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