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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."
Wireless my friend, wireless. A microwave link goes over the 10s of kilometres at the lowest end, and the bandwidth is great.
That's a fast VPN.. 5 Gigabytes in 20 minutes works out to about 4.3 Megabytes/second, or 34 Megabits/second.
60hz =! 60fps!
tv scans every second line so 60hz is only 30 fps
TV is actually only 30fps interlaced. One pass updates every other horizontal line, and the next pass updates the remaining lines, so there is the illusion of 60fps.
You are comparing apples and oranges
TV does not have 60 fps. It just projects the image 60 times per second. This marks a fundamental difference between TV and cimema projection:
* Cinemas project *the entire image* during the whole frame-time. The small blacks during image shifts are taken care of by your eyes (ever wondered why you do not see blackness when you blink normally?)
* TV only projects a very small part of the image at the same time, and relies on afterglow of the projected area to make the image appear. By increasing the rate of the electron bundle, you get a more consistent brightness (less afterglow needed) and your image perception will improve.
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.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
It's pretty difficult to crack the encryption if you don't have a license already. If you do have a license, it's pretty easy to strip the DRM from it by unencrypting it. There are tools out to strip DRM from audio files for which you have license files. I haven't been able to find tools that do the same for video files.
Reading the article comes in useful here as they are doing it via satellite.
It is actually 48 FPS (Sort of like interlaced) as while only 24 frames pass through the projector each is exposed to the projection lamp twice before being moved on.
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.
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.
The resolution of 35mm projection is amazingly bad. The area available for one image on film is just 16mm * 22mm, which is cropped to about 12mm * 22mm due to the widescreen format. That is a surface area of just 264 mm^2 on film, more than three times less than standard slides you take with your SLR camera. I don't know the technical details of the digital system in discussion but it should be no problem to beat 35mm film digitally.
When it comes to IMAX, it's another story...
Uh, of course mplayer is quite capable of displaying video with resolutions of 1440x1080p and 1280x720 on Linux today, using both WM9 DLLs and mplayer's built-in codecs.
7 /DRM/freemefix.aspx) which can circumvent the "security" of their media files.. Who do you think will bear the cost the next time Microsoft's format is broken? You can bet it won't be Microsoft! ;)
But, look at the mess that Microsoft's DRM has become, with tools such as freeme.exe (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/WM
I also hear from people with a real interest in it that Windows Media 9 is seriously better quality for the same bit rate than any of the Open Source formats. You may not like it, but M$ have identified multimedia, and particularly moving pictures, as a major driver for future development. They have spent real money developing their proprietary format and, from the reports I have heard, it works.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
The funny thing is that, since movies are taped 24 fps, movies on tv are often simply transmitting the 24 fps as 25 fps. A movie with a length of 1:40 will therefore only last 1:36 on tv. Of course, commercials stretch this to 2:30...
Since I haven't watched any tv in the last 10 years, I don't know if this still happens with the rise of digital technology, but I have checked this a couple of times when I still spent 2 hours per night on the couch in front of the boob tube.
This is simple not true. Can you tell if your monitor is refreshing at 60 or 100 hz? Yes. Otherwise there would be little point in having those refresh rates. Same goes for 100 hz televisions.
:P
In moving pictures the difference is quite clear as well. Being a demoscene kind of person I can asure you that I can tell the difference if say a tunnel is running at 35 or 70 fps.
Also Television is effectively 50 fps, as a single interlaced image contains two points in time.
The next time you watch a movie in a theater, try paying attention to what happens when the camera pans over some scene with objects close to you. It's not pretty. Sorry for ruining that part of your cinema experience
Ahh....No. Those are Changeover cues. Two of them at the end of each 20-minute reel, the first separated by eight seconds from the second, and the second about 3/4 of a second from the last frame. Gives projectionists using older equipment the signal to startup the incoming projector with the light path blocked, then, at the second cue, instantaneously switch image and sound from one projector to the other for the next reel. It's the way it was done up util about the 80s or so. Now most cinemas have only one machine and a film transport system called a platter that handles the entire print. The problem is that one operator now handles an entire huge multiplex and is running from one booth to another, so he or she can't be around to catch any problems. Coupled to the fact most of these operators couldn't count their balls/boobs and get the same number twice, and you have the reason that 35mm projection is often so bad, especially in smaller cinemas.
There are still many two-projector installations in the United States and Canada. I ran just about every one of them in Toronto in the 80s and 90s, and I still miss doing so to this day. Forget digital projection and stick with 35 and 70mm film. Just put properly-trained projectionists behind the equipment and the experience the movie-goer will get will be increased by an order of magnitude.
Cheers, Peter, W2IRT
The PAL system is a 50hz system as opposed to 60hz for NTSC (PAL has higher resolution than NTSC and better colors though) so movies shown in Europe are normally sped up by 4% to 25fps. When 24fps movies are broadcost in NTSC (or encoded onto DVDs) a special method called 3:2 pulldown is used. There is no speed increase when that method is used.
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.
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Actually, most of us *can't* see any higher than around 60hz. You might be able to, but you're the exception. Similar to people who have a better range of hearing. For most of us, 100hz televisions and moniters are completely unnecessary, not least because the input usually isn't 100hz anyways.
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Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world. It's larger than australia and the continental united states. Not to mention that it is filled with dense rainforest that makes travel almost impossible.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
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.
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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.
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