UK to Build Network of 150 Digital Cinemas

mikael writes "According to this article at the BBC, a network of 250 digital screens in 150 cinemas across the country is being planned. Each film is losslessly compressed from 1 Terabyte down to 100 Gigabytes and encrypted onto a portable hard disk drive with a key unique to each cinema, which is then delivered to the cinema. Each cinema projector will be capable of showing films at resolutions of 2048 x 1080 pixels. "The key benefit is the distribution and screening of documentaries, British and foreign language films, as making a digital copy is considerably cheaper than spending over £1500 pounds to make a copy of a single film". Other benefits include better picture quality and the ability to show more films each day." The UK Film Council has a brief overview of the project as well.

Comments

Now how long

[ICECommander]

will a 100GB digital to DivX rip take?

Re:Now how long

[HawkinsD]

Presumably each file is digitally watermarked, so that rips could be identified as having originated in one particular projection booth.

So... what do you do, as a theater owner, knowing that your ass is personally on the line if pirate copies of your copy of the movie appear?

If it were my theater, I'd have the only key to the server room, which would be the only place that the hard drive would do any good.

Since the data has to flow from the server room to the projector when the movie is being shown, I'd enforce access logs on the server, so I could tell if the file had been read at times other than showtime.

But that still doesn't stop the $8/hour projectionist from installing a device that intercepts the data, copies it, and then passes it along to the projector.

Are there such things as video projectors that accept an encrypted stream of data?

Re:Now how long

[LnxAddct]

If its found to be watermarked, the scheme becomes slightly more complex. If the watermark is undetectable, or not easily able to be found (which they aren't supposed to be, correct?) You need someone else at another unrelated theater to grab a digital copy as well. Assuming both are digital copies, then a frame by frame comparison should point out any watermarks. A little manual (or scripted) touching up will take care of it.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Now how long

[Anonymous Coward]

that doesn't stop someone from camming the movie.
there are watermarks in some US movies.. the first one that comes to mind is my boss' daughter.

it had lil dots on random scenes.

http://static.vcdquality.com/sample/id18919.jpg

Re:Now how long

[Anonymous Coward]

I noticed those in Constantine, wondered if it was a watermarking scheme. Slightly annoying.

Re:Now how long

[russint]

But that still doesn't stop the $8/hour projectionist from installing a device that intercepts the data, copies it, and then passes it along to the projector.

Wouldn't it be both cheaper and easier if you just payed the projectionist a fair wage?

Re:Now how long

[HawkinsD]

Wow, that's a really good idea. But the person doing the copying would have to give a crap about whether it was traceable.

The more I think about this, the less I would want to be a theater owner with one of these machines. To much opportunity to get sued into oblivion.

Re:Now how long

[teledyne]

Or it could be as easy as signing for it from the FedEx guy, and walking out. Seriously, it has happened in the past in the theater that I had worked at. But it was alright, we got another can o' film the next day.

Re:Now how long

[Anonymous Coward]

What projectionist?

She'll be redundant. That's one of the selling points of digital.

Re:Now how long

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming both are digital copies, then a frame by frame comparison should point out any watermarks.

Not necessarily!

Assume the pixels of the movie come in a stream M. Now assume you have a pseudorandom sequence P1 that tells you which pixels to add your watermark data to. That gives you a pixel stream M' which is mostly zeros except for the watermark. You distribute M + M' = M1 to the first theatre.

Now do the same with another copy of the movie, with a different pseudorandom sequence P2. This sequence is uncorrelated with P1. You get another set of pixels M'' which have watermark data. M' and M'' are "mostly disjoint". Now do M+M'' and get M2.

There is no operation you could do with two movies that would remove the watermarks. You could only add a second watermark to the movie.. Example:

Subtract the two movies: M1-M2 = M + M' - M - M'' = M'-M'' .. you get a stream of random bits which represents the two watermarks, but with one "inverted".

Average the movies: (M1+M2)/2 = M + (M' + M'')/2 .. now you've added a second watermark to the movie. The MPAA will put the smack down on BOTH of you.

However, there's something in that last one.. what if you did this with all 150 movies? (M1 + M2 + .. M150)/150 = M + a tiny bit of noise representing all the watermarks averaged together.

Would this work? I don't know. They could easily thwart this too, by making sure the frames of the movies weren't identical. They could film at a higher frame rate, and then downsample to a slightly lower framerate, which would make sure each movie's frames were completely different. I don't know enough to contemplate the effectiveness of this. They could even downsample non-uniformly across frames with another pseudorandom sequence and it would be extremely difficult to reconstruct the original M, let alone remove the watermark. So if you tried the trick you would just get noise.

Re:Now how long

[whitis]

Are there such things as video projectors that accept an encrypted stream of data?

The article mentions custom projectors so I suspect that is exactly what they are going to do. A fairly standard projector may be packaged with the decryption and possibly decompression apparatus in a tamper resistant enclosure that not only is secured by high security locks but also has the private key stored in battery backed RAM with tamper switches that remove power to the RAM when the case is opened. The projector bulb would have to be located in a non secure compartment of the enclosure or even externally.

They could encrypt the data before or after compression. Encrypt first then compress would allow the decompression to be handled by a very powerful computer or other apparatus outside the projector but is not likely to be practical since the encryption would interfere with the compression. It would also require the compression process to be rerun for each copy which would be expensive. Effective watermarks, which could be detected after a pirated movie had been DiVX compressed would also require each copy to be compressed separately.

Since a theater can have more than one projector and the movie might not always be shown on the same screen, they would need to encrypt the movie for each private key at a theater.

With film, the theater has to send the film back after it has finished showing which puts limits on how much the theater can lie about how many screenings it had. If they were paranoid, they could use keys that only worked at a particular time on a particular day so the theater would have to license each showing individually some time in advance. Or, they could use single use keys that the projector would reject after one showing. The projector could also take audit logs that it could save onto an SD card and distributors could require weekly copies of the logs.

Since public key systems normally are just used to safely transport a symetric key, licensing the film could be done after the hard drive had been sent or at least after it had been encoded. Thus, they could make thousands of copies of the film, each with a separate symetric key, on as many hard drives long before they knew what theaters they would be shipping those hard drives to.

While hard drives are cheaper than film, there is another cost saving to be had. The hard drives can be recycled after the film has finished playing in theaters or even immediately after the film has been copied to local servers.

All of this protection (other than the watermark) is likely to be somewhat moot as a projectionist can simply insert a 1% reflector into the beam of the projector and direct the beam into a camera to make a sufficiently high quality copy for internet distribution or, with good enough equipment, for pirate DVDs.

Re:Now how long

[LnxAddct]

The idea is to remove any pixels that don't match and fill those values in with a null or random pixel that is neither one or the other. Assuming the watermark doesn't make the visual appearance of the movie any different, this won't be a problem. The thing is though, if they set each watermark at a different offset then they could just see which two offsets are changed and still trace it back. To overcome that, you'd need to scatter various random watermarks of null or random pixels through out the entire video. Done properly, a viewer will never know, but a movie studio would be hard pressed to trace it back to anyone and even if they did, the legal case would be weak arguing that two null watermarks out of 1000 null watermarks matches an offset they chose. Honestly, the method really depends on how they implement the watermark feature, but it can be overcome if you can grab two copies, although inserting random watermarks into even just one video might suffice. It's not about getting the original film, its just about stopping it from being traced, while retaining quality in the film.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Now how long

[markxz]

The watermarking would have to survive the reduction in quality associated with the resolution/bitrate change.

Current cinematic releases (on 35mm film) have the print number visible encoded on the film Slashdot artical

However since very little pirecy is associated with cinema staff (most are from screener disks sent to reviewers) then it is mostly inefective but irretating for viewers (the coding is also thought not to work)

Re:Now how long

[squiggleslash]

This is easy to defeat: put the water mark on every frame (encoded differently each time, obviously. One way to do this is to add a random salt that changes on each frame and then encrypt the salt plus the identifier using something off the shelf like SHA. That way a mad hacking projectionist can't identify a fixed image to be removed from every frame.)

If the watermark is positioned at a random place on each frame too, and has very little apparent effect on the luminosity of the image, it'll probably not be noticed by the vast majority of cinemagoers. The more consistant quality of digital indeed may be enough to counter the loss of quality from the marks.

Re:Now how long

[Fred_A]

What are you, a communist ?

What's next ? taking care of the elderly ? Building schools ? Paying taxes ?

Re:Now how long

[LnxAddct]

The fix for this is too simply throw in your own random watermarks on every frame all over the place. If done properly you'll be guaranteed to overwrite their watermark to the point where it is no longer comprehensible, while retaining visual clarity of the film. I'm no expert in watermarking technologies, not even really sure how they are implemented, I'm just talking from my background in information theory. If they can add something to a film that is not visibly detectable to the naked eye, then so can you, and you can guarantee that your's overrides theirs.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Now how long

[Oktober Sunset]

projectionist? what projectionist? why would a digital prjector need a projectionist? what would they do? press the on switch, and sit on their ass for 2 hours? and if you needed to ajust the focus, there would be no need for someone to be near the projector to do that, so no oppertunity to tamper with it would arise.

Re:Now how long

[KlomDark]

Math people suck... :)

Re:Now how long

[Zeinfeld]

However since very little pirecy is associated with cinema staff (most are from screener disks sent to reviewers) then it is mostly inefective but irretating for viewers (the coding is also thought not to work)

You jest surely. There are cases where a projectionist has had someone come up to them in a new car and offer to hand over the keys in exchange for a loan of a print. The only way to pirate a film that has not been released on DVD is to borrow a print. Screener copies may be the source of bit-torrent piracy but that is small beer compared to the Russian mob.

But not for these movies.

Digital cinema is not economic for the large budget large gross movies the pirates want to steal. The cost of striking a print is easily recouped after a few days. A digital projector costs a serious amount of money, about $20K-$50K. You can get a 35 mm projector and a cakestand for $5K and all the theatres have them already anyway.

What this is about is making it easy to show short runs of movies that are distinctly minority interest that do not justify the cost of striking a print, shipping it arround etc. Properly preparing a 35mm print to show it is about 3 hours work for a good print and for some of the worn out crap prints that are common on the art house circuit it can take 12 hours or more to do a repair job. It takes a large staff to keep changing the program for each screening quite apart from the cost factor.

The distribution systems will probably be set up to encode the print for the specific decryption box at a particular location. If the decryption box is built into the projector it is not possible to subvert the signal without taking that apart which will be noticed soon enough.

Re:Now how long

[X0563511]

Not to mention, if the watermark was so undetectable, it would be fragile. Encoding to XVID would probably destroy the watermark.

Re:Now how long

[X0563511]

Well, in the USA, it is now a Federal Offense to bring in and record during a show.

It's out of control.

I can understand making it illegal, but a FEDERAL offense?

That's great.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Cinerama called, and would like to welcome them to the 21st century.

Digital vs. Film

[Orphaze]

Isn't 2048 x 1080 significantly less than regular movie film as far as resolution goes?

Re:Digital vs. Film

[EnderWigginsXenocide]

Film canned at 3000DPI is assumed to have all useable details captured. If the film this is replacing is 35mm (1 x 1.5 inches)then a resolution of 3000x4500 is required for replacement. 2048x1080 falls a bit short.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[JKR]

Yes, it's rougly equal to US HDTV in terms of resolution - good, but significantly worse than film when projected several metres across. The vertical line spacing is going to be approximately 3mm...

Jon.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[Creepy Crawler]

Err... Most places use film, an analog medium. You cant get "bitrate" or resolution out of them, as they have infinite resolution.

Then again, Im pretty sure I'd be happy with that quality..

Re:Digital vs. Film

[Velox_SwiftFox]

Not exactly infinite resolution. There's a grain size, the whole grain changes color when exposed, so it is effectively an irregular pixel.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[kyouteki]

They do not have infinite resolution! It's really high, but not infinite. Film works when light changes the state of tiny crystals on the film...consider each one a pixel.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Right, so we don't really need the library of congress at all then, do we? Contact Creepy Crawler and he'll put all of the information ever recorded in the world onto a single 'infinite resolution' 35mm frame...

Re:Digital vs. Film

[0123456]

Um, one slight problem. If you shoot digital and project digigtal, the final projected image is what you shot in the camera with an extra compression step on top.

If you shoot 35mm film, you get your negative, you cut the negative, you create a duplicate of the negative, then you create more duplicate negatives from that, then you finally create prints from those duplicate negatives. So by the time it gets to the cinema screen it's not unusual for a 35mm print to have gone through four or five _analogue_ copying stages from the original film negative.

As a result, the resolution of a final 35mm print is almost certainly substantially less than 2048x1080, whereas digital holds that resolution from start to finish (absent crappy compression schemes).

Re:Digital vs. Film

[Creepy Crawler]

True. You have to combine lens irregularity, packed-ness of the sensors on the camera (like for CCD's) and other real-world quality reducing effects.

Just most people just dont get the difference between analog data and digital data. Just saying analog data is like infinite bitrate is easier and get sthe point across (without the esoterics).

Re:Digital vs. Film

[Creepy Crawler]

Im sure you can put the library of congress onto 1 frame of 35 mm film.

You just need equipment to store the data and equipment to retrieve it.

Its the same argument used by the "Infinite Frequency" wonks who say you just need better equipment to store more data (when Nyquist says no).

Re:Digital vs. Film

[mcg1969]

I saw the movie "National Treasure" on a 2048x1080 digital cinema projector. Resolution looked fine to me; it was the contrast level that suffered a bit. But overall, the image was as good as you typically get from a mainstream theater.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[donglekey]

2048x1080 should be enough to look better than 35mm in most situations. Film scanned at 4k produces a blurry, grainy 4k image. Film scanned at 2k from original negatives is still somewhat soft and grainy, and the actual part that makes it into the final projection is a cropped version of the 35mm film (and at 2:1) it would be severely cropped) Digital projection at that resolution will be much better because it doesn't have the generation loss from 2nd and 3rd generation prints that are shown in theatres, and it won't have any of the wear and tear that happens eighther. If digital intermediates are used on a film, the digital projection could look better than the first generation print.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if that is sorted out, you have molecule size as a hard limit, but the lack of perfect focus alone should limit detail before that.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[Anonymous Coward]

Just most people just dont get the difference between analog data and digital data.

And you would be among them. You didn't say "infinite bitrate" initially; you said "infinite resolution." And analog film most certainly does NOT have that. It does indeed have finite resolution.

And once you get a proper estimate of spatial resolution and color resolution, you can arrive at a very reasonable and defensible estimate of the 'bitrate' of analog film---thanks to our good friend Nyquist, though of course I suppose that would be a bit 'esoteric' now, wouldn't it?

Alternately, another way of looking at it is that a sufficiently high resolution digital source can match the picture quality of film in subjective tests. Once you get to that point, it is entirely reasonable to suggest that analog film has an "effective bitrate" or "effective resolution" of approximately that amount.

Just saying analog data is like infinite bitrate is easier and get the point across (without the esoterics).

Only if you're trying to get the wrong point across, I agree.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[Velox_SwiftFox]

Anyway, give me disk platters with the surface area of that whole set of reels of 70MM strips of film, and I'll give you better resolution that that film can offer.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[Kiryat Malachi]

Nyquist can't do it on his own. Nyquist can tell you your sampling rate; you'll need to add Shannon for sampling depth.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[dougjm]

Then again, Im pretty sure I'd be happy with that quality..

I totally agree. Film has a double edge to it, on one side is its (almost) infinte resolution but OTOH it fades every time you expose it to the really bright projector light. That means that new big blockbusters that get hammered over the first weekend of showings look absolutely awfull come Monday, almost to the point that you wouldn't want to see the film in that condition - certainly not for £5!!

But even in small cinemas the digital revolution will be a great thing too.I visited the small indepengant cinema near me the other day. In the 40 seat "screen 3" that i was in they have this old projector that outputs a picture thats smaller and no brighter than a 2000 ansi lummen desktop data projector - which you can buy for easily under £2000. I'm sure that you'd want something better for a cinema of course but you get the idea.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[yincrash]

the post mentions that the compression is lossless. so the projection should be the same, pixel for pixel, as what the camera sees.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[badasscat]

If you shoot 35mm film, you get your negative, you cut the negative, you create a duplicate of the negative, then you create more duplicate negatives from that, then you finally create prints from those duplicate negatives. So by the time it gets to the cinema screen it's not unusual for a 35mm print to have gone through four or five _analogue_ copying stages from the original film negative.

Er, ignoring digital editing systems that cut at least one step out of that process, I'm not sure where you're getting "four or five" analogue copying stages even out of your own example.

"You get your negative" - this is the original film. "You cut your negative" - this is still the original film. "You create a duplicate of the negative" - ok, this is copy 1. "You create more duplicate negatives" - this is copy 2. You're not making copies of copies, you're making a bunch of copies from one original. "You finally create prints from those duplicate negatives" - this is copy 3. So, only three copies are made through the most laborious process possible - and digital editing systems cut one copy out of that.

Not to mention that film has been around for more than 100 years and so much R&D and technological advancement has gone into it over that time that the quality loss is really minimal through every stage. Sure, if you kept making copies of copies of copies of copies, eventually you'd see a real resolution difference from the original; but you won't in any commercial film.

As a result, the resolution of a final 35mm print is almost certainly substantially less than 2048x1080, whereas digital holds that resolution from start to finish (absent crappy compression schemes).

Different film stocks have different grain properties, and it's the size and distribution of the grains (the crystals) that hold the detail in analog film. Some film stocks have more than 3,000 crystals per inch, some have less. But all would be significantly and noticeably higher in resolution and detail than 2048x1080 digital resolution even after the production process was complete and all copies made.

I have seen several commercial films shot, edited and projected digitally - including Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and the last Star Wars. They looked good - cleaner than film prints, surely - but there was noticeable and obvious (to me) pixelization and aliasing throughout the films. Most people probably wouldn't have noticed and/or cared, especially in the absence of the analog "noise" caused by film grain, but it was clear to me that either the projection system or the films themselves did not have the actual resolution of their film counterparts. I don't know what the resolution of the projection systems used in the US is, but I doubt it's much (if at all) lower than 2048x1080.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[Anonymous Coward]

As a result, the resolution of a final 35mm print is almost certainly substantially less than 2048x1080

I doubt it. With some work, an amateur can get 100 lines per mm with 35 mm camera film. I'd expect that a pro studio would be similar.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[x2A]

I have seen several commercial films shot, edited and projected digitally - including Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

Final Fantasy was shot digitally?!!

Re:Digital vs. Film

[The Bender]

TFA, however, says:

"Fiona Deans, associate director of AADC, said the compression was visually lossless so no picture degradation will occur."

Which aint the same.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[mcc]

"Roughly equal to US HDTV"?

Well that's it then, isn't it?

It honestly seems lately like the film industry is trying to do absolutely everything in their power to dissuade me from going to movies. They show me loud and annoying commercials from the moment I walk in the theatre until 10 minutes after the movie is supposed to start, then show MPAA trailers that literally outright insult me mixed in with the previews. I have to go see the movie when they demand it, since anything that hasn't made a bajillion dollars by the end of the first weekend gets pulled from theaters permanently these days. And they've started overlaying on some-- but we don't know which!-- projections a bizarre flickering that is apparently enough to obliterate any attempt to film the movie, but we're for some reason supposed to believe won't consciously or subconsciously effect our enjoyment of the movie.

Now apparently they're going to start showing us nothing more than HDTV on a really big screen. And they're expecting us to pay a premium price for this.

Ever since The Commercials Unending started I've found it increasingly difficult to make myself go to the movies even when there's something out I want to see. Pretty soon I don't think I'm going to be able to make myself go at all.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[drooling-dog]

As a result, the resolution of a final 35mm print is almost certainly substantially less than 2048x1080

Suppose the screen is 10 meters wide. Then each of those 2048 pixels are going to be about 5mm square, which I think would be fairly noticable from anywhere near the front of the theater...

Re:Digital vs. Film

[NormalVisual]

The resolutions of the different DLP systems in use in the US can vary, as TI offers different micromirror chips in different resolutions for large-venue and cinema applications. Having had the good fortune to see "Attack of the Clones" and a number of other films at the local DLP theater (at 1280x1080 IIRC), I agree with your assessment - if you look closely, you can see the pixels and aliasing, although I don't find it particularly objectionable. Overall, I find it a better experience than real film.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. So I can get better resolution out of buying a 30-inch LCD screen from a wholesale vendor than Britain's "specialized" system of theatres achieves?

I'll take the 2560 x 1600 pixels display, please.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[StrawberryFrog]

film ... have infinite resolution

Film is made of molecules, which are made of atoms. Atoms are not infinitely small. Film therefor has finite resolution. You should know this.

So which is higher? You cannot assume that the analogue sytem has higher resolution
For instance, Cds store music to a greater level of detail than vinyl LPs do, due to limitations of the processes used to record music as wobbles in the grooves in the vinly. (60 Db dynamic range on vinyl, 96 dB on a CD).

Re:Digital vs. Film

[SunFan]

Outside of big releases with people dressed up like Jar Jar for the opening night and $1 family day at the movies, movie theatres are largely obselete. Last time we went to a movie, we ended up spending $25 for two people for, what, two hours? Amusement parks are cheaper per hour than that, and even they are way too expensive! ($50+/person/day to hug Mickey is just plain idiotic, IMO)

Re:Digital vs. Film

[Anonymous Coward]

So, only three copies are made through the most laborious process possible...

You've obviously never been to the Technicolor labs... :)

When I was doing reel review I was suprised at how different each reel coming off the line could look. I mean, I wasn't pulling every copy of every reel, but they'd set me up with, say, 7 or 8 copies of reel 3 of a movie and I'd watch them back to back in a theater. The most telling thing, and something I learned a bit more about when I started taking photography classes, was how the colors might shift depending on the age and temperature of the chemistry being used to develop it. Yeah, they have fairly tight processes in place, but they do a lot of compensation in the printing to strive for consistency and in a lot of cases, it's really best guess. Digial alleviates that.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[cybercyph]

the 35mm editing process: the camera negative is printed once. This print is edited. alternately, the camera negative is telecinied, and edited digitaly. Once the edit has been made, the camera negative is cut to match the digital edit or first print. This is done by the person you see credited as "Negative Cutter" The negative is printed once, to create an interpositive. the interpositive is printed a few times, 5 or 6, normally, to create internegatives. These internegatives are used to create the release prints, which are what you see in the theaters. in the case of optical effects-- fades, dissolves, titles, old-school green screen, etc., two extra generations are added, but ONLY for the shot which contains the optical effect. the optical negative is printed with the cut camera negative to make the interpositive.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[cybercyph]

I completely agree with your post. Living in Hollywood, I have the luxery of having options-- I personally only watch films at The Arclight, where you pay slightly more than elsewhere, but don't have to put up with ads. The glass on their projectors is 100 times better than the theaters i grew up with, and it shows.

The film industry will see this sort of backlash, when HD goes mainstream, and it will innovate. The theaters wil turn away from what they have become, or many will fail. When TV first came out, the filmmakers responded by giving you what you couldn't get at home: color, widescreen, stereo, then surround sound. Now we can get all of that at home.

This is one reason I don't see digital projection taking root. Sure, they can hype it and market it as something good-- but any side-by-side comparrison of film-originated material will obviously reveal film projection to be far superior. I hope people realize that. As for the people saying 2k is good enough for 35mm-- If you live in LA or New York, swing by kodak and ask when they screen their example films. If you can't do that, go watch a film like House of Flying Daggers. What you'll see is a 2k DI-- a film that was scanned at usually 4k, and then laser-scanned out to film at 2k. The laser scanning process is just about as generation-loss-free as can be. Having seen the differences, I can instantly tell you whether a film i'm seeing in a theater was a DI or a traditional film edit, it's night and day. Film editing, film releasing, and film acquiring are nowhere near dead, and won't be for a long, long time.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[cybercyph]

*luxury
*will
*comparison

(preview would have been my friend. Whoops.)

Re:Digital vs. Film

[kd5ujz]

The part about repeated use is very true. The first time I went to a local Century Theater, the stupid advertisments they play at the first of the movie ( not the pre-views, these are local ads) had been run threw one to many times, the quality was VERY bad, and looked terrible. I was upset, untill the movie started, as I was afraid it would look just as bad. The movie looked fine. These are projected from seperate projectors, and you could tell the ad projector needed a cleaning, as there were hairs, or something, on the lens causing bad picture quality.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[sulli]

Yes. If it's anything like the Star Wars Episode 2 I saw in digital a few years ago, it will be obvious to the viewer that they are looking at a big-ass HDTV projector instead of a film.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[TheSync]

US HDTV is under 19 Mbps MPEG-2 compression, and I've seen some DBS providers go down to near 10 Mbps (yuck!).

For Digital Cinema, they are actually talking about much better quality (even if the resolution is the same)

Re:Digital vs. Film

[mcc]

Hmm. But they aren't so much competing with television here exactly, are they? They're competing with HDDVD and Blu-ray. Compared to those, how well does this hold up?

Re:Digital vs. Film

[Anonymous Coward]

I work as a visual effects artist.

By the time 35mm film is projected, it is certainly below 2K in resolution. I have seen side by side tests of 35mm scanned in and projected A from a cinema print and B straight from the digital scans out a digital 2K projector. The digital projector has higher resolution. You see the full 2K pixels. With a cinema print you see about 1600 pixels worth of detail. I know what I'm looking for and a cinema print does not match 35mm for resolution, grain and stability. Colour and dynamic range is another story though! 35mm still has an edge there.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[cei]

A note and a question:

The digital projector at Grauman's Chinese Theater is probably the best in town, as far as lumens go at least.

I was under the impression that most major releases were using a DI process now days?

Re:Digital vs. Film

[KlomDark]

Not true. Although there is much less distortion with CDs, a vinyl album will reproduce higher frequencies than CD, which cuts out around 22 KHz, which they say is above human hearing. Except for people with asthma, who top out around 30 KHz. Not sure what the deal is with Asthma giving you better hearing.

dB refers to (think of it as signal strength or just loudness), rather than resolution.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[Zeinfeld]

Film canned at 3000DPI is assumed to have all useable details captured. If the film this is replacing is 35mm (1 x 1.5 inches)then a resolution of 3000x4500 is required for replacement. 2048x1080 falls a bit short.

Although 35mm photography and cinema use the same film stock the orientation is different. Still photography has the long side of the image parallel to the direction of the film advance. Cinema (except for IMAX) has the image oriented perpendicular. So the image area is about 0.75 x 1" or 2250 x 3000 pixels or about 6 Megapixels.

The 2 Megapixel projectors are certainly not optimal and much higher resolutions are used for editing but reducing from 6 to 2 Megapixel is not a major issue. People do not complain much about the use of anamorphic lenses for widescreen.

If you go close up to the screen in most commercial cinema the picture will be so out of focus you will not notice the difference in any case. The massive amount of heat put out by a Xeon arc means that the lenses heat up during the show and their optical characteristics change. Very few commercial cinemas have projectionists who check the focus at the start of a show, let alone after the projector has heated up.

The bigger constraint on the projectors is going to be the amount of light that they can throw.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Comparing the resolution and color representation of film and current DLP (the most common cinema projection systems) is a bit misleading.

Yes, clean film stock run on properly maintained and configured equipment is currently superior to DLP in resolution and color representation, not to mention the random ordering of the grain which increases apparent resolution further.

However, most film is poorly cared for and projected on equipment that is outdated, misconfigured, or broken.

One of the three cinemas in my city has decent projectionists. Gate jitter is minimal, there aren't poor splices or lines on the film, the film is clean, the aspect ratio is properly set, and the DTS decoder is configured properly.

This is the exception - not the norm. At many theaters, gate jitter is exceptionally annoying, the film is dusty or scratched, and the sound is rarely properly configured. Sometimes even the aspect ratio is wrong.

Digital cinema eliminates these problems. It's "idiot proof". That's why it provides a better experience to the typical audience.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[EditDroid]

Different film stocks have different grain properties, and it's the size and distribution of the grains (the crystals) that hold the detail in analog film. Some film stocks have more than 3,000 crystals per inch, some have less.

And because of the random distribution of grain, the effective resolution of a moving film image increases over time. In a digital image, the pixels are always in the same place, so even if a 2K digital still was comparable to a frame of 35mm negative (which it isn't), the subjective resolution of the moving film image would be higher.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[StrawberryFrog]

a vinyl album will reproduce higher frequencies than CD, which cuts out around 22 KHz, which they say is above human hearing.

Correct. The figure given is the upper limit of human hearing is 20KHz, and for a middle-aged male nearer 15kHz

Except for people with asthma, who top out around 30 KHz. Not sure what the deal is with Asthma giving you better hearing.

I've never heared of that, and a quick google turns up nothing on it. To be frank, it sounds daft. I get asthma sometimes and it does nothing for my hearing. Can you supply a reference for this remarkable claim?

dB refers to (think of it as signal strength or just loudness), rather than resolution.

Yes, and dynamic range of Db (what I was using) refers to the ratio between the loudest and the softest sound that can be recorded at the same time on the same medium. It is a measure of resolution. Cds outclass vinyl here. What's more, vinyl gets worse over time and with use. Cds don't.

So exactly what part of my post was not true?

Re:Digital vs. Film

[cybercyph]

It's becoming more common, but not the majority. When I went to a Kodak DI demo 3 or 4 months ago, the number they gave us was 60-- DI releases, ever. That may have been a bit low, but that's what they said.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[dunstan]

The massive amount of heat put out by a Xeon arc

Interesting slip-up. That's Xenon arc, of course.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[preservation1]

4k is required to digitise 35mm prints, not 2k so the quality of this is certainly going to be suspect.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[KlomDark]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD= Display&DB=pubmed

Backtracking now? You were using the term "resolution" to refer to the frequency response of CDs, not signal strength.

Never said anything about vinyl getting (or not getting) worse over time. It does, so what?

Re:Digital vs. Film

[KlomDark]

Correction: You were using "resolution" to refer to the signal intensity.

However, signal intensity does not indicate frequency response. While you have more control over signal intensity with a CD, you can record a higher frequency onto vinyl.

Not to say that you cannot record higher frequencies digitally, but with the 44 Khz sample rate standard used by CDs, you are pretty much stuck at a max frequency of 22 KHz. 44 KHz sample divided by two channels.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[triso]

Not to say that you cannot record higher frequencies digitally, but with the 44 Khz sample rate standard used by CDs, you are pretty much stuck at a max frequency of 22 KHz. 44 KHz sample divided by two channels.

Sorry but the number of channels recorded has nothing to do with the highest frequency a CD can produce. It is the same for quad, 5.1 and 6.1 recordings.

Google up "Nyquist's Sampling Theorem" for details.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[StrawberryFrog]

Correction: You were using "resolution" to refer to the signal intensity.

Yes, or more precisely to refer to the ratio between the loudest and softest sound that can be recorded at the same time.

but with the 44 Khz sample rate standard used by CDs, you are pretty much stuck at a max frequency of 22 KHz

So. What. None of us can hear that high-pitched.

Re:Digital vs. Film

[StrawberryFrog]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD= Display&DB=pubmed


That's a medical database. You haven't specified any search terms. Entering "asthma hearing" as search terms shows such highly relevant matches as "Incidence and outcome of congenital cytomegalovirus infection in selected groups of preterm and full-term neonates" and "mitochondrial DNA mutation and age related maculopathy".

Backtracking now?

Look, I'm open-minded but skeptical. I'd like to see evidence. Really.

The real question

[captain igor]

Is when will it be in my LIVING ROOM *drools at high res goodness*

Re:The real question

[Anonymous Coward]

When you get evicted and live under some seats on the cinema floor.

Re:The real question

[TheRaven64]

A couple of hours after the projectionist has finished recompressing it as MPEG-4 (maybe H.264), and published the .torrent, I would imagine...

Re:The real question

[Physician]

The highest HDTV resolution is 1920x1080. This is barely better than that with a resolution of 2048x1080. So just buy an HDTV and wait for the blu-ray discs to come out late this year or early next year. You'll have basically the same thing as the theatre.

Re:The real question

[Daengbo]

The popcorn won't be as good...

Re:The real question

[Anonymous Coward]

HDTV has basically the same resolution and for 30 grand you can get a Sony Qualia-004 Projector which does native 1920x1080.

Impressive

[SafteyMan]

From the Article:

The new network will double the world's total of digital screens.

Wow, thats pretty impressive. i'm actually quite jealous. I wonder how long it will take for the states to get anything close to that.

Re:Impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

There are something like 3,500 screens in the US, maybe even closer to 4,000. Many newer ones will be built with the digital projectors. Many more will be retrofitted as renovations take place. 250, is a drop in the bucket, and I would be surprised if their figures were very out of date. The appropriate division of Boeing might be able to provide much more up to date numbers.

That said, compared to 3D IMAX, anything else is just gay.

Re:Impressive

[mumblestheclown]

As the imperial monkey seems to be oblivious to the importance of the fall of the dollar, at this rate we'll see more digital screns in tirana, chisinau, and bishkek before we see them in ralleigh durham.

/ oh, who am i kidding? the US spends every last penny on useless entertainment gadgetry.

Re:Impressive

[Bazman]

Dont worry, I'm sure the big features will still come out in the US several weeks before they appear here in the UK.

I went to Arizona to see The Phantom Menace before it came out over here. Sheesh was that a disappointment. At least I did get to see the Grand Canyon, which wasn't...

Re:Impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

How will this double the total digital screens when there are already ~100 screens in China and ~130 screens in India?

10:1 lossless video compression? I don't think so.

[mcg1969]

Subject says it all. There's something fishy about a feature film at 1080p24 compressed "losslessly" down to 100GB. That's 573GB (yes, bytes) per hour uncomrpessed, assuming 24 bits per pixel. Even D5 compression isn't lossless, and that's 5:1.

I doubt they mean truly lossless

[Kip Winger]

Converting even raw RGB video down to 1/10 the size, while leaving it lossless, is currently not possible using any compression known to man.

To get anywhere near that much, you have to at least convert it to the sum of cosines using Fast Fourier Transformation, which, since it distorts the data by converting it to not the exact amounts but the nearest amounts, is inherently lossy.

Any programmers in the UK want to start a lawsuit for false adverts?

Re:I doubt they mean truly lossless

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article

Fiona Deans, associate director of AADC, said the compression was visually lossless so no picture degradation will occur.

What does visually lossless mean anyway? I suspecr that this is not lossless at all. Many mp3's may be described as audibly lossless meaning that a human doesnt hear a difference. Not that no data is lost.

I suspect that the devil is in the detail here.

Mark

Re:I doubt they mean truly lossless

[Tjoppen]

At 2048x1080, the inter-pixel correlation is very high. So 10:1 compression is very much possible by fairly simple means..

For instance, I just(losslessly) compressed a 2048x1536 24bpp image from 9.00MiB to 1.96MiB using a laplachian pyramid and a simple mean value predictor piped through bzip2. I imagine with a somewhat better designed predictor, aswell as taking advantage of temporal redundancy, you could go as high as 20:1.

Also, the Discrete Cosine Transform(which is what M/JPEG uses) is lossless. The quantization step is what constitutes the "lossy" part.

You know...

[Creepy Crawler]

Perhaps the Media Companies really DO get it, but dont want to lets us know they do..

Still, I wonder exactly what scheme they use to play these.. And, if I work out the numbers...

100 GB for 2 hours. Thats 7200 seconds.

We dont know if thats GB or GiB, so lets assume its GB. 100GB/7200sec or 1 GB per 72 seconds. Thats about 13.9MB per second for all sound channels and video.

If they really do spend THAT much on making vinal film, why not instead hook up to a fiber optic network and transmit ALL films to a server at the theater?

Re:You know...

[TheRaven64]

Boeing developed a system a few years back that included all of the required projection equipment and received the film via (encrypted) satellite transmission. The idea was to buy cheap unused satellite bandwidth (non-realtime delivery, so it doesn't matter if higher-priority traffic interrupts your transfer for a bit) and use that to deliver the films. I believe at the time they were talking about using about 40GB films. These were compressed with MPEG-2, and there was visible artefacting even on a plasma display (although less than there would be with a DVD) - although the film they picked to demo it was Ice Age, which is full of sharp colour changes and so hardly the best to demonstrate DCT-based video compression...

Re:You know...

[pulitz]

The point isn't how much space it takes up per second -- simply consider that the average film will cost less than US$ 100 to reproduce, per copy, as storage is just so damn cheap nowadays. And that's substantially cheaper than £1500 for analogue film rolls. And certainly a whole lot more secure than fibre optic.

Re:You know...

[Anonymous Coward]

Attack of the Clones was also sent via the Boeing system. IIRC, the ~2 hour 20 minute feature ran at around 68 GB for digital cinema. (Don't recall the resolution they used in 2002, but the file size was about the same for Aveca, Qubit and Boeing's systems, I believe. The other systems were delivered encrypted on 16 DVD-Rs to be loaded onto the players.)

Camcorder...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean I won't need my camcorder anymore?

How far does 1 Terabyte go?

[Bryan Ischo]

2048 x 1080 = 2211840 pixels per frame

3 bytes per pixel (24 bit color) = 6635520 bytes per frame

24 frames per second (to match the framerate of regular film) = 159252480 bytes per second = 151.875 megabytes per second

1 terabyte = 1024 * 1024 megabytes = 1048576 megabytes

Therefore 1 terabyte is 6904.204 seconds of video

6094.204 / 60 = 115.070 minutes of video

That's just over 1 hour, 55 minutes of video.

Sounds pretty reasonable for most movies; I guess they'd need 2 hard drives for movies longer than that, which I guess wouldn't add all that much to the cost of distribution since a 100 Gb hard drive is what, 50 bucks?

I'd be more interested in learning what kind of hard drives they have that can read 151.875 Megabytes per second continuously. I'd imagine that if you don't use a filesystem and just stream raw video off of the drive it would help because the drive wouldn't do any seeking. Still, 151.875 Megabytes sustainable must require some kind of high end SCSI drive so I guess my original supposition of $50/hard drive must be off.

I'd say that this is an idea whose time has definitely come.

Re:How far does 1 Terabyte go?

[InfiniteWisdom]

If you want to read fast, you don't get one crazy-fast disk, you get several normal disks and read them in parallel.

Re:How far does 1 Terabyte go?

[morzel]

I'd be more interested in learning what kind of hard drives they have that can read 151.875 Megabytes per second continuously.

I think they use the portable HDs only for transporting the movie... For playing, the movie is probably decompressed and stored on the local RAID storage (which should be plenty fast).

If a 2h movie just takes 100GB, this can be easily done using an IP uplink.

Re:How far does 1 Terabyte go?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hard drives are free the just recycle the ones that are seized from the **AA! Some even come preloaded with videos.

Re:How far does 1 Terabyte go?

[ThisIsFred]

Sounds pretty reasonable for most movies; I guess they'd need 2 hard drives for movies longer than that, which I guess wouldn't add all that much to the cost of distribution since a 100 Gb hard drive is what, 50 bucks?

152 MB/s is way outside the sustained throughput that a cheap ATA drive could do, aside from the fact that those drives have poor reliability on the whole. That's even beyond the best case scenario for a transfer from cache on a SATA drive.

It has to be some custom hardware, and if it's a disc drive, the rotational speed would have to be very high, or the data density very high. I'd pay the ticket price just to see how this system works, to hell with the stupid movie.

Re:How far does 1 Terabyte go?

[ThisIsFred]

Sorry, I guess I should have RTFC before I posted, since I just echoed your thoughts.

Re:How far does 1 Terabyte go?

[RichM]

24 frames per second (to match the framerate of regular film) = 159252480 bytes per second = 151.875 megabytes per second

In the UK, the framerate is 25fps.

Re:10:1 lossless video compression? I don't think

[Anonymous Coward]

It says "visually lossless". That is marketingspeak for "awful quality but no man in the street will notice".
Compare to digital tv.

Resolution

[Omnicrola]

Granted, that's a pretty high resolution by most people's standards, but take into account that it's being projected onto a 30 ft or larger screen, and it seems (to me) that it's not a high enough resolution.
Someone once mentioned to me that the frames that Pixar renders out for it's films are something on the order of 4000 x Something resolution, which sounds a bit more comperable to film.

Re:Resolution

[0123456]

"Someone once mentioned to me that the frames that Pixar renders out for it's films are something on the order of 4000 x Something resolution"

Much of 'Toy Story 2' was rendered at 1280 x n resolution... I doubt anyone in the cinema noticed.

Re:Resolution

[TheRaven64]

The size of the screen is not important. What is important is the angle between the left edge of the screen, your head, and the right hand edge of the screen. While a cinema screen is bigger than your television (I assume), you (probably) sit a long way further back from the screen in the cinema than you do in your living room, making the effective size similar.

Re:Resolution

[dj_cel]

Here is a link talking about digital resolutions, they are using 2k resolution for this (asuming they aren't lying). http://www.cinematography.net/Pages%20DW/Defining2 K4K.htm

Re:Resolution

[NeMon'ess]

Except that in a large theater I like to sit about 7 to 10 rows from the front. That way the screen approximately fills my field of view. It's more immersive than sitting in the middle-to-back. Sitting that close I clearly see the grain and blur, though I do my best to ignore them so I can enjoy the flick. I saw The Phantom Menace on a big screen at 1280x1024 and even if I'd been sitting in the middle I would have seen the pixels. I agree with the others who think this is just HDTV on a small-to-medium-sized screen. Yawn.

Does anyone know if Blu-ray or HD-DVD movies will be compressed as 1920x1024 24fps PROGRESSIVE? Then decompressed by the player and interlaced as needed? I'll be rather disappointed if they're stored in 720p. Assuming they do ship as 1024p, I'll be buying my own projector and screen for a few thousand and only see a handful of movies in an actual theater.

Whoops, forgot about the compression

[Bryan Ischo]

I forgot to factor in the compression when considering how much data has to be read from the drive per second. If the compression is 10:1 like they claim then I guess it'd only be about 15 MB per second off of the drive, which is perfectly doable. I guess then the problem becomes decompressing 15 MB per second but since it's a lossless algorithm it's probably pretty easy to undo given enough memory and a decent processor.

Re:10:1 lossless video compression? I don't think

[mcg1969]

Duh, you are right, I should have read the article. The poster dropped the "visually" term.

Of course you are right about the marketspeak. Some of the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray testing has revealed flaws even in D5 (5:1).

Thats great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just as the movie gets really exciting, a Blue Screen of Death will show up.

Re:Thats great...

[El Gordo Motoneta]

This 100GB compressed movie will be read from a hard drive..

*Courtain goes up..*
*Lights go dim...*

3

2

1

-----------

You have not powered off correctly.

Do you want to run SCANDISK? Y/y

Anyone else misread the title

[killa62]

as UK to Build Network of 150 Digital Cameras?

Re:Anyone else misread the title

[whereizben]

I did :)

Re:Anyone else misread the title

[x2A]

thought it was gonna be a "we don't want big brother watching us!" story!

Re:Anyone else misread the title

[lxt]

Seeing as the UK already has the highest number of CCTV cameras per person in the world, and thus the dubious honour of "most watched nation", I doubt 150 would make much difference :)

Re:Anyone else misread the title

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. I value literacy over assumption.

Re:Anyone else misread the title

[x2A]

yeah but these are *digital* cameras! This means you can do all sorts of high tech stuff like enhance a person who's taking up a single pixel to such a degree you could spot melanoma.. duh

-2A

Re:Anyone else misread the title

[Anonymous Coward]

ponce.

Re:Anyone else misread the title

[rzebram]

Not once, but three times.

Re:Anyone else misread the title

[Quiet_Desperation]

I did the first time because I had just seen an article about the cameras all over London. Power of suggestion.

Re:10:1 lossless video compression? I don't think

[TheRaven64]

I make it 533GB/hour ((1248*1080*24*3)/(3600*1024^3)), but close enough. The article didn't say the compression was lossless, it said it was almost lossless. On the average film simple lossless compression on the frames and lossless interframe compression should be able to get at least 2:1 ratios - 10:1 without noticeable artefacting is well within the realms of possibility.

Bittorrent

[Woy]

So...

2048 x 1080 - not much better than HDTV

[Anonymous Coward]

As a consumer I'd like to know that the digital version offers the same effective quality as the original.

Is 2048 x 1080 really an adequate sampling rate given the original source is likely 35 or 70mm film?

Re:2048 x 1080 - not much better than HDTV

[captain igor]

Given that 2048x1080 is the resolution of the signal and not the sampling rate, probably not.

Sooo

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that mean all the pirates can just take that file and make it at normal dvd resoloution!

even if it is locked?

Damn this technology! They take more fun out of piracy every day!

-Primal_theory (now with 100% more bad karma!)

Drive crash?

[hrieke]

When the film breaks, it can be fixed- for the most part. But when a drive crashes, you'd think that it would be at least 8 hours before a new copy of the move could be express-shipped to the theater.

Re:Drive crash?

[slim]

When the film breaks, it can be fixed- for the most part. But when a drive crashes, you'd think that it would be at least 8 hours before a new copy of the move could be express-shipped to the theater.

Drives crash far less often than film breaks, but even then, TFA indicates that theatres would copy the data to their own system before showing it. It seems reasonable to either have RAID 5 on these systems, or just have a hot backup.

Re:Drive crash?

[Quiet_Desperation]

Or you could just make a backup when it arrived. They could encrypt the files, but leave them copyable. You'd still need the key to view the copy. Or they could ship two copies. Lots of solutions there.

Re:Drive crash?

[SunFan]

It would be absolutely hilarious to see a Windows GPF on the screen upon walking into the theatre. Not much RAID 5 can do, then.

Interesting aspect ratio

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a bit over 17:9, close enough to Storaro's 2:1 Univisium. Maybe he was right all along...

DRM for the movies, and more....

[Brian the Bold]

So what this will usher in (sorry!) is the ability of the distributors to decide whether or not a multi-screen cinema can show a film on the screen they wish or whether they will be unable to fit their business model by moving a more popular title into their larger theatres. I'm sure all the projectors will be heavily secured to prevent any kind of local control of content, it will all be imposed from on high by the Cuban cigar smoking types with the large waist lines, paranoia and fat bank balances.

Hope I'm wrong, but history suggests I'm probably not....

Another reason to stay home ...

[Ron Bennett]

2048x1080 is lousy resolution ... ok, yes, it may be lossless, but that's little consolation considering that native film resolution far exceeds that by at least several times.

From a viewer's perspective, the comparative picture quality of a good HDTV (even a DVD shown on a TV with a good upscaler) will likely equal or exceed that of a "digital" movie theater, since resolution relates to screen size/viewing distance. In a nutshell, an inferior picture is only going to encourage more people to stay home.

Ron

Re:Another reason to stay home ...

[smoker2]

What they don't say is that the screens will be tiny and all 150 "cinemas" are in the same building, so the resolution will be quite good actually.

;-)

Actually it IS almost infinite in movies

[KZigurs]

Consider this - you have not only the resolution significantly higher than top-of-the-cream-40-grand digital cameras, but also - on sequential frames the pixels change their positions. Add with it the fact that our eyes have latency and voila.

UK copies Belgian practise

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess the UK concluded the Belgian initiative successful, as the reasons cited for this are the same. Belgium did this a few years ago. Dutch movie fans would go across the border to view Star Wars ep 1 and 2 and the Pixar movies in superior quality weeks after release.

It was of course pushed because it allowed for wide spread release of local films, who cares if the movie runs for one day or for months.

Re:10:1 lossless video compression? I don't think

[drinkypoo]

The story submission, on the other hand, DOES say it's lossless. I believe in RTFA as much as the next guy but this isn't even about the article really...

2k vs 4k

[Anonymous Coward]

4k is becoming more standard, but a lot of digital effects are still done at 2k res. so if you're sitting there watching a movie at a cinema with standard 35 projectors, i doubt you would be able to pick out the effects that were rendered at 2k or 4k.

while 2k does fall short of the resolution of 35, i believe it would still fall into the same category of "looking just as good".. when you are getting into the 4k side of things, you are talking about it actually looking crisper and better than 35 (even though it's the same "resolution" on paper)...

that's just my opinion. take it as you want... but here is an article about 2k/4k/6k(vista) that's interesting.. a few years old, but still a good read...

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HNN/is _1_17/ai_82533914/pg_1

Re:2k vs 4k

[Chatz]

This just seems crazy, why invest in 2K when 4K cameras, projectors and storage capable of supporting those rates are coming? Of course I'm assuming that 4K will be good enough for the next 10 years, but since that is better than what we have now...

Lower Resolution Option for High-Risk Theaters

[Ron Bennett]

Just got to thinking, with all the concerns about security, I wonder if theaters, such as those classified as "high risk" of theft and/or located in certain areas, will be provided a lower downgraded resolution version ... hopefully not as degraded as that space shuttle pic that was going around after the Challenger explosion, but I digress.

Anyways, it seems to me that resolution could by varied from theater to theater for various reasons ...

And finally, perhaps even custom ad placement may be inserted into the movie on the fly depending on where the movie is being shown/demographics of the particular audience.

Ron

Re:Lower Resolution Option for High-Risk Theaters

[Ron Bennett]

correction: meant space shuttle Columbia; Challenger was the first time around.

Resolution not high enough ?

[zymano]

35mm digital pixel equivalent

Re:Resolution not high enough ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Informative link, but it's talking about 35mm still photography, which has a different frame size, and therefore a different total number of pixels, than motion pictures. Still photography takes pictures with the long axis parallel to the strip of film, whereas motion picture cinematography lays the images out perpendicular to the strip of film. Plus, there are various aspect ratios used in 35mm motion picture cinematography which can affect the frame size.

Re:10:1 lossless video compression? I don't think

[kirun]

But digital TV is great! Where else can I get my choice of shopping channels, identikit music channels, and MHEG graphics informing me the channel is not currently broadcasting, please try some other time?

Pixel size?

[Anonymous Coward]

A 50' diagonal screen (I'm making this up I have no idea how big a real movie theater screen is) would be about 43' wide (16:10 ratio). 43' / 2048 is about 0.25 inches. I'd say that's pretty good resolution in place were you are a few dozen feet from the screen.

In sweden..

[lordsilence]

There's been lots of fuss about this digital cinema system. Appearently the projectors last 3-5 years before the technique is "outdated". Sure it cost much less to get a digital cinema projector. But the analog last for 15 years or more.

Re:In sweden..

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, the analog film projectors cost less than digital ones. Of course, since the price in analog broadcasting comes from the price of the film copy.

The digital projector costs a lot, but the medium is cheap, so they are cheap to operate.

Too bad digital projectors get obsolete so quickly so it's not wise to invest in them until you know for sure that the technology is mature.

2000*1000 pixels definitely doesn't sound mature.

The resolution is pretty low...

[NeedleSurfer]

Consider the screen size, for a rather small 15x45 screen the pixels will be 1/4inch x 1/6inch tall. It might seem little but its not, you see the pixels if you start looking at the picture quality, plus you need one very powerfull projector (6000 lumens and up) to get decent contrast. Using systems like Watchout, Blend Pro or whatever else you choose you can have resolution 4 time higher as source, make each projector project 1/16 of the source at native resolution of 1280x1024 (to date no projector have a native resolution of 2048x1080), 16 relatively cheap projector of 1500 lumens later you end up with a projected resolution of 5120x4096 in which you may fit as many lower resolutions as you wish, each pixel is damn small and you have a very well spread 9000 lumens projection. Cheaper and better...

Vertical vs. horizontal film

[tepples]

The article you linked concerns 35mm still photography. A 35mm still can be 36mm wide and 24mm tall on the negative because the film is held horizontally in the camera. Your article claims that 24mm corresponds to 2000 pixels.

Movie film, on the other hand, is typically held vertically in the camera and projector. Thus, the picture is about 24mm wide, or less if the film includes an analog sound track in addition to the Dolby Digital data or DTS timecode. This 2000 pixel width corresponds neatly to the 1920x1080 pixel spec of HDTV.

Watch Philip Anshutzs

[WindBourne]

Anshutz is rather intersting. He is major stockholder in Qwest (until he finally gets thrown in jail for all the qwest stuff that pulled). As part of that, he was trying to figure out how to fill the pipelines that he has all over the country. and the Answer: send digital movies. So now, he is busy buying movie houses under the name of regal and getting ready to turn them digital. All of them will be filled via qwest lines (or some local if qwest is not in area).

Pixar Resolution

[lxt]

According to a Sun press release (Sun providing the render gear for Pixar before they moved to Apple), Toy Story "uses a resolution of 1536 by 922 with an effective 48 bits per pixel."

For following films, I'm pretty sure they upped it to 2048x1536.

Multiscreenings

[lxt]

It's likely that a multiplex would screen the same film on two different screens with overlapping times, so would require more than 1 copy of the film anyway.

Re:Multiscreenings

[slim]

It's likely that a multiplex would screen the same film on two different screens with overlapping times, so would require more than 1 copy of the film anyway.

In fact some multiplexes have systems where the film comes off the reel, through a projector, onto a clever buffer reel, through another projector, then onto the takeup reel. This way they can show the same film on two screens, with overlapping times and a time offset to make the most efficient use of the lobby.

There's a working exhibit of one at the Museum of the Moving Image in London.

With digital, though: well, why not have one copy on one server, with multiple projectors running off it?

The tone of the article suggested that the idea of this was non-mainstream short films and documentaries though: stuff that doesn't have the selling power for traditional distribution. They won't be filling multiple screens in one building with this stuff!

It's not a Xerox machine!

[Anonymous Coward]

Subject says it all.

Excellent Stopgap

[Anonymous Coward]

IMO this doesn't come close to completing the transition to digital, but it's a great start. The transition will be complete once:

Most movies are sent to theaters via broadband or satellite.
Theaters are capable of showing live performances, including sports and concerts.
Movies are shown at 60 frames per second or higher.
Theaters are capable of doing some sort of interactive entertainment (each projector will need some sort of PC attached, and the audience room will need some sort of input devices).

This change in UK theaters does none of the above, but it will do two important things: Greatly reduce the cost of distribution and make niche movies much more accessable. This will whet audiences' and executives' appetites for more digital changes in the future, and in the mean time it will greatly level the playing field for niche and otherwise up-and-coming moviemakers.

I'd like to know what projectors they're using. The high cost of projectors ($100K to $250K) is a big part of what has delayed the digital cinema transition in USA.

2048 x 1080 pixels

[Duncan3]

I can do that here, at home, on my Viewsonic P815 monitor. It's only 50cm diagnal and I can see pixels and artifacts.

It's sure gonna look like crap at 20m diagnal.

It would be a good rez to download however.

Re:2048 x 1080 pixels

[Quiet_Desperation]

Video tends to be self-anti-aliasing, though. We have a digital theater near me, and eveything looks fine. Nice and crisp, but not in the "jaggies" sense. And you shouldn't get artifacts with lossless compression.

Re:2048 x 1080 pixels

[sahonen]

How far do you sit from your monitor again?

RTFA

[Insipid Trunculance]

Fiona Deans, associate director of AADC, said the compression was visually lossless so no picture degradation will occur.

The devil's in the details

Mod Parent Up (please)

[DrJimbo]

A lot of speculation and conviction has been thrown around in this thread. The parent links to some very interesting facts.

What this is...

[DrDebug]

... is TivoToGo on a bigger scale.

Re:10:1 lossless video compression? I don't think

[AGTiny]

Having watched 1080i HBO-HD at ~14Mbps (avg closer to 10-11 Mbps), they do a great job nearly eliminating artifacts even on fast-moving scenes. Decent 10:1 compression at much higher bitrates is certainly doable. The artifact issue is much worse on live events (i.e. CBS HD sports) than when you have time to run it through a multipass encoder.

Digital Cinemas in India and China

[alphakappa]

China has around ~100 (plans ~1500 by 2009) and India already has over 130 cinemas with digital projection and distribution.

Actually

[purduephotog]

1) Original Negative
2) Positive Negative (copy on negative masked stock)
3) Dupe Negative (negative again) (digital editing here)
4) Copy Negative (positive)
5) Print Negative (shipped to theatres)

And no, you still have lots of resolution left at that point. I know people that have made the films you speak of, and matching curves between series was one of their most prized accomplishments.

(yes I worked for Kodak)

Re: encrypted stream

[anticypher]

Are there such things as video projectors that accept an encrypted stream of data?

Yes, which is what these systems will be using. Fraunhofer-gessellschaft (of MP3 encoder fame) is the technology behind these projectors. The stream is encrypted the entire length of the data path until it hits the electronics driving the LCD screen. Each server has a key built in, supposedly impossible to recover without destroying the system. Each film to be distributed is encrypted with both a master key, and the private half of the projector's key. There are several stages of decryption, allowing a mostly uncompressed and decrypted stream to be presented to the final stage electronics. The decryption at the projector stage is lightweight, as it is less likely to be subjected to a significant cryptographic attack because it relies on having fully authenticated equipment elsewhere in the chain.

The servers regularly contact an authentication centre, so that audits can be made as to the number of showings. The servers also come with tamper-resistant housings which then disable the system until it can once again contact the auth centre. There is a bunch of other security stuff, the projectors are never sold, but only licensed to the theatre for a fixed time and have to be returned or inspected at regular intervals.

From the article, it sounds like they only have the "medium" quality screens going in, at 2k by 1k pixels. This means they'll only be installed in smaller theatres, because such low resolution looks really bad on larger screens. Also, the compression isn't lossless, like the /. summary said, but near-lossless, probably a Fraunhofer MP4 encoding set to a medium to high quality setting.

F-G will be showing off these projectors this year at CeBit, according to marketing bumpf I got from them recently. This BBC story is probably based on a press release from the building tsunami of announcements leading up to CeBit.

the AC

How is this news?

[kbahey]

Perhaps this is news for the UK, but I recall seeing Star Wars: Attack of the clones more than two years ago, in a South Western Ontario theatre (Galaxy cinema at Conestoga Mall for the locals) that has DLP digital technology.

I am not sure how the movie was delivered to the movie, but I vividly remember that I was close to the screen (crowded theatre), and seeing the pixels on some scenes, like on a low res monitor. Another guy told me that he too saw the pixels.

Perhaps for the UK, it makes sense to truck the movie on hard disk, since distances are not that great. For US and Canada, this may not be practical.

Re:How is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps for the UK, it makes sense to truck the movie on hard disk, since distances are not that great. For US and Canada, this may not be practical.

Why not? I'm a projectionist, and our prints are shipped by truck. It's not as if all prints come from LA, there are distribution centers all over the country. There have been times when Technicolor has screwed up our orders, and we haven't received our print at all. All it takes is a quick phone call, and we have the movie in a couple of hours. How else do you think we handle weekly deliveries and pick-ups? Air-drop?

Another thing I don't understand is how this is supposed to increase the number of shows? Sure, 35mm projectors need to be threaded before every show. That takes a whole 2.5 minutes. The things that limit the number of daily show times are the length of the film, the time it takes to clean, and the time it takes to get the customers seated. Projectors can be threaded during the intermission, so that's not really an issue. 35mm prints don't need to be rewound, so digital films can't save time there either.

The only improvement that I see is that digital films don't need to be build and torn down. Traditional prints are shipped in several reels. When the films are received, they must be built into one large reel; trailers need to be added, and all the smaller reels need to be spliced in the correct order. A good projectionist can build a film with trailers in an hour or two, and it takes considerably less time to tear them down.

Re:How is this news?

[kbahey]

How else do you think we handle weekly deliveries and pick-ups? Air-drop?

I was thinking more along the line of electronically receiving them over the internet.

But, I agree, sometimes low tech is the most elegant and cost effective solution, not just technology for the sake of technology.

Re:How is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

AotC was shipped to most digital cinemas via 16-18 DVD-Rs then loaded onto the playback device and decrypted.

it's not even that...

[Anonymous Coward]

My doo00de brother that's right. It's just not 1337 enough. What were they thinking of ?

I can't watch regular films anymore after playing UnrealHaloQuake 2006 at 8192*6144 resolution and 1483 frames per second on my 8Ghz quad zentium with ultrati megvidia 2048 MB 8ghz graphic card and my 32 GB of RAM on my 48" flat panel.

In fact their resolution for digital film isn't enough we need at least 16384*12228 resolution and 120 frames a second for new films in theatres. We need also need special visual sound projectors on each seat and ultra mouse pods for interaction. We need to be able to freeze the movie at any point and we need to do it over broadband beamed into the theatre with ultra smart ultra ultra DRM which wipes the memories of the audience afterwards.

We also need no compression. Each frame should be at least 1GB to allow for all the detail.

this is the way forward

Re:10:1 lossless video compression? I don't think

[timeOday]

Recording video losslessly would be stupid anyhow. For the same bitrate, you could get a much better picture by using a higher resolution camera and lossy compression.

It's all about the size of the screen

[mpemba]

I imagine that once they have the copy of the file they can reproduce it as many times as they like for internal use.

If thats the case then you can have 10 small theaters instead of 3 big ones. With the screens smaller the picture will be more crisp and the audience experience will only change with regards to how many people they are viewing the movie with. Changing the distance of the seats with respect to the screen will compensate for the "big screen" effect. As a result the resolution issue is no longer valid.

I for one would love to go out and see a movie with ten or fifteen friends, instead of a large amount of strangers. I mean it can be cool to see a movie like that, but given that most people suck, most times you get a A-hole who screams, or you have cellphones ringing, or some other type of biomass distraction.

Never underestimate...

[blair1q]

...the bandwidth of a noob falling off his sinecure when someone explains that it'd be a hell of a lot faster and cheaper and more secure to DL the 100GB off the Internet than to ship HDD's all over Blighty.

Nor that the use of the phrase "a network of theaters" kind of shoulda sorta implied this solution in the first place.

0 marks.

Re: encrypted stream

[jp10558]

Does anyone else find it ridiculous that we are turning our theaters' projection booths into a storage facility like the one for the Declaration of Independence?

Film has far greater contrast...

[Dzimas]

Some really good film has a brightness ratio (that is, darkest black to brightest white) of approximately 1024:1. When projected, the effective brightness ratio falls to about 128:1, and on TV the ratio is a much smaller 32:1.

I suspect that digital projection will not provide anywhere near the rich brighness gradient we have come to expect from film.

Re:Film has far greater contrast...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you point to any sources that back-up your claim of a 10-stop dynamic range? I realize that movie film is different than, say, Ektachrome, but I was under the impression that even 7 stops was pushing it...

Re: encrypted stream

[kerry-buckley]

The stream is encrypted the entire length of the data path until it hits the electronics driving the LCD screen. Each server has a key built in, supposedly impossible to recover without destroying the system. Each film to be distributed is encrypted with both a master key, and the private half of the projector's key.

The public half, surely?

better quality? i doubt it.

[DaveJay]

2048x1080 resolution is BETTER QUALITY than analog film? Not likely. They are likely referring to the absence of scratches and whatnot that build up over time, but I have a hard time believing that 2048x1080 projected on a large screen will not look pixelated.

Re:Resolution and quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Pixar (and just about every other CG film ever made) uses a horizontal resolution of either 2048, 1920 or 1828. This resolution is referred to as "2k" in the industry and, while not a 100% match to film, it's good enough so that you can cut from something shot on film to something shot, scanned and re-recorded onto film at 2k and not really notice the difference. The biggest difference you'll notice between digital and film screening is: 1) The image is very steady when digitally projected. By comparison, film projection jumps literally around by 1% or more each frame (we've gotten used to it but if you sit close, you'll see that the image is bouncing around several inches every frame) 2) There won't be any dirt, dust or scratches. That's a big difference. There are also very subtle differences in color (film resolves some green colors differently the DLP's) but those are not going to be noticable by most people. Rob http://www.185vfx.com/

Actually...contrast is a very close match.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have calibrated a DLP projector to match film and it is a very close match. If you compare them side-by-side on a split screen it can be hard to discern which is which--until you realize the image that's bouncing around widely on the screen is the film projector (the image is very steady from the DLP but even a well calibrated film projector cannot register each frame as accuractely).

The numerical contrast ratios are nearly identical between the high-end TI DLP's and 35mm projected film.

Rob
http://www.185vfx.com/

Value of data

[Skapare]

Financial institutions, such as banks, credit agencies, and payroll processors, should learn something from this aspect of the motion picture industry. Data about people should be treated as just as valuable (because really, it is).

I can't believe it

[Anonymous Coward]

I really and honestly cannot believe that all of you morons would argue over the dumbest shit.

It's a movie. If it works, who gives a shit.

You people are in dire need of a life.

They told me that morons hang out here and I just had to see it for myself.

When will you yanks learn..

[robdavy]

"over £1500 pounds" is like saying "over $1500 dollars" /flamebait (sorry)

Who delivers it?

[Anonymous Coward]

...losslessly compressed from 1 Terabyte down to 100 Gigabytes and encrypted onto a portable hard disk drive with a key unique to each cinema, which is then delivered to the cinema...

... by Ninjas!

People won't notice...

[TheEvilOverlord]

I ran a cinema for 4 years... you wouldn't believe the things people *don't* notice.

Yeah this is going to be lower quality, but the general public won't notice.

Cinema geeks will notice.
Projectionists will notice.
The public won't.

The cinema geeks will still go, 'cus they've gotta see that movie, the projectionists will still go to work, and the public as ever will put up with being shafted. The studios know this. It's big and it's loud, that's what the public notices.

I never noticed the queue dots, the joined sections the dirt on the film until I became a projectionist.

The only thing that will hold this back is the cinemas themselves. They have a huge capital investment in their current equipment and not much money to invest with (unless it's a studio owned cinema). Technology for _the majority_ of cinemas moves very very very slowly, and the studios for all their power need the cinemas to show their films.

Dynamic range

[DogsBollocks]

I have a long standing question over film vs digital.

What about dynamic range?

I've seen the output from some higher end digital cameras and the scenes are awful when compared to the film equivalent.

(Yes I know this isn't a camera we are talking about here it's a projector even though the article says camera, but it's tarred with the same brush)

What I'm talking about here is the ability to capture details that are lurking in the shadows when the majority of the picture is a bright scene.

As far as I'm concerned digital sucks, how come as technology gets better and better yet the consumer has to put up with poorer quality.

Just take a look at all the digital artifacts when watching digital TV, it's disgusting. Digital compression schemes have a very very hard time trying to compress random type objects, IE grass blowing in the breeze, water effects such as rooster tails from power boats, waving crowds at sports stadiums(especially when panning), there's just to much moving detail for the compression to be able to handle it so it just "drop's" stuff and assumes you won't notice.

The compression algorithms especially don't like dark scenes. I see lot's of solarisation on dark scenes even on DVD and that's supposed to be the best quality we have as a consumer item.

And now the studios will be expecting the movie going public to keep shelling out hard earned cash for this.

Oh by the way, if you've never noticed these horrible arttifacts before, trust me you will now you know what to look for.

Re: encrypted stream

[swillden]

The public half, surely?

Most likely, but not necessarily -- depending on your definition of "public" and "private". In RSA, there are two "keys". One is the combination of an exponent E and a modulus PQ (where P and Q are large primes), and the other is the combination of another exponent D and the same modulus PQ, where D is the multiplicative inverse of E, mod (P-1)(Q-1). Normally, we call (E,PQ) your "public" key, and (D,PQ) your "private" key (actually, since PQ is part of the public key, it's not usually duplicated in the private key).

However, because E is chosen (with the constraint that it must be relatively prime to (P-1)(Q-1)), and D is computed, it's normal to choose a value of E that is easy to compute with. So, "public" key operations are much less computationally expensive than "private" key operations.

That being the case, it may occasionally make sense to reverse the usage of the "public" and "private" keys. A relatively small and easy-to-use E can be selected (verifying, of course, that it's relatively prime to (P-1)(Q-1) -- the easiest way to do that, of course is to choose a prime number for E). Then, messages can be encrypted using the resulting harder-to-use D, and decrypted with E.

Of course, since E must be kept secret to make this work, you can't use one of the values commonly used in "normal" public key crypto, and you also can't choose a value that's too small or too nice to compute with because you need to make sure you're selecting from a large enough keyspace to be resistant to brute force search.

I don't think that's really what's being done here; just wanted to point out that there may be circumstances in which the key normally called "public" would kept private while the key normally called "private" would be published.

I haven't seen any systems that do this. I have, however, seen systems that treat *both* keys as secret, and for good reasons.

Re: encrypted stream

[swillden]

A relatively small and easy-to-use E can be selected (verifying, of course, that it's relatively prime to (P-1)(Q-1) -- the easiest way to do that, of course is to choose a prime number for E)

Just to clarify, choosing a prime number for E is not sufficient to ensure relative primality. You also have to perform a trial division to find out if (P-1)(Q-1) is a multiple of E. If it is, you have to pick a different E.

Frame Rate: The Death Of Film

[Effugas]

Film has been an impressive technology for quite some time, this I grant. Kodak did some amazing things.

But Digital is going to overtake it. Not might, not could, and not just because the public is full of stupid people. Digital will overtake film, because digital will enable video with proper frame rates.

It's kind of funny talking to film people about frame rates. Given the general cluelessness of computer people about all things AV (I spent a few weeks working on low latency audio under standard operating systems; it's a nightmare, the entire architecture presumes nobody would want to do more than a thousand things a second), I didn't really expect that I'd find something about motion pictures that film people were ... ahem ... creative about. But, alas. In the era of 60fps gaming, who's backing 24fps imagery?

Film people. They have to; doubling the frame rate doubles the size of the cans, doubles the cost of printing each movie, to say nothing of the effects on production. So they tell stories. "It's dark. The human eye just can't see very high frame rates when the pupil's all big." Or they make it a challenge, "A sign of a master cinematographer is that he can work around this awful framerate...not that you'd be able to detect it anyway."

It's not that film itself can't run at higher framerates -- Maxivision48 was a system that finally fixed some of films most annoying problems -- not only the low framerate, but physical jitter from the motor. You know what? No traction, none whatsoever. They blamed digital, but at some point the entire production line made the call: Nobody needs higher framerates, why try?

(Yes, IMAX is also >24fps. But it's on a massive screen, so the effective fps still isn't fast enough. The bigger the screen, the higher a frame rate you require for panning to seem credible. Too low a frame rate, and objects in Frame 1 become difficult to locate, ten feet away, in Frame 2. But I digress.)

Digital has a reason to make people try. Viewers -- the ones who are actually bringing in money -- don't care at all about lowered expenses to ship 3000 movies; it's not like they're going to see any of the savings anyway. And of course viewers really don't care about the cool security technology being used to prevent the piracy of the video streams. However, viewers "care" about quality. I put that in quotes, because on average they don't, but as a few "experts" rail on digital for having visible pixels and thus looking bad, average viewers, not generally seeing a difference between film and what they're seeing, will "play along" rather than look bad for being unable to perceive the problems. (I know this sounds awful, but it happens all the time in a number of different fields. The irony that the complaints about digital are coming from people with huge home theatre systems w/ MPEG-2 compressed DVD's playing should not be lost on anyone.)

Framerate changes everything.

Seeing large amounts of silky-smooth motion is a noticably different experience. There was a small period in the late 90's where there was still argument about whether the human eye could detect frame rates above 30fps. 3Dfx ended up assembling a demo where the left side of a spinning donut was animating at 30fps, and the right side at 60fps. That ended that debate rather quickly. I expect we'll see the same thing out of digital. Potentially, movies will be run through framerate-upsampling algorithms that intelligently interpolate the motion vectors to derive new frames -- in English, simply by doing compression, the computer knows what's moving where between Frame 1 and Frame 2, so it's not ridiculously difficult to invent Frame 1.5. They'll do a side-by-side for the press, and everyone will ooh and aah.

But what I *actually* expect will happen involves Slashdot favorite Steve Jobs, acting not with his Apple hat, but with his Pixar hat. Pixar will render a movi

The Dark Secret of Analog Film Projection

[mpesce]

Although no one in the exhibition industry really likes to admit it, the average 35 mm print of the average film showing in the average theatre an average number of times has a resolution considerably less than the theoretical maximum. If you assume perfect printing from a perfect negative shown for the first time in a perfect projector, you might get something near to these values, but -- in most cases -- the actual resolution is much closer to one-third of that value. This is because every time the film is exposed to the mechanical stresses of projection, and is exposed to a bright light source - which bleaches the film stock - it loses clarity and resolution. Cinematographers know this, and they hate it, but, until now, they couldn't do anything about it. Although, at the moment, the maxiumum resolution of digital cinema is less than the theoretical maximum of analog cinema, in practice the digital image is nearly always cleaner, clearer and higher-resolution.

Why Digital Cinema == Good Thing for Movie Lovers

[mpesce]

One of the most overlooked aspects of digital cinema is the freedom it offers exhibitors (theatre owners) to repurpose their exhibition space (seats) on-the-fly. Instead of needing several copies of the latest-and-greatest Hollywood blockbuster on opening day in the megaplex, they can have one digital copy and ship that to however many projectors (and theatres) they need to show it in, for as long as the demand holds up.

But, perhaps even more significantly, it allows theatre owners to show "little" films, which might only fill up seats once a week, without having to hold onto expensive prints of those films.

Before the mid-1970s ("Jaws", specifically), films were rolled out to theatres in a gradual release. But, after "Jaws" and "Star Wars", Hollywood required thousands of prints for thousands of theatres on the film's release date. That fact alone has contributed to the ever-increasing trend toward blockbuster films to the exclusion of all else - they sucked resources from other more experimental projects, and kept the theatres fully loaded with movies that the exhibitors were more-or-less obliged to show.

Now the exhibitor can keep a very wide range of films on hand, and show them as demand develops. Films might stay in release for an entire year (or at least until the DVD comes out) because of digital cinema, and "little" films could potentially reach much wider audiences as a result.

And that's not even counting the fact that a digital cinema doesn't have to show movies. It could (and probably would) show various HD broadcasts, such as the Superbowl, the Academy Awards, and other specialty programming. A digital cinema is a brand new beast, and exhibitors will find a lot of uses for these very expensive, but flexible machines.

Re:Frame Rate: The Death Of Film

[TheEvilOverlord]

That's all very nice, but you don't really understand how the average cinema projection system works...

You keep blathering on about the frame rate of standard projectors being 24fps, and *you're wrong*. Even the old Westar projectors I use that were made in the 1960's are 48fps. Yes the film is 24fps, and that's why they are called "the flicks" because 24fps is noticibly flickery; this problem was solved by the neat trick of showing each frame twice, giving an effective framerate of 48fps.

Modern projectors use all sorts of tricks to help keep the picture flicker free.

As for MaxiVision48, well that failed to get anywhere because as it states in the glossy brousure it gains the better picture "by recapturing the picture space used for the vestigial analog sound
stripe". Well calling the analogue sound strip vestigial is getting rather ahead of themselves... There are tones of independant cinemas out there that still use analogue sound and the studios aren't going to cut out part of their market by issuing films in MaxiVision48.

Re:Frame Rate: The Death Of Film

[Effugas]

EvilO--

The fluorescent lamp at the back of every LCD screen flickers at 3000fps. Surely you are not suggesting that video played on my display outputs at 3000fps!

The flicker is not in the projection. The flicker is in the angular deviation against the eye resolving an object moving from one location to another. The lower the framerate, the bigger the jump. This framerate -- not flicker-rate, but framerate -- cannot be covered for by an analog projector. (Digital projectors could concievably interpolate motion vectors.)

--Dan

No one's made the obvious 'network' comment?

[srmalloy]

How much processing power do you get with a 150-node Beowulf cluster of digital cinemas? Wouldn't the movie projection eat too many cycles?

Digital Cinema Compression

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a bit late, but I felt compelled to reply to this as an insider to this project. The compression is not DCT based but is called Quality Priority Encoding and based on a wavelet transform. It is a variable bit rate encoding scheme that preserves a base quality level instead of a quality ceiling set by a max data rate. This QPE encoding by QuVIS does not suffer from block artifact problems associated with DCT that you may encounter with DVD's for instance. The resolution is greater than HD-TV at 1920x1080 or 1280x720 and the bit rate is higher by a far cry, preserving the color depth, contrast, and even the film grain that are critical to the quality.

The new 2K projectors to my knowledge have not been seen in any US based public digital cinemas to date. Visit Japan to see some of these. If you have seen digital cinema in the US you have seen a 1280x1024 resolution picture from DLP. The new 2048x1080 resolution as you can imagine is far superior. It is still a far cry from what many would like to see at 4K, but there is only one 4K projector manufacturer to date, SONY, and their projector is not bright enough to light up many of the larger cinema screens.

There is more advancement to be made for sure. But this is a great step in the right direction.