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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."
Its nice to go to the Cinema and have amazing sound, now we can watch the films and not have scratchy, popping, projected images!
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?
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i'm just curious, why would linux/mplayer be probably better?
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.
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.
I suppose they were thinking about distribution to, say, Manaus, which is a big city in the middle of the Amazon. There are additional delivery costs either by air or by water. A digital delivery scheme would be faster and cheaper.
Nobody is building theaters where there is no basic infrastructure. There are just natural obstacles to be overcome, like the size of the country and the remoteness of some highly populated areas with good infrastructure.
This is exactly like the US. You can hire a plane to deliver your movies, or you can put bits down a backbone. Guess which is becoming increasingly more attractive.
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..
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)
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.
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. For high bitrates I believe MPEG-2 is actually better, so I am not sure why they propose MPEG-4 for this purpose.
K
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.
That's not why they won't be using the digital theater though. Seriously, who's going to be able to afford the $50,000 equipment and DSL connections when they don't have accessible roads. Obviously, this won't be an affluent area. How do the theater owners actually plan on making money off this?
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.
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.
20-25fps are sufficient with motion blur, which naturally occurs on motion film with long exposures. Film can start looking jittery when filmed in very bright outdoor scenes.
60fps on computer games can look jittery because there is no exposure. It's just a rendered frame at that exact instant in time, and because of this your eyes can pick up on the sudden changes between frames. The effect is called temporal aliasing.
Adding a motion blur, or simply blending with the previous frame can smooth out this affect.
This generally should not be a problem with film images projected digitally.
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
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 size of the country? At its widest, Brazil is about half as wide as California is tall. It's really not all that sizable. The real problem is that their Highways are laid out in the least logical style possible, and you can't truck things places in a reasonable amount of time. What takes us a few hours in the states, because we have highways running all over the place, will take you all day in Brazil. I think the other cost we're not considering here is duplication, it must cost quite a bit to make those big film reels, and then they're pretty large, so distributing a lot of them will be expensive.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Damn. I must have run Fight Club in the multiplexes a zillion times but I was never monitoring the sound when that exchange came up. Mind you, in 19 years doing it for a living I've never heard anybody call cue marks "cigarette burns."
As to splicing single frames of pr0n into features, it's a nice urban legend but in reality anybody even casually watching will notice the frame. Go back to the changeover cues we were just talking about -- each of the two cues is printed on 4 frames, or about 1/6th of a second. They HANG there on the screen. One frame of something totally different would be CLEARLY visible to even the most clueless observer.
Not to mention, the jump that would occur on the screen and the pop in the sound about a second and a third afterwards.
As for it being a shit job, you tell me...I've run probably 5,000 films or more, watched likely well over half of them and was paid a reasonable salary for the priviledge. At the height of my career in that industry I worked 5 days of 10-hour shifts one week and two days of 10-hour shifts the following week. I got to work with toys I loved, learned an incredible amount about electronics and sound and got to sleep in till the crack of noon most days.
I'd sell my left nut to do that today.
Cheers, Peter, W2IRT
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.
I hope you realize that sentence reads like a TV only works at 1 fps, this is wrong of course.
Alright, everybody seems confused about how TVs work. Well let me start by saying, yes, TVs do operate at 60 fps. You are getting 60 distinct frames of animation per second on a TV. But before you hit that reply button to tell me I'm wrong, keep reading.
TV's only have enough bandwidth to interpret 30 frames per second at 720 by 480 resolution. In order to achieve this higher frame rate, they halved the resolution vertically and doubled the frame rate. So in one second, in interlaced mode, you're getting 60 half-res frames per second. They are half frames, but there are also still 60 distinct frames of animation. This is not an illusion, nor is it a trick to keep your eyes from noticing the flicker. It really is 60 frames per second. (Sorry for being redundant, but man I can't believe how many people have commented on this so far.)
So now to address what you've said:
Yes, this is basically true. Films run at 24 fps progressive scan. And yes, your eyes retain the light long enough that you don't see flickers. But to add to this, it's important to know that each frame is thrown up twice. The result is actually 48fps. No, this is NOT like the TV example above. You don't get 48fps of motion, even interlaced, you get 24 fps of motion displayed at 48 fps so that you get less light flicker. (Note: From what I understand, this may only be true on certain projectors, been a while since I looked into it.)
This is not true. Human eyes can percieve motion all the way up to 100fps. What you are describing is not the same thing as frame rate. It has to do with retention of light. When you get into the 20 fps range, you stop seeing flicker and start seeing blur. Things may streak, that doesn't mean you're not getting temporal resolution in there. I guess it's sort of like watching an LCD do 60 fps video. Notice it ghosts a little? You're still getting 60 distinct frames per second of video, but it gets a little ghosty.
No argument here. It supports my above point.
This is not a logical conclusion to draw. First, your understanding is flawed. Second, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, just on this site alone. Show somebody a game running at 30 fps, then at 60 fps, and the gamer will say "that one is smoother". Ask anybody who works in animation. Ask anybody who works in broadcast. Yes, 60fps video on a movie screen will be noticable. You know how I know this? Because my local theater has a digital projector for showing commercials before a movie. They were running at 60fps, and it was quite different than the cinematic look. I wasn't the only one who noticed that.
"Derp de derp."