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."

Comments

Input

[bcmm]

Will these be able to take normal digital video input?

Could they play DVDs, for example?

Or Quake...

Why is it taking this long?

[Peter Cooper]

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?

Re:Piracy boom?

[m50d]

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.

SIGH: Another reason not to go to the cinema

[G4from128k]

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.

Re:SIGH: Another reason not to go to the cinema

[johnhennessy]

Totally agree.

The bandwidth and size of these films are probably not trivial - so if someone was even thinking of ripping the sat streams you'd better take a few things into consideration:

PAL is 720x576 (normal TV size in Europe). If you were to take an hour of video from a DV tape (even with a high end DV camera) you'll get 20GB worth of data. And this is at crappy TV resolution. Cinemas will need resolutions much much higher than this (I hope anyway).

Before I get blown away with people screaming about compression - DV is slightly compressed, but its intended to be be as closs to uncompressed quality as possible. The quality of the end result (if encoding multiple times) is always going to be directly related to the quality of the original footage.

This really gives the cinemas two options - (1)lots of storage (I'm thinking at least 1 or 2 TB here) - which when you think about it, isn't that expensive and (2) major compression.

It will all come down in the end to marketing - do the cinemas think they'll get away with a lower grade product (i.e. crappy quality) - I don't know.

A marketing fantasy

[standards]

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?

ETA in the USA...

[T-Bear]

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.

Re:Finally Ireland is ahead with something

[Finuvir]

I think the adoption of digital projection is due to the fact that Irish movie fans are the most ardent in Europe.

Second highest cinema attendance in Europe according to the article.

Re:Piracy boom?

[neoform]

35mm film also has a very dark grey, you can always tell when the projector is on with a black image.

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!) :-P

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.