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Digital Movie Projection: Can It Live Up To The Hype?
hobb writes "OK, so Roger Ebert's not a technical genius, but he's written an interesting piece on the future of digital movie projection (theatres, not home.) Read his essay here. Digital for home systems is great, but will 1280x1024 be good enough for theatres? That's about 10mm dot pitch, folks...
"
Digital video has crap resolution. Why? Because to achieve the same sort of resolution you get with film, you need to store enormous amounts of data.
You can't afford the required amount of memory/storage. So you use compression.
Which means you lose quality (because you certainly aren't using *lossless* compression -- not when you need huge compression ratios), which was what you were trying to gain in the first place.
Until multi-terabyte storage is fast, cheap, and small, film will continue to be superior. As is so clearly is now.
The reason for the current resolution limit for the digital theatre projectors is a simple one of physical manufacture - the various systems such as the light valve are not CRTs. As with devices such as LCDs or the CCDs used in video cameras, these devices need to be made a certain size, and with that size comes the problem of yield. You might be able to tolerate a stuck pixel on your notebook PC, but in a theatre?
Another thing to remember is that resolution numbers are not the be-all and end-all. Budget and independent filmmakers are taking up "prosumer" equipment based on DV, and shooting in progressive-mode PAL (25fps) for transfer to 35mm. And when professionally transferred to film and shown in theatres, those digital-video images can look pretty damn good.
Ebert's enthusiasm for a true 48fps film process is understandable. Some people in the TV world gush every bit as much about moving to, for instance, a 720-line 60fps progressive scan mode instead of 1080 interlaced. There are aesthetic judgements to be made here which are very important.
The other thing to bear in mind is that the quality of the movie you are watching is every bit as important as the gee-whiz technical aspects of getting it to you. Digital video cameras - DV-style, not even the HDTV ones - are already enabling independents to make films for inconceivably low budgets. The real battle is in getting the art distributed to where people can see it.
Film's resolution is considerably higher than HDTV's. This post is just plain false.
I'm an (amateur, but serious) photographer. I do indeed like using Fuji Velvia and other fine grained, high resolution films wherever practical. I use a tripod whenever I can. So why do I think that a resolution that would be unacceptable for me for serious photography would be just fine for movies?
Last night I printed one of our wedding photographs on my Epson Stylus Photo EX (and before anyone starts commenting on this gross violation of copyright, not to mention photographic etiquette, I'll point out that our deal with the photographer included throwing in the negatives and all that). This was a fairly low resolution scan (1280x1024, I did it for a screen background). The print is on an 11x17 piece of glossy film. It's using the Gimp's print plugin that Michael Sweet originally wrote that I've enhanced (URL below). I can see the pixelation -- if I look at it carefully from less than 12" away with my left eye, which has unusually acute close-in vision. Even then I can only see the pixelation in sharp transitions, such as between my tuxedo jacket and my shirt where the line is only about 15 degrees off parallel. It's obvious if I look reasonably carefully that it's not as sharp as a good quality photographic print, but it doesn't look pixelized.
And the point is? A movie theatre is not an optimal location for spotting imperfections. For one, it's in constant motion, so it's usually impossible to focus on any one spot for long enough to see any artifacts. Secondly, if the projector is even slightly out of focus, any pixelation will be blurred out of existence.
I'm not an expert on motion picture film, but the resolution enhancement over normal 35 mm film is not as great as the 70 mm format would lead one to believe. Taking into account the sprocket holes and the soundtrack, I'd be surprised if the actual frame width on 70 mm movie film is greater than 50 mm or thereabouts. If it's 50 mm wide, the length of a frame should be about 27 mm (at least if the depiction at http://www.theatres.sre.sony.com/imax/film.html is reasonably accurate -- the long side of the film stretches across the width, rather than the length). 35 mm still film is 24x36. So the movie frame is bigger than the 35 mm frame, but not spectacularly so (it's smaller than the smallest "medium format" photographic format, which is nominally 60x45 mm but actually a bit less). High end consumer digital cameras are currently in the range of 1800x1200 pixels, and they produce quite satisfactory non-critical prints.
2 Mp resolution might not be sufficient for Imax (very large format, with a huge screen), particularly at theatres such as the Omnimax at the Boston Science Museum), but I suspect that for most motion picture purposes, it's quite adequate.
I'm surprised at you people!
/. with 80% static content.
One of his comments struck a nerve with me - the fact that hollywood "suits" don't care about the technology. They just follow the hype like dogs in heat.
Sound familiar?
Our little clique isn't the only one that has shoddy solutions foisted upon it by clueless "suits." It sounds to me that Ebert, a flim geek of sorts, is pointing out a case just like this. He touches on the technical problems, the emotional ones, and how the solution works in practice. All arguments that one of us might use against a PHB advocating a 100 box nt cluster using VB scripts and MSSQL as a web solution for a site getting 1/100 the traffic of
Digital film will probably win in the end, but there's no reason to start hiking my ticket prices for the crappy quality we'll get now.
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The system used for the recent Phantom Menace digital projections was the Texas Instruments DLP system. The specs are here:
r wars.shtml
http://www.ti.com/dlp/products/cinema/specs_sta
Or here for more on the system:
http://www.ti.com/dlp/products/cinema/
Yes it only has a resolution of 1280 by 1024. HD systems at home do have more resolution than this, but the home HD systems are cathode rays not projection. It's much harder to make a projection system very high resolution than a tube system.
But the resolution will get even higher. Hughes has a system already the ILA-12K (http://www.hjt.com/products/ila12k.html) that does 2000 by 1280. It will keep increasing.
The effective resolution of film (ie. the analog messy strip of celluoid) is around 4000 by 3000 pixels. Digital special effects that are mixed with live film footage are rendered at aywhere from 2048x1550 to the above 4K rsolution.
But the advantage of digital is that the colour reproduction is much more accurate and when you project film, the film is moving at high speed and jitters from side to side so you get blurring.
I imagine only films that have a large proportion of their content created digitally will go with digital projection in the near future. Then there is a real advantage for the director that he knows the colours he sees on the computer screens when they are creating the effects are exactly what will be projected. When you shoot to film there are a huge array of isssues with film stock, look up tables, gamma curves and the only way to know what your colours will actually look like is do go out to film and do a test screening (expensive).
Digital projection is the future but the current systems will improve a lot before it becomes the only system used.
What I know of this comes from still photography, but its also at 35mm (i.e. a negative 24x36mm), so I can say something intelligent.
If you do the sums for a 35mm still, it is considered "sharp" if a single point on the object maps to a cirlce of diameter less than 0.004 inches on the negative (known as the "circle of confusion"). That corresponds to a digital resolution of around 3000x2000. Of course you can go finer. But that is roughly the best performance you can expect from a 35mm film.
Now, whether this makes any difference depends on whether you can see such a small object. The question is: given two small dots in the scene, can you see whether there is one dot or two in the projected image? The point at which the two dots merge into one is the resolution, and the angle subtended by the two dots is the angular resolution. I'll dodge the difference between angle for the camera and angle for the viewer: projection systems are designed so that the middle seats get the right perspective.
The angular resolution of a good human eye is 1/60th of a degree (1 arc minute). So an ideal cinema screen would need to match that with around 60 pixels per degree. Right now I'm wearing spectacles, and without moving my head they put a frame on my vision about 80 degrees wide. I haven't measured a cinema screen from the centre seat, but I'd expect something nearer 40 degrees. 40 degrees times 60 pixels per degree gives 2400 pixels. Which is not too far off what 35mm film gives (at its theoretical best).
So current XVGA systems are not up to the job of replacing film, but give us a 3000x2000 pixel screen and it will look better. And Moore's Law suggests that we will be able to do that fairly soon.
Of course there are other issues. As others have noted you have the problems of physical wear and dirt getting onto film, and the costs of printing, versus the 100% reproducability of digital and the costs of piping all that data around. But you can bet that the studios have looked at these numbers and figured that the lifecycle costs look interesting. And no doubt someone has told them of Moore's Law too.
I remember the same argument in the early days of digital audio. The first CD players sounded harsh in the high treble thanks to the steep filters required. Analogue purists declared that digital would never replace analogue. But where is analogue now? A niche split between rich die-hards and poor elderly people who can't afford to replace their existing LPs. Physical analogue film will go the same way.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
As much as I respect Roger Ebert, I have to say that he's just missing the point completely here.
Ebert contends that film-based systems will be better than digital in the future because film will provide a better-quality image than digital can; and on this count, I think he's absolutely right. Even uncompressed DV lacks the "warmth" (for lack of a better term) of film, and the MaxiVision system he touts sounds like it provides an image that nobody in the DV world can hope to match.
The problem is, image quality is unimportant. Now, before everyone gets up in arms here, think for a second. Who is clamoring for image quality that is better than today's films? General audiences? Nope, they are happy with the cruddy image from a poorly set up projector in a shoebox theater in their shopping mall. Theater owners? Nope, they make more money by dividing their space into multiple small, low-tech screens rather than lovingly setting up one beautiful screen and cutting the number of movies they can show by 11/12ths. Studios? Nope, they know that what makes them money: formulaic movies with name stars presented on as many screens as possible. If they could make money presenting more striking images, they'd all be doing IMAX films by now.
So where it counts -- money -- MaxiVision & other advanced film systems are irrelevant, because nobody wants them bad enough to pay for them. Digital, however, is a different story. Digital offers a big money benefit to one of these players -- the studios -- because it cuts dramatically one of the biggest cost in distributing a film: prints & advertising.
P&A is one of the biggest line items on a film's budget, running into millions of dollars. Each theater which is going to show your film needs a "print" (an analog dupe of the film) to run through their projector. In fact, they need more than one, because prints wear out or get scratched or otherwise start to die after awhile. When you consider that each print is absurdly expensive, and that a movie that "opens wide" goes to 2,500+ theaters, you can see how this gets expensive quick.
Digital changes all this. Suddenly you can stop sending reels of film around (which are expensive) and start sending around magnetic disks (which aren't). Even better, you could conceivably ship the image via a fiber optic cable or satellite connection and avoid "prints" altogether. Then "P&A" just becomes "A" and you've just saved millions, which to a Hollywood executive means that his project is that much more likely to be profitable and thus advance his career.
So, while I understand Ebert's position and wish that we lived in a world where he was right, where the quality of the experience was the prime factor, we don't, and he's wrong. Digital will overtake film, not because it's better, but because it's cheaper -- and even the most beautiful MaxiVision 48 images won't convince the Hollywood moneymen to ignore that math.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Read my blog.
Finally, a topic on /. I actually know something about. I was hoping this article of Ebert's would turn up, cause it pissed me off and thrilled me at the same time. And please, if any you know Ebert's public email (he does have one at compuserve) address, please post it.
First I'd like to discuss Ebert's misconceptions.
They were computer-generated in the first place, so they arrived at the screen without stepping down a generation to film. And because they depicted imaginary places, it was impossible to judge them on the basis of how we know the real world looks.
This is not true at all. The film was scanned into the digital medium for digital projection from film (analogue) negative. Even the effects shots. See American Cinematographer, Sep 1999. In fact, one shot in the film - a non effects shot - was shot on a prototype digital camera. It's when Anakin talks to Qui Gonn outside his house in the desert at night. No effects in that shot, just an unpublicized ruse to see if anyone would notice.
* It can project film at 48 frames per second, twice the existing 24-fps rate. At 48 frames, it uses 50 percent more film than at present. But MV48 also has an "economy mode" that uses that offers low-budget filmmakers savings of up to 25 percent on film.
He doesn't detail this saving problem. The fact is, for independent filmmakers, the prohibitive cost is film, the raw stock and processing and development of negative. It's why so many have turned to digital. Shoot an hour for ten U.S. dollars on Mini DV. Shoot an hour on 35 mm film at 24 fps works out to roughly $4000. Now, at 48 fps, this cost doubles. So what's the "economy" mode here? As well, he completely skirts the issue of the fact that the system's vibration free tech would need to be implemented on nearly every camera in Hollywood. The main mechanism for filming today is the claw / registration pin system. Filming in the analogue sense is really a matter of taking 24 still photographs per second. A claw pulls down a perforation in the film, aligining it into the picture gate, while a registration pin aligns the perf so the film remains within the register of this gate. 24 fps is the standard, and running at higher speeds often needs serious maintenance and reengineering. As well, running at higher speeds = more light. The faster your framerate, the more light you need. This increases costs on film.
And it can handle any existing 35mm film format--unlike digital projection, which would obsolete a century of old prints.
And how good have those prints been maintained? The fact is, such classic immortal films as Vertigo needed extensive digital restoration work in order to present it as it was seen in its year of release. Thousands of films have been lost forever. Earlier this year Ebert even mentioned that there might not be an existing print of Robert Altman's Nashville - a film from the 70s. Classic films now are safer as digital masters.
One advantage of a film print is that the director and cinematographer can "time" the print to be sure the colors and visual elements are right. In a digital theater, the projectionist would be free to adjust the color, tint and contrast according to his whims. Since many projectionists do not even know how to properly frame a picture or set the correct lamp brightness, this is a frightening prospect.
And at the same time - most films shown in cinemas are underpar to the cinematographers wish. A recent popular technique, known as many things but basically silver retention, desaturates color and creates bolder contrast. These prints are more expensive and as a result only a few prints are shipped utilizing this tecnique - which the film was shot for - so that the majority of viewers never see the film as intended. Seven is a particular case of this.
Add to this the fact that Kodak themselves, and Martin Scorcese has campaigned against this, have found that most cinemas dim their projector bulbs under the misguided idea that it extends the bulb's life. It flat out doesn't. It just leads to a muddy, darker picture. Kodak sent technicians to several theaters armed with light meters and found most films projected at a full stop or two under their proper foot candle level. Add to this variations in print reels - and films are on several differnt ones - and you have a subpar projection process. Many cinematographers love the process of approving a DVD transfer because they can properly time the entire film - and a helluva lot of color timing is done digitally now. The cinematographer of The Full Monty shot a film called Hideous Kinky in Morocco, and he told me that he could've turned shots in daylight in the desert into midnight blue using new digital color timing tecniques. The digital projection tecnique could have s locked down system approved by the filmmakers so that the projector is rigged to only show it at their levels of choice - thereby making sure that there is an optimal standard for all showings of the film.
* What about piracy? Movies will be downloaded just once, then stored in each theater. Thieves could try two approaches. They could grab the signal from the satellite and try to break the encryption (as DVD encryption has just been broken).
Digital projection is not MPEG or MJPEG. The compression algorithim is 50:1 - adaptive block size rather than fixed block size. It compresses frames without regard to one or the next, whereas MPEG and MJPEG compress the information that is the same in each subsequent frame. This leads to picture artificating, which the digital projection system does not have. In other words, it is a proprietry, high storage medium with its own compression algorithim at a high cost. Pirates would need more than a simple telecine (transferring film to video) to pirate the film - first they'd have to break the encryption, which would be vastly superior to DVD's pathetic 48 bit, then they'd need the extremely expensive tech to decode that signal to a low fi master for pirating. Good luck, pirates.
As for the image recording itself - we do not know what system it will utilize. Sony and Panavision have yet to elaborate on what test shots for Ep. 2 have turned out as - nor what compression or resolution etc. it will use. It will not be an existing format like DV or DigiBeta or MPEG.
Hollywood has not spent a dime, for example, to research the intriguing question, do film and digital create different brain states? Some theoreticians believe that film creates reverie, video creates hypnosis; wouldn't it be ironic if digital audiences found they were missing an ineffable part of the moviegoing experience?
Umm, which is why video rental is such a huge business? The fact is, for the most part, the audience just doesn't care. And I have experienced states of emotional reverie from movies watched on DVD rather than a cinema. I went to see the IMAX film Everest during which a hair ended up in the gate of the projector. The result - during an emotional moment- an enormous tentacle from space lashed out at our heroes, and continued to do so until the end of the film - was hugely annoying. I complained to the manager. He told me I was the first, indignant, and rude, customer to complain about their high standards. The amount of misconception that still exists about letterboxing is insane. Letterboxing means you see more of the picture as intended. It's as simple as that. How many DVD users know what 16x9 anamorphic means, despite attempts by the DVD community to educate them?
There are issues here. For instance, watching a film projected means that you spend, during a two hour long film, an hour in darkness - maybe creating a dream like state. Digital projection does remove this flicker effect. But this is esoteric, and I doubt audiences even care.
As for questions raised here in slashdot:
The resolution in the TI system doesn't fit the width of films shot in a widescreen aspect ratio.
There are many different ways to make a film have a wider picture. Super 35mm, for example, utilizes the area in a frame that an optical sound wave is normally stored on, creating a fuller frame image. This is usually cropped down to 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 for a widescreen film, chopping off the top and bottom of the recorded image. This is great for effects people because they can reframe shots in the post production process. There is also anamorphic, which uses lenses which squeeze onto a standard frame a wider image and projection uses a lens which unsquezes the image. Star Wars was projected in this manner - the raw image was compressed horizontally, and a lens was put on the projector which expanded it to a full widescreen image, no black bars.
The resolution is nothing near that of analogue film
Absolutely true, but it is improving. The TI system cannot be considered as a dot matrix field of pixels in the standard LCD projection or monitor sense. It uses a system of dichroic mirrors to relay each beam of light representing a pixel. The resulting pixels do not have a stacked, square relation to one another. What it cannot reproduce is that film does have a resolution. It's determined by the number of silver halide crystals in the emulsion. But these crystals are of a random shape and size, and do not conform to pixels. It's messy, chaotic, and gorgeous. Picture grain (on analogue) is the result of seeing these crystals in the image, when a film is underexposed. It is true that digital projection cannot match this chaotic aspect of the film picture.
HOWEVER - as much as you read about the digital revolution, I've seen it. I've seen effects technicians working on major Hollywood films. And the amount of work they're doing that is invisible and are not for show - reframing shots, eliminating a modern car in a peroid film - is stunning. And when these are projected on film integrated into picture that hasn't been messed with digitally, at a 2000 line resolution, you do not notice. What you do notice about effects that give away bad effects are lighting discrepancies and bad rendering or false, too smooth movement. Think of Toy Story - which went from 4k line picture in a digital medium onto film - thereby it was sourced at those 4k lines. Did you notice it came from a pixelated source? No. Bottom line: you are already viewing in your cinema images that have less resoultion than real film.
Wow! Higher framerate for film. Just as good as getting 60 fps in Q3A rather than 30!
This gets into theoretical doctrine, which is messy. Film has been, for the past 70 years, a 24 fps medium. No one has complained that Lawrence of Arabia sucks because of 24 fps. 60 fps is more important in virtual point of view exercises because it better replicates real vision and the subsitution for mouse scrolling for your viewpoint. Undoubtedly, I agree with Ebert, the Maxi Vision system must look great. However - when a filmmaker doesn't shoot in the standard, normal 1/60th of a second shutter speed at 24 fps, the result is noticeable and unusual for audiences - such as the battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan, which were shot at a faster shutter speed, removing motion blur in images.
The projection of film is an optical illusion utilizing the perception of persistence. Most film frames individually with movement have motion blur. Persist this image one after the next, and the brain interprets it as movement. This is a huge debate about perception and so on, which I shouldn't get into here - but the fact is, cinema is so old as a standard, that 24 fps is what people almost expect when they see a movie.
The digital revolution is on, and its gonna crush film, Ebert is a Luddite - or - Hollywood is just hung up on buzzwords and trends and thus this system.
Which is why I was so stunned at his article. He is anything but a Luddite. He was one of the first critics to use the Net, and often writes about tech issues. Yes, the digital revolution is on, and there are going to be huge problems. James Cameron, who does know a helluva lot about this, has said the problem is that Hollywood will go for the cheapest, and therefore nastiest, system. Whatever system they get so they can maintain control of distribution even greater. Imagine if the studios were hooked up to every projector and ran them from their HQ - yeah, it's not a pleasant idea is it? Two weeks into a films release and a scene is causing a media uproar - HQ deletes it from every projector in the world. Etc, etc.
Likewise, the digital revolution is on - and it's not just a buzzword. The fact is, 90% of all films go through some form of digital process now, be it in editing or corrective opticals (traditionally done with an optical printer) or FX. This often entails painful procedures to get film to match the framerate of video systems (30 fps or 60hz NTSC) - 48 fps will make it even worse. There is so much money squandered getting film from one analogue medium into a digital one then back to analogue - that in the long run it's more effective for all parties concerned to move entirely digital. I'm telling you, here at ground zero, as a film student who has managed to see the new tech - that filmmaking in the traditional sense is undergoing a massive change - and it is unstoppable. What astonishes me is butting heads with traditionalists who believe everything must be done to stop filmmaking going digital - but haven't realized it already has - and that this new tech is liberating in that the real indie filmmaker can really make something for cheap, really cheap. Films that would never get made otherwise have been done on DV.
We are getting to the point of - if you can imagine it - you can show it. Which I find personally liberating. Especially if I can do it faster and cheaper - or if a kid in Kansas in his basement can. I own, in my PC, for less than a really cheap car, the equivalent to a mid 90s TV station's image processing and editing capabilites. At the same time, too much content is now being produced - too many crap webcam soap operas, the Truman Show made real but in an almost more craven manner. The many headed Hydra that digital has brought to image capturing and editing has only just appeared, and none of us knows where it will really take us, or what the future of filmmaking will be. But it's better to be informed of the truth of the situation than to give into preferences for more familiar formats - because of some kind of notion of "purity". Filmmaking is the manipulation of time, space, and emotion. It is an optical illusion. Nothing more, nothing less.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
Duplicating a film print is an extremely expensive and time-consuming process, and for that matter, you can only make so many copies before destroying the original. So instead of making a copy for every theater, studios make a limited number of copies, and force the theaters to take turns. (Usually by staggering international premieres.)
Digital "film" would solve this problem, by allowing unlimited lossless duplication.
MSK
I'll address his points one by one, pointing out the errors.
Here's the first and probably biggest mistake. He doesn't realize that technology is changing. The proper question is, "How good is digital projection NOW?" In a few years, it'll be bigger, better, and cheaper.
One wonders how they came up with this number. Is watching a movie five times better on their system?
Here's a pointless and barely accurate statement. How often does a theatre show a print that's twenty years old? Very rarely, because by that age they're brittle and faded. This is if the prints happen to be lying around. It's very unlikely there'd be many old films for a projector to display.
Sure, the upfront cost of a new system is higher. So we should never upgrade anything by this logic. I mean, fixing an old car is almost always cheaper than getting a new one, even if it'll break down sooner and cost tons more to run.
Digital systems are prototypes now, and are thus more expensive, but they'll get cheaper, and promise free or very nearly free delivery. The updated film system requires more film, making shipping even costlier and doesn't offer a future reduction in cost, like digital does.
A 400GB array costs $75k? Well, even assuming this was true, the cost would come down drastically over the next few years. Twenty drives and a server will end up being two drives, easily shipped.
And the promlem with compressing the signal is?? 4:1 compression with a decent algorithm is barely noticable, especially if you don't have a hard limit of 1/4 the uncompressed bandwidth to stay under. (If the film is 100MB/sec, 25MB/sec is trivial to attain, if you can hit peaks of 50MB/sec... If 25MB/sec is the hard limit, as in, downloading over a link offering only that much bandwidth, it's a little bit harder.)
This actually seems fairly accurate, but I don't imagine they'd use satellite downlinks, it doesn't make sense when they could simply run fiber to the theatre for a higher upfront, but negligible ongoing cost.
Here he compares the prototype systems with HDTV of the future, and the best HDTV of the future, 1920 being the highest of the resolutions, not the one that most broacasts will be in.
And then he misses the obvious point... If can can broadcast this HDTV signal, in higher quality than the digital projection, you'll probably have the technology for a higher resolution digital projection.
And here we have the famous "Customizability is bad, because you're not as smart as we are, and if we say it's best this way, then don't fiddle."
Sure, some projectionist are probably color blind, but there are two things he missed, one is that the digital projector and the digital signal don't degrade or change, so you won't have to constantly fiddle to keep it in focus and bright enough. And if there are color controls, what's to keep them from sticking a sensor behind the screen to read the displayed colors and making the adjustments automatically?
A technology isn't bad if it can be misused, his "tweaks are bad, because people have less taste than me" argument is like saying cars are bad because you can get them painted in ugly colors.
No, really? The engineers travelling with the prototype systems are more highly paid than a young kid? Sheesh.
This assumes that the system need be so complex to operate that it requires a trained engineer. I can't imagine it being more complex than modern home-theatre... "Press this button to start it, and use these controls to tweak it. Hit this button to stop it if the bulb burns out." Do TV's require electrical-engineers with specialization in antenna theory to operate them?
If it does have any complex theatre-servicable parts, one technician could service the whole theatre, and would probably do something closer to swapping out a dead unit for later repair, than on-site service.
This also ignores the benefits of having only one projectionist instead of one per machine. When you have to fiddle with film, and be on hand to fix problems that crop up, you need one person per machine. When you simply press 'Start' and watch the screen on a video pickup watching for problems, you don't need to be right there, and can hit 'Start' on many movies at the same time.
One 'projectionist' (VJ?) and one tech would have to be cheaper than eight-ten projectionists as are required now.
This show's he doesn't understand the technology. DVD encryption has fundamentally flawed because it was relying on untrusted (and untrustable) hardware to decrypt the DVD. It was only a matter of time before a key was grabbed, the Xing accident only made it easier.
A digital projector on the other hand, being manufactured by the movie industry, could be 'trusted', because it's the last step in the chain before shining the movie on the screen, and because they could use crypto in the only way it can really work, from one trusted and secure machine to another.
Actually, no. The projector itself would probably be the decryptor, and would be a sealed black-box (basically) given to the theatre by the movie companies, with which the transmission systems would communicate and agree upon a session key with public-key crypto. I doubt these would have an output labelled 'Dub pirate copy to disk'. And it's unlikely a trained tech, let alone a projectionist, could jury-rig one.
Didn't he just finish telling us how you had to store this on a $75k system of 20 18GB HDs?
Either he expects the average pirate to carry around these huge $75k disk systems, or he expects the storage to get cheaper.
So, by this logic, a digital system would be perfect. With trusted machines at both ends, with huge storage requirements, and with no similarity to custom hardware, the digital system should be much more resistant to piracy.
Wow, a refinement of an old technology, using special film, gives better quality than a prototype of a new technology. I'm in shock.
It's actually interesting to note that he does subscribe to the, 24fps is only good enough, not great, school of thought. Someone should transfer this to the undying "How many FPS are enough?" threads...
Could it be because the costs of film reproduction and distribution and so high that avoiding this is well worth subsidising the theatre's purchase a new hardware?
Wouldn't it be great if first-run movies came out across the world at the same time, instead of other continents having to wait for North America to be done with the film before getting it, and even then, getting the used and scratched film, after months of use? Actually, this might partially solve the DVD region code problem, if movies could reasonably be played worldwide at the same time, they wouldn't need to restrict region 1 DVDs from working in foreign players just to artificially create an audience for the big-screen version.
This assumes that these companies can spare the space for a projection system, which requires having a unobstructed area between the projector and the wall... And that they can afford the film costs, with a projectionist the run the whole thing...
A wall of LCD screens will soon be incredibly cheap by comparison, especially because this application doesn't have problems with small join marks between screens, or higher number of dead pixels than would be salable on a laptop.
But, if you accept the word of a technology pundit with no technology skills, who urges you to buy into a dying system with incredibly high upkeep costs instead of looking to the future...