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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.
"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.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts