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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."
Many in the movie industry hope digital cinema will help revive theater attendance, which fell 9 percent in 2005 in the United States.
My guess is that releasing movies that don't suck would increase movie attendance.
Despite the expensive tickets and overpriced food, crying babies, restless children, chatty couples, cell phones going off, people lighting up the room checking their e-mail on their Blackberries, and every other clichéd movie theater problem on the tip of every stand-up comedian's tongue, I say to myself: "I could put up with all of this if only the film projector was digital."
Many in the movie industry hope digital cinema will help revive theater attendance, which fell 9 percent in 2005 in the United States.
I stopped going to movies because I was sick of paying the price of a DVD, just to be forced to watch commercials for deodorant and lectures about how I'm an evil baby-killing sealsucker for downloading movies (which is something I don't do).
Now I'm supposed to go back and start going to movies again just because they've tossed in some newfangled, flashy, questionable technology?
Sometimes I wonder whether the people who work for MPAA style companies are stupid, or whether they simply are from some alternate universe where logic actually works that way.
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?
Maybe if movies became affordable for the middle class family again and weren't absolutely fucking horrible and didn't include 20 minutes of advertising at the start. Maybe, just maybe... people would start going again.
"current equipment does not meet all the technology standards set by the industry."
I wonder if this means "The equipment doesn't have the DRM and copy protection we require."
The one place where they could use DRM for a true user pays arrangement - i.e. Pay per screening etc - and no mention at all of this.
I'm sure there are probably other "technical issues" holding them up, but DRM would be the most obvious. I'm sure that I read a while back that copy protection has already been addressed in the form of encrypted hard disks for distribution in the UK.
Don't tailgate - the end is near!
Lets see, the last time I went to the flicks it cost us £20 (tickets and snacks), the seats were very uncomfortable, the picture quality wasn't all that great (poorly done 35mm is barely better than a projected DVD, let alone HDTV) and the sound was nothing to write home about. Also, the guy behind me had stinky feet that he insisted on putting on the back of my chair, some guy at the back of the theatre stood up proclaiming that someone had farted and that it stank like shit (duh!) and stormed down to the front to sit. Admittedly the fart was pretty nasty. Anyway, the fact is, the cinematic experience can be closely replicated at home without all the bad things by playing a DVD on even a budget DLP projector these days. Compared with the £100,000 front projection CRT systems with line doublers etc that were necessary only 10 years ago, a modern cheap DLP blows that away for the most part (black level is the only real problem but they are getting better and better). I can't wait for HD discs (blu-ray or HD-DVD, not bothered, both would be fine by me) so I can finally say that yes, my home projection system is better than all but the very best cinema. At that point the only way you will drag me into a cinema is if it is a *REALLY* good film, or IMAX. From what I understand the digital projection systems are only aiming to be as good as 35mm which means HDTV should be a very similar experience.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
It's the commercials that keep me away. It pisses me off to no end having to watch 20 minutes of commercials and previews for movies I have no interest in after I paid for a movie ticket. If I wanted to watch commercials, I could have stayed home and watched TV.
And, if they are gonna show a preview, at least show a preview for a movie that the audience of the movie being screened might be interested in.
Fæx!
Digital picture quality isn't as good as they like to think. The resolution to match 35mm film is something like 3000-4000 pixels. 70mm film is twice that (going higher isn't neccesary since the eye has a limited resolution). Upgrading will involve replacing the most expensive component.
Cinemas like equipment that's built to last. Some cinemas are using projectors that are 30+ years old and still working perfectly. New equipment such as multi channel digital sound processors are just bolted on. You can't bolt a digital projector onto one of these. The technology is fundamentally different.
People are not going to go to the movies just because they have digital projectors. They don't care! It doesn't make a difference how the popcorn was delivered, or whether the electricity comes from nuclear power or coal either. They want to see a movie. This is the problem. Hollywood is too obsessed with technology (not just cameras but digital sets as well). Give us a decent story. Use the technology to tell the story.
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.
While important, the quality of the projection should not be the focus when trying to draw people to a theatre. The commodification/McDonaldization of movie theatres is the problem. Most theatres in the US are mega-plexes, with the front lobby and each theatre looking exactly the same no matter what city you go to in the US. The theatre needs more character and intrigue.
For example, if you go to Westwood in Los Angeles, the theatres look like opera houses, and are ornate and spacious. There is palpable excitement in the crowd on opening night for a new film. I saw a movie at a pizza restaurant/theatre in DC a while back. The tables were set on tiers. Sitting in a comfy chair eating pizza while watching a movie in a theatre is an awesome experience. Lastly, I saw Saving Private Ryan in Amsterdam. The theatre was also very ornate. Some people dressed up for the occasion. A choir dressed in WW2 uniforms sang before the movie and during intermission. During intermission, you could go to the lobby or a number of lounges to have a cocktail or some champagne.
If some maverick theatre owner was willing to turn movie-watching into an EXPERIENCE again, then I might think about attending, but right now I have no interest in being pumped in and out of a suburban money making machine.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
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.