I've seen "Phantom Menace," "Tarzan" and "Toy Story II" using Texas Instrument's DLP Cinema beta projectors in Burbank, California, and could not see a compression artifact anywhere -- just a rock solid, scratch free, bright and intense image. On a technological level, digital cinema is basically here, now.
As for Ebert's specific technical criticisms of digital cinema, here are my responses, in order:
* MaxiVision is currently just as much a prototype as the Texas Instruments installations, so any equipment cost comparisons are premature. And we all know digital means rapidly falling prices over the long term; * The best compression and storage schemes for digital cinema are still evolving.. and very quickly. Consider: "Phantom Menace," at 136 minutes, took up 20 18-Gigabyte drives using a HyperSPACE recorder and disk array back in May. By the time "Toy Story II" was presented in November, QuBit compression had squeezed the entire 92 minutes into just 32 Gigabytes stored on 4 hard disks. * Comparing digital cinema to HDTV is an apples and oranges affair that misses many points. TI's DLP in fact uses three 1280x1024 "micromirrors," tripling the resolution of Ebert's sketchy, misinformed math. There is also the role of a theater-quality and sized reflective screen and the massively bright projector bulb in adding to the clarity of the projected image; * Projectionists cannot (and can quite easily not be allowed) to "re-time" films in digital cinema projects, and don't need to, since the film itself would contain any specific projector settings; * As for projectionist salaries, digital equipment could mostly handle and monitor itself. Even today's mechanical projectors are mostly turn on and forget propositions. Digital projectors could even be monitored remotely, on site or at the exhibitor's main office; * Security is always an issue, but any stolen movie file could easily be watermarked to identify the offending (or offended) theater, and steps taken; * For MaxiVision to be viable, there would have to be enough lab capacity to handle the tens of thousands of prints going out today (unless MaxiVision wants to monopolize that), which would create just as much pirate capacity.
I think Ebert's arguments suffer from his priveleged position as a film critic who doesn't appreciate the bulk of the theatrical exhibition industry and what digital cinema could mean beyond simply aesthetic considerations of the moment. This is, after all, a man who watches most films essentially alone in special studio screening rooms. But out in the real world, today's theatrical exhibition business is on a razor's edge. Three quarters of the boxoffice take in the first few weeks of a film's release goes right back to the studio, leaving theater owners to subsist on popcorn and Coke sales. Exhibition chains have rushed to build costly 18-, 20- and 24-screen megaplexes in heated competition, just to turn around and close the small 12-screen boxes. Home entertainment technology continues to gain ground. As a result, profits are thin, and stocks are down.
Why focus on economic considerations, rather than the aesthetic ones? Because money will make the decision. If purely aesthetic considerations ruled, we'd all be watching IMAX movies, or at least going to 70mm Sensurround theaters. On this note, consider some of the advantages for theater owners of digital projection systems:
* Lack of "prints" means no degradation of the image and no broken reels just when they're starting to keep most of the profits; * Being able to "turn on" a movie on as many screens as they can sell tickets for, instead of the current system where they are locked in by the number of prints they're given, and have badly-performing movies taking up space while hot-selling movies send viewers home because of sold-out shows; * Being able to book special screenings, from revivals to small-budget independents, with far less financial investment for all involved, increasing revenue opportunities; * Even the ability to book non-theatrical fare like concerts and live sporting events. * Pre-movie screen entertainment, so limited and sophmoric now, would become more competetive and consqeuently better in a nimble digital system -- not to mention much more local, a very important consideration for invidual theater owners.
More fundamentally (even revolutionarily), digital cinema would also lower the barrier to entry for smaller filmmakers and distributors whose tight budgets cannot afford current distribution costs. These independent filmmakers, working outside of Hollywood, are much admired by critics like Ebert for their alternative artistic vision, and many in fact are already turning to digital on the production side to get their visions made and seen. They understand the liberating effects of digital economies.
In an ironic twist, by insisting on the primacy of celluloid and the entire studio industrial infrastructure that comes along with it, Ebert is voting for the status quo in cinema art as it is currently constructed.
All this fuss over the control logic problems of a spherical PDA seems oddly defeatist. After all, the military has been flying fundamentally unstable jets for two decades, and some company has built a high-tech wheelchair that can keep you perfectly balanced and stable when it stands up on two wheels. Robotics research struggles to replicate human-looking movement, but moving a sphere in a very non-human way is, pardon the pun, a breeze by comparison.
As for those complaining about how much R&D on this PDA has cost, and why they didn't just build a tricorder, the point is that NASA wants something that could be used outside the shuttle, say, to inspect heat shield tiles or investigate a crippled satellite. Any PDA data-crunching capability can be kept on a network base (AirPort anyone?), leaving only the manuevering brain in the sphere itself. If all you want is a tricorder, just soup up a f*$%#ing Palm Pilot!
Hopefully this thing will be killed before it stinks up the marketplace like Divx did. Three points:
By fall of 2000, the Sega Dreamcast will have been out a year, the Nintendo64 and new Dolphin box will have built some momentum and Sony's follow-on PlayStation2 will be hitting its stride with complete backward compatibility with thousands of games. Any one of these consoles (especially, and probably, Sony's) could wipe the floor with X-Box because of market momentum, consumer loyalty and brand awareness alone.
Console videogame OSs are also rock-solid stable (CE is an option, not the core, on Dreamcast), and they already run on workstation-level chips with equally brawny graphics co-processors, both of which are often 64-bit or better, and god knows how fast they'll be a year from now. (With apologies to all you open-source folks, this stability is because, at least in this case, each of these companies maintains tight, proprietary control over their hardware-software sets.) M$ can call it a game console till they're blue in the face, but if the hardware and software guts are hardly different than a crappy eMachines box, it won't be stable enough for the pre-teen kids and soccer moms who will have to run it.
As for the "may have other functions" line, my guess is this might be a play for set-top cable tuning. If that's the case, it's worth nothing that WindowsCE may not yet be a qualified real-time operating system, which it would have to be. CE is shipping on some set-top boxes today, but only as middleware, because that industry set up a consortium to keep all boxes open-source specifically to checkmate M$. And if M$ tries to position X-Box as some kind of "embrace and extend" advance, expect the $hit to hit the fan. M$ (or Dell or whoever) can build all the set-top tuners they want, but if they stray from the Open Cable specs, no cable system will buy them, not even the ones M$ invests in.
This is the heart of it. Register and keep posting. A slowdown in major OS upgrades that push hardware/app upgrades will kill M$'s growth and revenue model and turn their reality distortion field (the size of which Steve Jobs can only dream of) over NT to dust. M$ is already facing a probable revenue lull due to companies turning their attention to Y2K, unless their recent shenanigans over registration revenue can compensate. Meanwhile, NT5/Win2000 is late and bloated but somehow, according to the press, a foregone success. If that isn't the definition of a monopoly freezing the trade press over obvious problems, I don't know what is. "Flat-earth"/.-ers can see the writing on the wall even if Jesse Berst and his fellow tertiary adjunct dwellers can't, but when Wall Street smells blood in Redmond, things will go bad fast.
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I've seen "Phantom Menace," "Tarzan" and "Toy Story II" using Texas Instrument's DLP Cinema beta projectors in Burbank, California, and could not see a compression artifact anywhere -- just a rock solid, scratch free, bright and intense image. On a technological level, digital cinema is basically here, now.
.. and very quickly. Consider: "Phantom Menace," at 136 minutes, took up 20 18-Gigabyte drives using a HyperSPACE recorder and disk array back in May. By the time "Toy Story II" was presented in November, QuBit compression had squeezed the entire 92 minutes into just 32 Gigabytes stored on 4 hard disks.
As for Ebert's specific technical criticisms of digital cinema, here are my responses, in order:
* MaxiVision is currently just as much a prototype as the Texas Instruments installations, so any equipment cost comparisons are premature. And we all know digital means rapidly falling prices over the long term;
* The best compression and storage schemes for digital cinema are still evolving
* Comparing digital cinema to HDTV is an apples and oranges affair that misses many points. TI's DLP in fact uses three 1280x1024 "micromirrors," tripling the resolution of Ebert's sketchy, misinformed math. There is also the role of a theater-quality and sized reflective screen and the massively bright projector bulb in adding to the clarity of the projected image;
* Projectionists cannot (and can quite easily not be allowed) to "re-time" films in digital cinema projects, and don't need to, since the film itself would contain any specific projector settings;
* As for projectionist salaries, digital equipment could mostly handle and monitor itself. Even today's mechanical projectors are mostly turn on and forget propositions. Digital projectors could even be monitored remotely, on site or at the exhibitor's main office;
* Security is always an issue, but any stolen movie file could easily be watermarked to identify the offending (or offended) theater, and steps taken;
* For MaxiVision to be viable, there would have to be enough lab capacity to handle the tens of thousands of prints going out today (unless MaxiVision wants to monopolize that), which would create just as much pirate capacity.
I think Ebert's arguments suffer from his priveleged position as a film critic who doesn't appreciate the bulk of the theatrical exhibition industry and what digital cinema could mean beyond simply aesthetic considerations of the moment. This is, after all, a man who watches most films essentially alone in special studio screening rooms. But out in the real world, today's theatrical exhibition business is on a razor's edge. Three quarters of the boxoffice take in the first few weeks of a film's release goes right back to the studio, leaving theater owners to subsist on popcorn and Coke sales. Exhibition chains have rushed to build costly 18-, 20- and 24-screen megaplexes in heated competition, just to turn around and close the small 12-screen boxes. Home entertainment technology continues to gain ground. As a result, profits are thin, and stocks are down.
Why focus on economic considerations, rather than the aesthetic ones? Because money will make the decision. If purely aesthetic considerations ruled, we'd all be watching IMAX movies, or at least going to 70mm Sensurround theaters. On this note, consider some of the advantages for theater owners of digital projection systems:
* Lack of "prints" means no degradation of the image and no broken reels just when they're starting to keep most of the profits;
* Being able to "turn on" a movie on as many screens as they can sell tickets for, instead of the current system where they are locked in by the number of prints they're given, and have badly-performing movies taking up space while hot-selling movies send viewers home because of sold-out shows;
* Being able to book special screenings, from revivals to small-budget independents, with far less financial investment for all involved, increasing revenue opportunities;
* Even the ability to book non-theatrical fare like concerts and live sporting events.
* Pre-movie screen entertainment, so limited and sophmoric now, would become more competetive and consqeuently better in a nimble digital system -- not to mention much more local, a very important consideration for invidual theater owners.
More fundamentally (even revolutionarily), digital cinema would also lower the barrier to entry for smaller filmmakers and distributors whose tight budgets cannot afford current distribution costs. These independent filmmakers, working outside of Hollywood, are much admired by critics like Ebert for their alternative artistic vision, and many in fact are already turning to digital on the production side to get their visions made and seen. They understand the liberating effects of digital economies.
In an ironic twist, by insisting on the primacy of celluloid and the entire studio industrial infrastructure that comes along with it, Ebert is voting for the status quo in cinema art as it is currently constructed.
All this fuss over the control logic problems of a spherical PDA seems oddly defeatist. After all, the military has been flying fundamentally unstable jets for two decades, and some company has built a high-tech wheelchair that can keep you perfectly balanced and stable when it stands up on two wheels. Robotics research struggles to replicate human-looking movement, but moving a sphere in a very non-human way is, pardon the pun, a breeze by comparison.
As for those complaining about how much R&D on this PDA has cost, and why they didn't just build a tricorder, the point is that NASA wants something that could be used outside the shuttle, say, to inspect heat shield tiles or investigate a crippled satellite. Any PDA data-crunching capability can be kept on a network base (AirPort anyone?), leaving only the manuevering brain in the sphere itself. If all you want is a tricorder, just soup up a f*$%#ing Palm Pilot!
Hopefully this thing will be killed before it stinks up the marketplace like Divx did. Three points:
By fall of 2000, the Sega Dreamcast will have been out a year, the Nintendo64 and new Dolphin box will have built some momentum and Sony's follow-on PlayStation2 will be hitting its stride with complete backward compatibility with thousands of games. Any one of these consoles (especially, and probably, Sony's) could wipe the floor with X-Box because of market momentum, consumer loyalty and brand awareness alone.
Console videogame OSs are also rock-solid stable (CE is an option, not the core, on Dreamcast), and they already run on workstation-level chips with equally brawny graphics co-processors, both of which are often 64-bit or better, and god knows how fast they'll be a year from now. (With apologies to all you open-source folks, this stability is because, at least in this case, each of these companies maintains tight, proprietary control over their hardware-software sets.) M$ can call it a game console till they're blue in the face, but if the hardware and software guts are hardly different than a crappy eMachines box, it won't be stable enough for the pre-teen kids and soccer moms who will have to run it.
As for the "may have other functions" line, my guess is this might be a play for set-top cable tuning. If that's the case, it's worth nothing that WindowsCE may not yet be a qualified real-time operating system, which it would have to be. CE is shipping on some set-top boxes today, but only as middleware, because that industry set up a consortium to keep all boxes open-source specifically to checkmate M$. And if M$ tries to position X-Box as some kind of "embrace and extend" advance, expect the $hit to hit the fan. M$ (or Dell or whoever) can build all the set-top tuners they want, but if they stray from the Open Cable specs, no cable system will buy them, not even the ones M$ invests in.
This is the heart of it. Register and keep posting. A slowdown in major OS upgrades that push hardware/app upgrades will kill M$'s growth and revenue model and turn their reality distortion field (the size of which Steve Jobs can only dream of) over NT to dust. M$ is already facing a probable revenue lull due to companies turning their attention to Y2K, unless their recent shenanigans over registration revenue can compensate. Meanwhile, NT5/Win2000 is late and bloated but somehow, according to the press, a foregone success. If that isn't the definition of a monopoly freezing the trade press over obvious problems, I don't know what is. "Flat-earth" /.-ers can see the writing on the wall even if Jesse Berst and his fellow tertiary adjunct dwellers can't, but when Wall Street smells blood in Redmond, things will go bad fast.