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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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
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.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
"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.
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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.
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/
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...
There is folly and foolishness on the one side, and daring and calculation on the other. - Admiral Pellew, Hornblower