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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."
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.
More than mere navel gazing.
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.
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..
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
Tom's Hardware
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
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.
...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.
Read The Fine Article:
The majors are resistant to MPeg4 because since it is cheaper, uses smaller files and is easier to manipulate, the risk of piracy is seen as greater. For the time being, KinoCast machines will only be able to project independent and Brazilian movies, where there is less fear of piracy.
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
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
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
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
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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