Slashdot Mirror
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."
DRM is just one of the technical issues. The DCI specification includes transport, subtitling (via XML), compression, watermarking, multiple audio/language tracks and of course encryption. By the way, the encryption isn't just on the hard drive/fiber/satellite. It extends all the way to between the server and the projector so that a professional "hacker" can't decrypt the bit stream between the two. I understand it goes just about all the way to the imaging chip.
Every okay-sized town has a couple cheapo theaters with inexpensive snacks. Those places generally do even worse than the overpriced joints.
Why?
Because people can now have a *very good* theater experience at home. I've got a relatively cheap ($1800) 720p projector, and when I go to any theater around town that isn't an IMAX, the first thing I notice is "this theater is not as nice as the one in my living room."
There was a day when people would go to a movie just to sit in an air-conditioned room for an hour and a half. Those days are gone. Our homes are much more comfortable than they were in 1955.
Theaters, in order to survive, must create an experience worth driving across town for. Doing so costs money, which means either higher ticket/popcorn prices, or those goddamn ads which have driven a lot of people away from going to the theater forever.
It's a rough time to be in that business. I wonder if there will even be movie theaters 20 years from now, and if there are none, I wonder where teens will take their dates.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
actually while true HD is very good (1920 x 1080) it still does not have the color space and contrast that the black chip TI projectors have (as well as a slightly lower resolution)l. Also note that there are temporal artifacts introduced by the conversion between the 24 frames per second progressive the movie was presumably shot at and the 30 frames per second interlaced of the 1920x1080 HD standard. It lacks that subjective "film" feel that is, admittedly, actually a lower quality image. As for the 1280x720 60fps standard not only is that of significantly lower res. but it has that very different "showscan" (an old movie format) feel due to the high frame rate.
All these points will need to be re-examined in one to two years when the new 4K projectors start coming out with much higher (even than film in true comparisons) resolutions.
I watched the first half of Star Wars Episode 3 on film, and then digital, back-to-back, on opening weekend. Half-way through the film projection, a fire alarm went off and everyone in the multiplex had to evacuate for 20 minutes. When I went back in I went to the digital projection theater and watched the film from start to finish.
I found the resolution of digital was as clear or clearer than the film, by just a little bit. I loved the lack of jitter, which was a huge improvement. However, without the jitter I noticed the pixels from the projector, and I sat in about row 8. I like the screen to just about fill my field of vision. The new clarity was especially distracting during fast motion from either the characters or the camera pans. I've disliked 24fps for years now, but digital clarity almost makes the problem worse now because the motion blur stands out.
The digital delivery standard approved last year offers 2K at 48fps, or 4K at 24fps. Both of these are inadequate. That said I'd rather watch action movies in 2K at 48, and slower dramas in 4K at 24. But visual feasts like Lord of the Rings truly need 4K at 48 to do them justice.
I've been reading your backposts. You talk about what's happening to society with the tone of someone who's studied history, but with the ignorance of someone whose idea of the past is based on fifties sitcoms.
Society has always been a terrible, roiling mess of people killing, fucking, beating, screaming, stealing and swearing. This is probably the most generally civil time in the history of the world, but not by much.
There was a great deal of American propaganda in the fifties and sixties in which television shows and movies depicted the way that authority figures wished society was, but it was completely inaccurate. Coat-hanger abortions, drug use, prostitution, unreported rapes, lynching of blacks, the blackmails of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, and a thousand other offenses went on all the time. The populace of the fifties knew this, but their children and their grandchildren fell for the saccharine story.
It didn't make these children better people. It made them ignorant of how people work.
Your assignment is to read A Tale of Two Cities, in which highwaymen rob passersby constantly, traitors are drawn and quartered after having their entrails burned in front of their eyes, children are executed for stealing sixpence, and in general two of the "greatest" societies in Europe wallow in muck and horror. You'll see how these societies were in this predicament precisely because of how tough they were on offenses to their moral code. You'll certainly see that culture has long been full of violence, sex and profanity, because people are full of these things.
After you've done that, you can continue to proselytize for your supposed utopian vision of a society founded around families. You can continue to ignore that the majority of the world is not composed of families at all, but of single people, divorcees, widowers, and the parents of adult children. You can ignore that reproduction is merely the start of a life that is supposed to be full of many experiences apart from merely reproducing again. This twisted vision can still be yours... but at least you won't think your ideal represents a glorious past we once had.
Life has always been a crock of shit. Lucky that we so often like the smell of our own.
My main problem with the Cinema is that I don't have control. Missing half the film if I need to use the toilet is a bit of a pain. Also, if I miss what someone said, I can't rewind a bit and listen again. Most of my viewing in done on a Archos AV500 portable PMP while I am commuting to work (about 1 hour). I mostly watch TV shows, e.g. Babylon 5, Alias etc. The only problem is getting the content. There don't seem to be any good (and legal) places I can get the content I want. Does anyone know where I can pay a reasonable fee to download popular TV shows?
Strangely enough, our town's cheapo theater has turned out to be the most successfull theater by screen in Iowa. The guy that owns it charges $3-$4 a ticket for 2nd run and art house flicks. His concession prices are the best, and he uses real butter on the popcorn. And for the digital aspect, he has a high end DLP for each screen that he uses for powerpoints to show limited ads and informitive bits before the show. A cool thing he did this year was show the superbowl in HD on one of the screens. People that went to it said it was fantastic. He also uses it to show amature movies for the annual film festival.
http://www.collinsroadtheaters.com/
http://crifilms.com/
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
I for one cannot wait for full digital cinema based on the spec released last summer.
You are quite right about most prints for movie theaters these days too: they're pretty awful. Most films I've seen recently have been poorly projected (bad focus and not enough / too much cropped from the actual print via poor screen size ratio compared to the print) and the print quality was mediocre at best. Having to make sure you get to one of the first showings at any given cinema is probably the best bet, but who wants to do that?
Given the choice between a good projection of a DVD at someone's home with a good setup (including excellent sound) and going to a cinema, there is no contest. Even in an empty local cinema I have been subject to projector / aircon noise, rubbish in the aisles, cold draughts, you name it.
I think home cinema and DVDs are popular because the cinema experience has really started to lose momentum. The only reason I ever go is to get "out of the house" and see something recent. Simultaneous DVD release would kill the movie theater, but who cares?
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I saw this in another thread, but the fall of 9 percent can be explained by the "passion of the christ," which came out in 2004. It brought out movie goers who don't normally go to the movies, sometimes more than once. It was explained by Roger Ebert that basically the 2004 figures were inflated by this figure, and they simply droped off to a normal trend in 2005.
So Cinema isn't dead, the movie companies aren't hurting, it's just that all this is a myopic response to an abberation in the figures the year before.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Don't have much to add to that informative post except to say that I too have noticed pixellating while watching a digital projection. It reminded me of the first generation of digital cameras, in which the prints obviously did not compare to 35mm film. Nowadays a good digicam print is equal or superior to the average 35mm P&S print. So I'd imagine the problem of digital artifacts will be licked in the next generation of theater projectors as well.
The problem for large theaters is that flawless digital projections will eventually be their own death warrants. Because at that point, what's to stop boutique sized 100 seat microtheaters from opening up, and for a higher ticket price providing a much more pleasant user experience? What's to stop corporations from ordering "free" screenings for their executives? Point being that there is no limitation on the number of digital prints that a movie commpany can send out. And that will destroy the advantage that theater chains have over the rest of the world. They'll have no choice but to compete on price, the very concept of which puts fear in their hearts. (Before you say "economies of scale," look at the precarious situation of American automakers and airlines.)
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Okay, I have a question...
...or perhaps, because they have a very detailed encryption scheme where you have to call in and get an expiring key that will only work for 7 days - they the films wont play anymore and you need to call up and buy a new key...
Why is retrofitting these theatres going to cost the $100,000/screen as they allege? I have a friend who I helped acquire a theatre and we were able to use a $2500 projector (and later 2 $3,000 unites with "lens shift" where they can be used in tandem), and threw the image onto a full size screen (30x50 ft?) with a super bright, and clear image... WE ran a DVD from a Sony DVD player that was up-converting everything to 1080 lines of resolution, and it looked as good, if not better than 35mm...
We found that the DLP projectors gave much truer color, whereas the LCD units put everyone in a candy colored world.
So anyway, we now show independent filmmaker's films, and DVD trailers - and an occasional a public domain film - and NO ONE had every questioned the quality.
I just don't understand why everyone wants a $100k "digital Projection" projector just because it's the unit they've used at events like the Oscars. Is this because to brand name? Ignorance?
From what I've heard, the bigger issue isn't getting the image on the screen, but the lack of willingness of the exhibitors to LET you play a DVD - they just wont allow it - even if you already get regular movie prints from the company (Disney, MGM, etc.), and are paying them market rate, and have the DVD at the same time the vinyl 35mm is available.
Ah yes, enter the MPAA and UK equivalent that seem to have more greed than common sense.
Stelios came up with Easy Cinema (http://www.easycinema.com/ where you could watch a film for 50 pence (off peak, not likely a recent release either). Not sure it quite worked out as it maybe was planned, but his basic take was that he could strip out all of the snacks and drinks, replace them with vending machines, and have a skeleton staff running the place. If you want that kindly old dear showing you to your seat with that strange torch thing, you're out of luck.
In short, he was going to cut his costs to the knuckle so that ticket prices could get sensible. As someone who's widely acknowledged as being the catalyst for lowering the cost of air travel, he's got the credentials for doing it in cinema. As I say though, not sure it's quite panned out as broadly as it maybe was planned.
Personally, I think cinema is a bit old-hat. Home cinema is 'good enough' (and getting better/cheaper), so I can't see cinemas having anything you can't do elsewhere. Back in the 50s I'm sure cinema was the coolest thing ever, but not now. Imax may have the technology to give people a reason to leave their own homes, but lacking feature films has slowed them up.
The movie associations have had a good run of making money for old rope. They need to start innovating, or else the herd will just totter off elsewhere. They'll have to drop at least half of their greed to do it, so I can't see it happening any time soon.
Additionally, you can read his ideas for real ways to revitalize the movie-going experience here.
Don't put advice in your sig.
Some highlights:
The system shall be designed to push data to outside business entities per the needs of the exhibitor, and shall not allow outside business entities to pull data from the exhibitor's equipment or from the premises without the express written permission of the exhibitor on a case-by-case basis. All such communications shall be recorded and shall be auditable by the Exhibitor.
That's a nice contractual definition of a "no spyware" requirement. IT managers, put that in your purchase orders.
Good performance requirement. If you have to do hardware replacement, this puts an upper limit on how fast the vendor has to authorize the new hardware.
If we have to have DRM, it needs contractual safeguards like that.