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Irish Cinema Set to Go Digital First
LocalisationDude writes "The BBC is reporting that Ireland will be the first country in the world to have their traditional 35mm film projectors replaced with digital projectors. An American company is installing digital projectors in 500 cinemas to replace the traditional film projectors. Cinemas using the technology will be able to download the latest releases to a computer server via satellite at a lower cost."
Will these be able to take normal digital video input?
Could they play DVDs, for example?
Or Quake...
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I can't understand why it's taking so long to move from regular projection to digital projection. I'm hoping someone with more experience here can fill us in on what's going on.
Are they waiting on standards or a big change in the industry? Are they waiting on a new file format, DRM, or aspect ratio? Is the distribution network missing? Where is the bottleneck in getting this rolled out in more places?
I would hazard a guess that they could make an LCD attachment for existing projectors that would allow digital projection to take place at a cheaper rate, kinda like the transparent LCD screens you can get for regular overhead projectors. This being the case, is the distribution network the problem?
The amount of money that would be saved in distribution and replication costs, as well as having the ability to show more films at more times, would surely overcome the cost of upgrades. Or is it all down to being wary of change?
Cinemas using the technology will be able to download the latest releases to a computer server via satellite at a lower cost.
Will this mean that we will start to see screeners with higher quality than DvD's? I'm sure it won't take much money to convince a middle-manager to release some of that sweet sweet digital content.
And best of all, the movie would have to be downloaded possibly days before it's actually played.
This makes me laugh...Ireland is behind several european countries when it comes to ADSL rollout with regards to cost and speed and yet we're going to have sat links so cinemas can get movies?
:)
Is this there way of trying to stop piracy over the net?
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
Yes you are. Anyone with access to the booth was able to make near-enough perfect rips anyway. The average person can't tell the difference between 35mm and digital projection. And camcorder-between-the-seats is not going to be any better just because the projection is digital. Piracy might get easier, but the quality won't be any better.
I am trolling
I fear that this trend will lead to the use of image compression for movies. I find the MPEG compression artifacts in most digital video (e.g., TiVo, DVDs, and digital cable) to be obnoxious -- digital quality is often an oxymoron due to aggressive compression.
Digital video may avoid analog noise and be capable of perfect copies, but if the sender uses too high a compression ratio (and you know they will to save on bandwidth and storage) then the image is permanently corrupted. And if film makers switch to digital video that does not use loss-less compression during filming, then all is lost.
I can only hope that falling prices for bandwidth and storage will let companies ease off the compression ratio sometime in the future.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The BBC is reporting that Ireland will be the first country in the world to have their traditional 35mm film projectors replaced with digital projectors.
Since there are many more than 500 35mm projectors in Ireland, it seems a bit of a fantasy to imply that the entire country will have digital-only screens.
My question of interest is... what are the economics of giving away 500 projectors? Are the 500 projectors "gifts", or are they leased or under loan? Is the goal to reduce the costs, or reduce the damage to the film, prevent piracy somehow, or what?
I'm going to respond to a few things here. Sorry if someone mentioned something on one of these points, I couldn't bring myself to read every one of the 45 posts.
Firstly, yes the projectors can take AVI inputs. DVI too probably, now a days. A few companies in the States have a few projectors scattered around, and I worked as a projectionist at one of them for a time, a few projectionists were fired for outputting a DVD player to the projector after hours and using it to watch Top Gun.
Secondly, the reason we haven't seen it wide spread in the States and probably won't for a bit yet is simply Cost. Cost to produce the movies in a digital format by the distributors, and cost to the theatres to purchase all those digitgal projectors. They are *not* cheap. For your local 24 mega-plex to replace it's 24 multi-thousand dollar projectors with a digital projector would be *well* more than the profit that theatre sees (if the theatre even manages to post a profit).
With rising costs put on the theatres by the distributors, and lowering numbers of patrons *in* the theatres, the profit margins and simple ability to make money to invest in new technology for the theatres is drastically being reduced. So until the time that *that* situation reverses itself (which I don't imagine we'll ever see) or until the digital projectors become much cheaper, we'll just have to wait.
Brian
As this expands and more theaters go digital, will it break the stranglehold that the big distributors have now, or will legal tricks just assure it's the same as before? There are lots of great films out there that get almost no screens because they don't fit the distributors' views of what goes in their catalogs or what will earn them payback for printing and shipping.
As I understand it, not being in the theater business, theaters are pretty much at the mercy of distributors right now because smaller studios just can't afford the cost of wide distribution. Will digital distribution truly lower the cost and give theaters a wider palette of films to choose from? I suspect the big distrubutors will defeat that possibility with legal tricks, but I'm hoping otherwise.
35mm film also has a very dark grey, you can always tell when the projector is on with a black image.
:-P
The main advantages to Digital vs. 35mm is are:
-Impossible to scratch the image
-Sound quality is WAY better (8.1 digital)
-No Flickering (the shutter runs at 24fps which is low enough to notice)
-The image is completely stable, when watching credits the words scroll up VERY smoothly. (to see image stability, walk right up to the screen while it's running and you'll see just how much the image really is moving around, even on very high quality 35mm projectors)
-No more projectionist needed to thread the projector (damnit, i'm out of a job!)
The only downside i've seen it that i've found is that if you look real hard at some text on screen you can actually see pixels.. but considering how much sharper the image is, who cares.
I've had the honnor of being the first person in Quebec (back in november) to start a Digitial Projector. Yay.
MABASPLOOM!
Hmm, I wonder if we'll see a growth of cinemas that actually pirate themselves, swapping or buying cheap digital copies rather than shelling out for the original stuff? Who would know, after all?
Anyone know if these new cinemas include a DRM system that would prevent this?
And of course then there's always the people who say downloading a movie (or buying a dvd) will get you the same experience as a cinema ...
I don't know... the last time I bought a DVD and sat down to watch it with my GF we weren't charged $8.50 for the popcorn that I nuked or $3.50 for the soda's that I poured. I also don't recall the child behind my couch that kicked me every five minutes, the screaming baby a few seats away, or the guy on his cell phone talking about his herpes diagnosis.
Granted, there are some movies I'd like to see on the big screen (Episode Three?) but the cinema experience is not all that it's cracked up to be.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The theatres stay in business by sending bigshot movies as soon as they can, and small time movies up to a year late. e.g. Bad Santa, that was so late it was postponed to wait for the next christmas, which meant downloaders watched the directors cut Badder Santa while moviegoers watched an inferior version for twice the price and more...
The largest movies are however sent within a few weeks to a few months of the US release... some are starting to do a worldwide one day release as started by the LOTR series, and this is a way good thing. Well, for the movie theatres, that is.
But this is all severely of topi, of course, except for the part that digital projectors would allow for earlier worldwide screenings.