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."

Comments

Re:(DRM) Not ready yet?

[wisebabo]

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.

Re:Cinema is dead

[wisebabo]

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.

An assignment for you

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:cost

[Sporkinum]

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/

Why is it so expensive?

[DigiMan]

Okay, I have a question...
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? ...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...

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.

box-office slump is an urban myth

[pcgabe]

(From Roger Ebert's "Answer Man")

Q. If this was such a great year for movies, why are box-office receipts so far down from last year, even though admission prices are at an all-time high? Do you feel that there is such a growing disconnect between Hollywood and America that Hollywood had better wake up or face serious consequences?

Cal Ford, Corsicana, Texas

A: No, I don't, because the "box-office slump" is an urban myth that has been tiresomely created by news media recycling one another. By mid-December, according to the Hollywood Reporter, receipts were down between 4 percent and 5 percent from 2004, a record year when the totals were boosted by Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," which grossed $370 million. Many of those tickets were sold to people who rarely go to the movies. 2005 will eventually be the second or third best year in box-office history. Industry analyst David Poland at moviecitynews.com has been consistently right about this non-story.

Additionally, you can read his ideas for real ways to revitalize the movie-going experience here.