry about replacing bad hard disks in the rain forest every week. You know it's gonna happen...
Whether or not the jargon is correct is another question, but you are in fact talking about the same thing:
Jack: "Let me tell you a little bit about Tyler Durden. Tyler was a night person. While the rest of us were sleeping, he worked. He had one part time job as a projectionist. You see, a movie doesn't come all on one big reel. It comes on a few. So someone has to be there to switch the projectors at the exact moment that one reel ends and the next one begins. If you look for it you can see these little dots come into the upper right hand corner of the screen."
Tyler: "In the industry we call them cigarette burns."
Jack: "That's the cue for a change-over. He flips the projectors, the movie keeps right on going and nobody in the audience has any idea."
Tyler: "Why would anyone want this shit job?!"
Jack: "Because it affords him other interesting opportunities."
Tyler: "Like splicing single frames of pornography into family films!"
Jack: "So when the snooty cat and the courageous dog with the celebrity voices meet for the first time in reel 3, that's when you'll catch a flash of Tyler's contribution to the film. Nobody knows that they saw it but they did."
Tyler: "A nice, big cock!"
I'm going to guess that this will mean yet another increase in the cost of tickets (up to $13 CND in some theatres here) and food (overpriced to begin with) for theatre patrons. Is the lower cost to theatres going to be reflected by lowering prices for movie goers instead of screwing them over more for the "big screen experience"? I doubt it.
I'll make a bold prediction(hmm..as anonymous :/ ), Brazil is about the only place on Gods grey Earth that has the possibility of Greatness!! I am serious!(and a bad speller). Where else do You find a President who used to polish shoes for a living? Where else do You find ppl who doesnt identify themself as 'aryans', 'vikings', 'white', 'native', 'black', 'the-chosen-ones' etc ?? They all seem to be Brazilians...poor or rich! Maybe I am naive, I dont know...but the harts of these people!! I am telling you... AND they dont take crap from anyone!! This includes IMF as well as US!! Americans who lost beleif in "The American Dream", look at Brazil!! Unless I am mistaken(or some superpower will put an halt to it), this is where the future is, on all levels. e.g R&D (which is a LOT cheaper(and a LOT more passionate) than in, say US or Europe) is exploding down there. When I have finished my current project (some profiling and UI-fiddle), I might go there! The Language is the biggest hurdle for me at the moment...(I want to be able to get the WHOLE culture), but crossing my fingers and working hard, it will happen!
> I ran just about every one of them in Toronto in the 80s and 90s
That was you Peter? I thank you, and my weird friends thank you. My brother thanks you, and my brothers weird friends thank you.
The wife and kids say hi; say hello to the gang there for me. Pick up some garbonzo beans on the way home.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Sarcasm aside, once the new digital systems are in place, even with maintenance costs, total overhead costs should drop. I'm sure that the studios will make sure that they don't pass on that benefit to consumers. Instead they will pad their own pockets and those stars on the $20m+/movie list. They could spend the savings on hiring some new writers who have some original ideas. Just a thought...
Amigori
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
MPEG-4 is more efficient at low bitrates than MPEG-2/1. I am not sure that MPEG-4 encoding is even capable of reaching 7.5 Mbps - the maximum I have seen for DivX movies is around 2 Mbps with the minimum quantiser used for all frames.
...that the resolution is much higher. 640x??? -> 1920x??? and you have 3x3 = 9 times the pixels. For the same picture quality, think 2*9 = 18Mbps bitrate...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
it can cost up to $750,000 for 500 copies of a Matrix-type blockbuster to be distributed
That's $1500 per copy! How the hell are they delivering these things? Every reel on a giant gold platter, with a 50-piece samba band walking behind it? (Come to think of it, that does sound pretty cool.)
Then again, this is the movie business we're talking about. Their accounting's bound to be a little 'funny'.
I wonder how this will affect future generations.
There have been several instances over the years where the studios lost the original film masters and had to resort to using 35mm prints that were sent out to the theaters to restore parts of the film for home video release. (The Wickerman comes to mind as an example) If digital distibution becomes so prevalent that everything is distributed on recycled HDDs or via network I do hope the studios deem it important to keep off-site backups.
Take it from someone "in the business"... (my creds are: (1) performance analysis for experimental digital project, uncompressed video
(2) design wireless networking for 10/54Mbs home video transmission (3) HD mode development for ATI Xilleon, and other projects).
The effective data rate for this "theater" is the same as digital SD television -- not even HD.
If the compression is THAT much better, I would have heard about it... and I haven't.
They won't be able to blow this up to a big theater screen (unless its filtered to hell). It's not gonna look good. Of course, we *could* be talking about a bad quality small theater screen...
So this is a big yawn. Worse -- they DO have the intrastructure needed to move 30Mps. The just want to, what, cut costs? Give 'em at LEAST HD resolutions (36Mbps).
And, if the compression is THAT GOOD (6 to 10 times better than current) -- there are other applications we would have seen it in first -- high end cam-corders, and (at least) a proposal for a DVD replacement format COMPLETELY COMPATIBLE with existing DVD technology (HD DVDs would be possible, with a blue laser!).
So this is bunch of hooey.
Thanks for you time; I needed to vent.
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Too bad digital projection is nowhere near replacing film quality-wise. All digital projectors available today crush blacks horribly, resulting in the complete loss of shadow detail and other tangible features.
Let's hope digital projection doesn't follow the same path as fixed pixel TVs have, taking the market as something "cool," ignoring the fact that it of course is of lesser quality than what it is replacing (LCD, DLP and plasma have yet to attain the picture quality of the best CRTs...)
And, it should be said, the metropolitan area is 29,000,000 people, maybe the biggest in the world. If you ask me, it's a nice city, too.
It's $1-$2 in rural Brazil.
small town (lt 100k ppl) = $1.25 (R$ 4)
mid-sized (lt 1M ppl) = $1.75 (R$ 5)
my town (3rd largest, 4Mppl) =
downtown theaters -- $2 = R$ 6
mall multiplex, mon-fri -- $2.25 = R$ 8
mall multiplex, sat-dom -- $3-5.25 = R$ 12-16
approximate math, of course. yes, I can multiply.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
>> Brazil is about half as wide as California is tall.
Brazil is bigger than California, bigger than the entire West of Mississipi. In fact, Brazil was bigger than the US until you got Alaska.
Also, we have almost 80% of the US population.
We are a peaceful people.
Your eyes are only capable of seeing 20-25 fps. This is why you do not see fluorescent links blink on and off. For this reason you will not notice when cimema projection will increase speed from 25-60 fps.
Oh yeah? Then how come I can clearly see the monitor shimmering and parts of the screen darkening and brightening at 65Hz? 75 is the minimum tolerable, 85 is good, but you will have to pry my Apple cinema display from my cold, dead eyes. And by the way, software DVD players that don't hide interlacing suck badly.
Cuba is in poverty today because of the U.S. embargo, not because of their "socialistic government". Guess you were so taken in by anti-communist propaganda that you forgot about the embargo, didn't you?
And you seem to remember Cuba as a prosperous, highly advanced country before Castro. Read up on the dirty playground for gambling and prostitution that was Cuba before. Even the Cuba of today doesn't seem so bad.
"... we could use a little more human cordiality,
This makes me laugh. Only a Brazilian who has spent most of his time in Brazil would say this. SP is amazingly friendly, far more friendly than any other big city I've seen.
Bangkok is nice, but not as friendly.
The 29,000,000 is the entire populated area around SP, which is many, many kilometers wide and deep.
As one or two others have pointed out, WMV9 encryption is actually relatively secure, at least as far as we know right now. It uses pretty strong public key encryption. Someone suggested just using another media player that doesn't respect the "protection". That's like suggesting just using another email client to open a PGP encrypted email if you don't have the private key.
There are tools out there to strip the protection from WMV9 audio files, unf**k.exe and one other I can't remember right now. However, none have been released to my knowledge for video files. When the full-length Hilton video came out last week, it was released as a WMV9 file with DRM. The distributors wanted $50 for the privelege of viewing it five times. Needless to say, someone actually bought a license and released a pretty good quality analog rip of it within a few days. There is NO way to get around the "analog hole" provided a would-be pirate has a valid key for it.
What I'd be more worried about with theaters using Mpeg-4 compression in general is quality... Yeah, they brag about filesize compression in comparison with mpeg-2, but I was always under the impression that mpeg-4 is best for lower bitrates and can't provide high quality at high bitrates like mpeg-2 can. Mpeg-2 is used currently in HDTV streams and on DVDs.
I would suspect that you would get compression artifacts even in a 5 GB mpeg-4 file in a 2 hour+ movie. Actually I would suspect you'd get noticeable artifacting at any filesize with WMV/Mpeg-4. I don't think I've ever seen a WMV encode that looked even near DVD-quality.
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
I just love garish video colors..., well ok I don't. I for one am happy to lag and see old fashioned analog projected movies. Give it a few years and I might change my mind.
If this is implemented in richer countries, then piracy will go through the roof.
Even an average computer user can find movies at little or no cost, in a range of low-quality formats. 5gb is already easily transferable for some users. Essentially, rampant piracy and a lowering of release quality means that a user with a high speed internet connection and a decent home cinema system will be able to get *exactly* the same experience at home and for free.
The studios' only hope of survival is to focus on delivering the best possible experience; that means higher quality vision, sound and comfort in a theatre - for which a user will pay a premium. Moving away from this would be insane.
I also suggest that they stop selling popcorn. I pay to experience a theatre's sound system too, you know.
It's a common myth that a human eye can only discern 25fps. The fact of the matter is that gamers have long known that the eye is capable of perceiving up to 5 times that resolution. The difference in display of a game at 25fps and 125fps is more than noticeable, it is downright blatant.
The difference is that in film, the objects are moving in between frames. A video game is like 125 still pictures per second.
1) Brazil has a robust wireless digital infrastructure. 2) Brazil is geographically segmented. 3) The movie theaters will play movies indepentendly of each other, not simulcasted. 4) Linux is not the answer to every question. 5) Microsoft still sucks, but on a rock solid VPN with dedicated applications, maybe it will survive. 6) The major cost of distributing a film is the film itself. When people say it cost $1500 to distribute a film, they mean to actually print a copy of the film on 35mm. Not shipping and handling (you twits). As my girfriend would say: "Vi tomar no cu, gerdal!"
The studios' only hope of survival is to focus on delivering the best possible experience; that means higher quality vision, sound and comfort in a theatre - for which a user will pay a premium. Moving away from this would be insane.
The FIRST thing they can do is GET RID OF THOSE FSCKING RED DOTS ON THE PRINTS!!!
I noticed such 'watermarking' on the last few films I watched in the theaters: Kill Bill Vol. I, all 3 LOTR movies, and Paycheck. It appears this practice started when 28 Days Later was in the theaters back in 2002.
It doesn't work!
Moviegoers who (always) notice them are annoyed/p!ssed off (like myself) and said dots can be removed by determined/skillful media pirates before the copied content is illegally redistributed.
Give it up, Hollywood, such watermarking is a lost cause!!!!
I also suggest that they stop selling popcorn. I pay to experience a theatre's sound system too, you know.
I virtually never buy anything other than a movie ticket when I go see a movie. Theater (chain) owners need to bring the concession prices down or secure a better cut of the box office income from the movie distributors in order to increase their profits.