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

Piracy boom?

[cypher_soundz]

Am i the only one who thinks that piracy quality will increase now?

Re:Piracy boom?

[Saven Marek]

> Cinemas using the technology will be able to download the
> latest releases

I'm thinking now there'll be 500 notices served on irish cinemas by the RIAA for movie downloading!

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.

Re:Piracy boom?

[justforaday]

The average person can't tell the difference between 35mm and digital projection.

You certainly can! For starters, the image doesn't have any scratches or floaters on it. It also doesn't jitter around or flicker like film. Oh, and the colors tend to be considerably brighter. The downside is that when the screen goes totally black, it's actually a very dark grey (more of an illuminated black).

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.

Re:Piracy boom?

[crunch_crumble]

For starters, the image doesn't have any scratches or floaters on it. It also doesn't jitter around or flicker like film. Oh, and the colors tend to be considerably brighter.

Film doesn't flicker - it has been projected in cinemas at 24 frames per second for over 70 years. It this was a problem for film-goers, I think it would have been noticed by now. Problems like scratches are due to poor handling on the part of projectionists. Dim and muddy-looking pictures are usually because cinema operators don't use the correct illumination from their projection bulbs (turning the illumination down makes the bulb last longer - advantageous for the cinema owner, but not for the viewers watching the film).

Film handled correctly can easily provide bright, sharp, colourful and stable images. Yes, film eventually begins to degrade after being run X number of times through a projector, but you can easily keep a print in pristine condition for a few weeks at least (more than enough for most film releases). Too few cinemas seem to care about presentation quality unfortunately.

My concern is that digital film resolution still seems to be a moving target. An improvement in film stock doesn't require new projection equipment. But what happens when digital resolution increases? That would require an upgrade of the digital projection equipment to take advantage of the improvement, and that's going to be costly.

The introduction of digital cinema will be good thing if it breaks the distribution stranglehold that keeps so many international and independent films off cinema screens.

Re:Piracy boom?

[steeef]

Yeah, and don't forget the cigarette burns/reel change markers. Thanks to Fight Club, I notice them all the time.

Wonder if they'll keep the recent addition of those damn red dot patterns to "thwart" pirates...

Re:Piracy boom?

[FireballFreddy]

Hmm... maybe they could build that into the digital ones. Flip a few bits at random each time it is played, so people who wait until 4 weeks after the movie comes out can get that warm-fuzzy popping and twitching-hair-on-the-screen effect.

Re:Piracy boom?

[forkazoo]

No, the "average person," certainly can't. I can. I deal with video compression a lot, so any artifacting is very obvious to me. But, most people will look at any motion picture and not notice any problems. Most don't notice the brown dots designed to screw with pirates, or the cigarette burns, or the random motion of the frame when projected.

You see, you and I are what are called "enthusiasts." We care. We can see it. My dad just wants to watch the presentation, and wouldn't notice anything but the most horrible projection, unless it was a side-by-side comparison.

My dad thinks he is getting HiDef Satellite right now because he has an HD capable TV. He thinks it looks very good, and bragged to his friends. I don't have the heart to tell him you have to pay extra for the HD channels. I don't have the heart to teach him to spot the horrible MPEG artifacts around every crisp edge. He thinks he has great quality, and it looks good to him, and ho doesn't have to pay extra for the HD channels he wouldn't really notice...

Re:Piracy boom?

[AmunRa]

Note: although there are only 24 physical frames every sec, the shutter actually runs at twice this speed (i.e. each frame is displayed twice), so the shutter speed is 48fps. A shutter speed of only 24 fps, projecting on such a large arc of vision would look terrible!

Re:Piracy boom?

[Shakrai]

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.

Re:Piracy boom?

[Apotsy]

-Sound quality is WAY better (8.1 digital)

That is not specific to digital cinema, and there is no reason why 35mm cannot meet or beat anything any other system comes up with. DTS has succcessfully separated the sound and picture in 35mm (as well as 16mm and 70mm) presentations. Their latest processor, the XD10, has support for 10 channels.

-No Flickering (the shutter runs at 24fps which is low enough to notice)

There aren't many, if any, theaters running single bladed shutters. A double-bladed shutter giving a refresh rate 48Hz is the norm. And, depending on what kind of shutter you have, the shutter is usually open a larger percentage of the time than it is closed, reducing flicker. If you really want, you can always get a triple-bladed shutter for a nice 72Hz refresh rate, but then you have to watch your light output.

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 do. I don't go to the theater to look at visible pixels. I can get that at home. Fortunately, 4K resolution (which is enough to make the pixels invisbly small at normal viewing distance) seems to be the direction things are headed these days. Sony was demoing 4K equipment at ShoWest this year. And with digital intermediates starting to be done at 4K the source material is there.

The biggest area where video projection still falls behind film is dynamic range. Side-by-side comparsions make this abundantly clear. While projector manufacturers are sturggling to eek out a little bit more on their contrast ratios, print stocks like Kodak's 2393 (aka "Vision Premiere", used most recently for prints of "The Incredibles") can deliver 10,000:1 contrast. Yes, really. The max density is so high it's not just dark grey, it's really, truly, black. Video systems have a lot of work cut out to catch up to that.

In other news...

[Zebra_X]

Irish cinema operator busted for distribution of l33t 0-day filmz!

Re:In other news...

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

Cinema operator? Naah, think bigger.

Digital system + trojan + bittorrent = "Irish cinema -projector- busted for distribution of 133t 0-day filmz!"

Input

[bcmm]

Will these be able to take normal digital video input?

Could they play DVDs, for example?

Or Quake...

Re:Input

[mcknation]

I would imagine so...however "normal" dvds probably would not have the resolution required to look "normal" on a movie screen.

mck

Re:Input

[ThJ]

609 kroner timen? Er du rusk?

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:Why is it taking this long?

[johnhennessy]

I'm guessing that the projector technology is probably only now getting cost effective.

If you look at most consumer grade projectors, they usually support 1024x768, or if you go for really expensive ones, maybe the next size up. I think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that its currently considered at production level to edit films at 4K pixels (not sure if thats horizontal or vertical, but guessing 4K pixels vertically) so as you can see a consumer projector (which can normall costs thousands to begin with) just wouldn't cut it.

As the technology moves to LTPS (low temperature poly-silicon) - which it has already is the Asian market, the resolution will go up.

Just think of it practically: if I pixel is 0.5mm x 0.5mm on the projector, how big is that pixel going to be on the "big screen".

Re:Why is it taking this long?

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

The major hurdle is that there are about 35,000 cinema projectors in the country that need to be converted to digital at about $100,000 a shot. Add in the cost of the satellites, storage, retrofit for data, etc. and the average multiplex is looking at an investment of well over $1,000,000. Sure, the investment will pay back in ease of distribution and whatnot, but where does the million come from? The studios sure aren't going to pay for it - the razor-thin margins they give back to the theaters are why popcorn costs $28 a pound. And theater owners know that Joe Public won't stand for a ticket price hike when most people wouldn't notice or appreciate the jump in quality.

Basically it's a case of which comes first - the chicken or the egg? Or the cart before the horse. Except the chicken is a $100,000 digital projector and the horse is a $28 bucket of popcorn.

And somehow the egg is Orrin Hatch.

Re:Why is it taking this long?

[canavan]

It's horizontal. 4k is 4k x 2k pixels. However, the 'smaller' digital cinema projectors use relsolutions as low as 1280x1024 with anamorpic lenses to stretch the whole image over the 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 screen.

Over here in europe, even that is much better than the average copy of conventional film, since the focus is adjusted just once and stays essentially perfect, and you can't scratch a digital movie, or neglect to service the projector so bad that the image is vibrating as if the projector was run by a two stroke engine.

Satellite Hacking?

[n0dalus]

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.

Cinemas using the technology will be able .....

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

to just download the torrent :)

Consider security...

[irritus]

Can you imagine how terrible this could go if they don't use adequate security? Someone could conceivably hack the source and replace a film with a horrific piece of fanfiction. Movies will now have a chance of not only being terrible, but not even the terrible movie you paid to see in the first place.

Finally Ireland is ahead with something

[Celt]

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? :)

Re:Finally Ireland is ahead with something

[zoney_ie]

Actually, we are third last in the EU25 for broadband access according to the most recent EU survey (by this stage we are probably last!).

Only 70% or so of lines connected to a broadband-enabled exchange are suitably good quality (i.e. not faulty/broken) to allow a connection. The enabled exchanges only cover the cities and major towns. So contrary to Eircon's outright *lies* to the people and government (they've pretty much successfully brainwashed people that only techies are aware there's a problem) there is a pitiful amount of broadband coverage.

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.

The real goal

[WormholeFiend]

was to stop projectionists from emulating Tyler Durden's insertion of pr0n frames into family movies.

Belgium has had this for a while..

[Anonymous Coward]

Granted not in all movie theaters, but the mayor cinema group has been showing digital movies for more than a year now.
Check out the 'Hoe werkt digital cinema..' link on the following page:
http://www.kinepolis.be/index.cfm?PageID=2043

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.

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

[Timesprout]

Actually you may not have noticed this but most cinemas are hell bent on providing the best quality sound and picture they can so as to attract more people to go to the cinema. After all the invesment in theatres they are not going to shoot themselves in the head with low quality quality video.

Bandwidth and storage are not going to be an issue for these systems.

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

[Jafafa Hots]

Well, I have seen one digitally projected "film" (can we even call them that anymore?) and I will never see one again. It was HORRIBLE. There I was in a friggin movie theater and I could see individual pixels even more clearly than I do when watching some crappy divx-encoded file at home.

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

[cgenman]

Well, I have seen one digitally projected "film" (can we even call them that anymore?) and I will never see one again. It was HORRIBLE.

Yeah, and I hear Episode 3 isn't much better.

Older films

[caitsith01]

What will the situation be with older films? Many excellent movies are not available in a digitised form, and we may be at the mercy of the film studios as to when, if ever, they are re-released in a format that these projectors can play.

Re:Older films

[dvdeug]

What will the situation be with older films? Many excellent movies are not available in a digitised form, and we may be at the mercy of the film studios as to when, if ever, they are re-released in a format that these projectors can play.

Honestly, I don't think I've ever been to a movie theater that wasn't showing the latest movies. I'm sure Rocky Horror Picture Show and Gone with the Wind and the few other old films that movie theaters actually play will turn up in digital formats.

For the old movie theater, or person with a private theater, no one is destroying the old projectors. I suspect you'll be able to get cheap new replacement parts for five or ten years, and cheap old or expensive new parts for the rest of the century; film isn't going to disappear in an instant.

I thought Brazil was first

[kiekerjan]

See this Slashdot story.

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?

Re:A marketing fantasy

[Xoro]

Since there are many more than 500 35mm projectors in Ireland,

Are you sure there are "many more than 500" movie screens in Ireland?

I couldn't find the exact number, but saw one estimate that said Canada has about 3,000 screens. Since Canada has a population of 30 million people and Ireland a population of < 4 million, ~500 screens seems about right.

Re:A marketing fantasy

[Finuvir]

I'm surprised there are as many as 500. I live in a town of < 20,000 people and one cinema (with one screen). If there was one screen for every 20,000 people in a country of ~4m there'd be only 200 screens. Okay, so there are smaller towns than mine with cinemas in them, and being quite close to Dublin we have access to all of the mulitplexes too which probably limits the business opportunities of the local. 500 screens is certainly of the right order.

good Vs. bad

[Havenwar]

Well, on one hand my first thought is "great, this is a great move and I hopw the entire world follows so we can watch digital movies at any theatre".

But it is quickly followed up by the thought that "But seriously... My entertainment system is already digital. Why go elsewhere?"

Sure, a 30 foot screen is bigger than a 32", but hey, size is not everything. And I can always get a projector. By then, teh advantages of move theatres has kind agone bye bye... I have usually seen everything by the time it reaches the screen here in sweden anyways. (Sometimes up to a year after the american release)

So sure.. digital theatres are good... but only because it is cheaper to distrbute movies for th ecompanies. This way they might cut the prizes, distribute worldwide quicker, and possibly even start to gain some ground on the pirating market. But still... Just buy me a popcornmachine and I'd rather stay home - with friends.

Nah, I cant decide. What do you think.. good step or bad step, or just a completely useless step?

Re:good Vs. bad

[Havenwar]

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.

There'll be riots, you know.

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

"A long time ago in a galaxy far, far aw -

STREAMING...

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.

will that mean..

[Exter-C]

Idealy to cut costs further the cinemas could just stream the movies from the one location each time the movies are being shown. Especially with the growth in cheap fibre across europe especially.

The over all cost savings will be more significant than just the film cases. Ive been in cinemas on several occasions where the film has screwed up and we have had to get a refund from the cinema.. Taking that out out or reducing it seriously would be a great bonus for the cinemas.

Re:will that mean..

[Swedentom]

"cinemas could just stream the movies"

... BUFFERING ...
;-)

Will this make being a distributor easier?

[Katravax]

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.

"Fake" Cinemas? DRM in these new digital cinemas?

[CarpetShark]

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?

Re:They need a transportable media format.

[Wesley Felter]

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a FedEx package with a 400GB hard drive.