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Digital Cinema Not Quite There Yet
An anonymous reader writes "A Reuters article explains how, in some ways, the digital future of movie theatres isn't quite here yet. Despite the push for new technology in the projection booth, theaters have been slow to adopt the new and expensive gear." From the article: " Many in the movie industry hope digital cinema will help revive theater attendance, which fell 9 percent in 2005 in the United States. The studios stand to save about $1 billion a year in print distribution costs because they will be shipping digital movies via computer hard drives, satellite and broadband cable, versus old celluloid canisters. But digital deployment is expensive at about $100,000 per screen, and while the studios agreed to foot most of the bill, current equipment does not meet all the technology standards set by the industry."
I'm not sure why the movie industry doesn't get that one of the reasons (besides movie/story quality) that attendance is going down is because tickets cost too much, and snacks cost way too much. Price everything reasonably, and you'll get more volume. I don't need 17.3 gallons of Coca-Cola for ONLY $25!!! I want a reasonable serving that you don't gouge me for. And the same goes for everything else you're selling. Why do you think so many people cruise right on by the snack bar and straight into the theater? And why so many more don't even bother showing up at all?
Trondheim already has the world's first Sony 4K SXRD projector installed in a commercial cinema
http://www.ntnu.no/midgard/Nordic.html
the oft quoted 3000-4000 pixel count is done under perfect conditions using a pristine negative with a million dollar telecine. In the theater you are usually watching a fourth generation print that has accumulated dust and scratches. Audience testing showed that even the first generation of digital projectors (1280x1024 using an anamorphic projector lens) was preferable to the ordinary release print. In addition the digital projectors are designed to be as close to the "analog" ones as possible. They typically work with a digital "head" bolted onto a standard projector light housing. Power supplies and audio connections (from the server) remain the same.
Now the current generation of projectors are 2048x1080. Soon they will go to 4K. It is telling that IMAX known for its ultra large format films (70mm 15perf) is actively considering digital, in no small part due to the extremely high print costs $20K-$40K. If they consider digital good enough, that's saying something.
Wow, no wonder you have to take out a mortgage on the popcorn. Back, er, in my day, it was 60/40 for the movie theater, or maybe 50/50 for a "sure hit." Of course, a spectacle or event movie didn't cost $200 million or more, and there wasn't a $50 million ad campaign to get you to see it. You looked in the paper, see, and read the reviews or talked to Cousin Artie, and he said it was good, so that was fine. It's way beyond inflation. In the '50s, I was seeing Saturday kids' matinees at the FOX in New Orleans -- which is now a tangled mess, I guess -- for 15 cents. During the week, it was 50 cents or so. Now, I think, if it were regular inflation here -- like a loaf of bread -- the price would now be about $4.00. Come to think of it, I think the movies would be better if they had to make them with that admission price in mind.
There are a number of reasons that D-Cinema has not taken off.
1. The format has just been ratified and in some ways is still incomplete. It is a SMPTE spec (DC-28).
2. The equipment needed to playback DC-28 doesn't exist in cheap enough quantities yet. This is essentially the chips to decode (encode would be nice as well but it can be done in software). The decoding of J2K is quite cpu intensive and the algorithms don't optimize well in todays CPUs so the decoder chips are a requirement.
3. Its an expense for everyone involved. The projectors are around $75K today, the encoding systems represent multi-million dollar changes to the workflow of the studios (depending on commitment).
4. The only person that is going to make money is the distributor. The distributors all have financing secured, the ones we have talked to for the past 5 years have 3-4 hundred million secured so that they can essentially subsidize a large portion of the rollout but at 10,000 primary screens this only goes so far when you consider projector costs.
5. The theater owners are unconvinced that switching to DCinema is going to gain them anything, in fact the only advantage it gives them is the ability to dynamically change the number of screens that they are using for a given movie at any point in time. The ability to instantly add another showing without ordering another print is a bonus but its not a big enough one.
6. The traditional equipment providers have been fighting this tooth and nail. Somewhat out of ignorance and protectionism but mostly because their technology involves gears and reels not bits and bites. They simply don't understand the technology or to be more fair they didn't in the beginning.
7. There was a lot of division in the format wars, the MPEG 2 guys wanted their version, there were some stand alone wavelet formats, there were some oddball variants of jpeg. All of which had some success which has ultimately delayed the rollout *somewhat* just do to the FUD it has caused.
8. the content owners are worried about digital copies of their films flying around the great cloud of the internet of course and about them being stored on hard disks but most of those issues have been somewhat addressed and we are now just waiting for them to sort of catch up with the reality of technology today.
9. There are a bunch of little things like the single longest lead time item for a D-Cinema system is the lens for the projector. The wait time can be as long as two years.
10. The accepted cost for the DCinema system is around $7K per unit (not counting the projector) which is rediculous as it does not leave much room for cost for storage, the decoder board, the network, backup systems, etc, etc, etc.. just an enterprise class server alone is going to suck up $4K of that cost, its a bit rediculous.
In response to some of the other topics mentioned.
DRM/Security: The DRM is simply normal encryption systems, since the playback system is entirely hardware the playback board has the keys. It will be quite hard to hack. This is not a case of DVD CSS encryption, the system will be much harder to get into. Also the move now is to put real-time watermarking into the film at playback.
Quality: The typical film you see in a theater is around 4th to 6th generation prints. This means you could be down as low as 1000 lines of resolution. DCinema kicks ass in quality. Even when you butterfly the content side by side with a 6K telecine from a pristing master print of the film the dcinema quality stands up quite well (90% of the test audience cannot tell the difference). I would also say that the main reason that some people can tell the difference is that the dcinema version is much more stable (not gate weave) so it is not moving all over on the screen. Even the golden eyes in hollywood agree that it is a better image. Keep in mind that all of the dcinema systems out there today are based on older technology and cannot compare with a DCI spec system.
My guess is that releasing movies that don't suck would increase movie attendance.
There have been some good films released over the last year, the same as any other year. There have been crap films released since the history of films. Your theory is therefore flawed.
Are you implying that Ozzie and Harriet had carnal knowledge of each other? I am devastated.
In general, a very well constructed post, but I would pick a nit on this:
" traitors are drawn and quartered after having their entrails burned in front of their eyes"
The "drawn" part of "drawn and quartered" refers to the removal of the victim's entrails. If the entrails were burned before removal, the victim would be unlikely to survive till the quartering.
So the correct chronology would be:
1> remove entrails (drawing them out rather than just hacking them out - to minimze trauma)
2> burn said entrails (now out of abdomen, but still attached to the victim) before
3> rip victim apart (quartering)generally by tying each limb to a horse pointed towards one of the cardinal points of the compass, then setting the horses to gallop.
So Shrek 2, best movie of 2004? Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, sweeps the awards for `99, Jar Jar for best male in a supporting role?
While we are at it, spider man deserves some awards, lets say best actor, we can give it to him again for his sequel.
Then finaly, best actor of 2004? Jesus Crist, as Himself, in the Passion of the Christ.
Please, look at this for the caliber of movies you would be awarding for excellence. http://www.filmsite.org/boxoffice.html I didnt go past the top ten. but look down, Meet the Fockers, Home Alone, Beverly Hills Cop, and How the Grinch Stole Xmas would all atleast be nominated, Top box office are really a who's who of crappy movies we should probably be ashamed of (With notable exceptions)
Box office success says Nothing about how good a movie is, nothing about how good of acting it had, and nothing about how good the story, is, box office success is having a movie start from the begining trying to hone in on a target audience and run a targeted non stop marketing blitz in the months between October and Thanksgiving. Can great movies top the box office, Of course, Can a great movie be something you have never heard of, Definately, maybe you should check them out now that you have.
Finaly, incase you really are that dense, let me shout at you...
JURRASIC PARK AND MRS DOUBTFIRE ARE IN NO WAY AS CULTURALY SIGNIFICANT AS SCHINDLER'S LIST!!!
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
>But it was a quiet time of a combination of prosperity and peace between the WW/II and the Vietnam era.
I guess it really was the forgotten war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_war
I was quoted directly by an IMAX rep that it costs $40k AUD, per print, because of that they could not get
all the movies they'de like into aust. If it was $1k on a harddrive they yeah, they could show anything 24/7.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.