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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.
will a 100GB digital to DivX rip take?
All your Sybase are belong to us.
The Cinerama called, and would like to welcome them to the 21st century.
Isn't 2048 x 1080 significantly less than regular movie film as far as resolution goes?
Is when will it be in my LIVING ROOM *drools at high res goodness*
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.
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.
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?
- - - - - Fear not the reaper, but my shiny white teeth.
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?
Does this mean I won't need my camcorder anymore?
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.
It says "visually lossless". That is marketingspeak for "awful quality but no man in the street will notice".
Compare to digital tv.
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.
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.
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).
Just as the movie gets really exciting, a Blue Screen of Death will show up.
as UK to Build Network of 150 Digital Cameras?
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.
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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!)
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
Given that 2048x1080 is the resolution of the signal and not the sampling rate, probably not.
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
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.
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...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
35mm digital pixel equivalent
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?
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
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.
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...
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.
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).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
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.
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.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Fiona Deans, associate director of AADC, said the compression was visually lossless so no picture degradation will occur.
The devil's in the details
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A lot of speculation and conviction has been thrown around in this thread. The parent links to some very interesting facts.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
... is TivoToGo on a bigger scale.
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.
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)
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
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.
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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.
Nor that the use of the phrase "a network of theaters" kind of shoulda sorta implied this solution in the first place.
0 marks.
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?
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
I suspect that digital projection will not provide anywhere near the rich brighness gradient we have come to expect from film.
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.
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/
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).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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
"over £1500 pounds" is like saying "over $1500 dollars" /flamebait (sorry)
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.
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.
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
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Film has been an impressive technology for quite some time, this I grant. Kodak did some amazing things.
... ahem ... creative about. But, alas. In the era of 60fps gaming, who's backing 24fps imagery?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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?