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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.
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.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups. -- 0 1 My two bits
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.
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as renovations take place. 250, is a drop in the bucket, and I would be surprised if their figures were very out of date.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.
Not exactly infinite resolution. There's a grain size, the whole grain changes color when exposed, so it is effectively an irregular pixel.
It says "visually lossless". That is marketingspeak for "awful quality but no man in the street will notice".
Compare to digital tv.
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).
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.
If you want to read fast, you don't get one crazy-fast disk, you get several normal disks and read them in parallel.
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.
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China has around ~100 (plans ~1500 by 2009) and India already has over 130 cinemas with digital projection and distribution.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
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.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
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)
Are there such things as video projectors that accept an encrypted stream of data?
/. summary said, but near-lossless, probably a Fraunhofer MP4 encoding set to a medium to high quality setting.
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
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
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
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.
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.