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?

[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...

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

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.

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.

The real goal

[WormholeFiend]

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

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.