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Focus on Technology
PROTECTIN
ANWAR BRETT REPORTS ON HOW THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION IS BEGINNING TO ENGULF CINEMA WORLDWIDE
With all the talk of a digital revolution taking place on our TV screens it is easy to forget that a similar sea change is slowly but irrevo- cably happening in our cinemas.
With the development of more afford- able, reliable technology and the enthusi- asm of the major film distribution compa- nies, the days of the bulky tins of film being delivered to your local multiplex each week are numbered.
In June, 20th Century Fox and Cisco Systems Inc made history, joining forces to transmit digitally the animated adven- ture Titan AE coast to coast. Storing the completed film on a dedicated server in the Atlanta cinema, it was then digitally projected for
the film’s world
premiere.
Here in the UK, things are
moving
towards the
digital age with
increasing
speed. Disney,
in particular,
have embraced
this new tech-
nology, with
hits like
Fantasia 2000, Mission to Mars and Toy Story 2 screened in the digital format at the handful of British cinemas equipped to do so. In October they will release the CGI adventure Dinosaur in this way too.
“I think most sceptics have had a chance to see this format now,” says Disney’s Technical Manager in the UK, Saul Mahoney, “and sales of humble pie are on the increase.” Films like Titan AE, Dinosaur and Toy Story 2 are obvious choices to exhibit digitally being, in part or whole, computer generated at the point of creation and then mastered entirely in the digital format.
In an unambiguous signal for the way ahead, Disney described digital projection as part of the company’s ongoing “efforts to stimulate digital exhibition”. To this end they formed a partnership with Texas Instruments, whose DLP (Digital Light Processing) Cinema technology is designed to replicate the visual experi- ence of film, but with the crucial advan- tage that it does not scratch, tear or dete- riorate as film does.
“The analogy between vinyl records and CD is probably a good one to think of,” explains Texas Instruments‚ European Marketing Manager, Ian McMurray. “The first time you hear a
record it’s a wonderful sound, but gradu- ally you get to hear the pops and crack- les and scratches. Film suffers from exactly those hisses and cracks and pops, or at least the visual equivalent of them, but at a digital screening the 100th showing will be as good as the first.”
Supplying DLP subsystems to the world’s top projector manufacturers, who design the projector around them, the Digital Light Processing technology relies on the Digital Micromirror Device (DMD). This is an optical semiconductor that has 1.2 million hinged, microscopic aluminium mirrors mounted in a 50mm square. It is these mirrors, acting as optical switches controlled by computer, that create a high resolution colour image. With Technicolor
Digital Cinema providing deliv- ery and installa- tion technology, and lending their august name to this new process, the growth in digital distribu- tion seems unstoppable.
“How it will all work out
remains to be
seen,” McMurray adds. “I
ple have a vision that movies will be dis- tributed by satellite, and that makes a lot of sense. But at the moment a movie is loaded onto a series of optical disks, and those are in turn loaded onto a server hard drive, very much like you might take a CD ROM and copy the contents onto your computer hard drive. That’s the way it works today, but the infrastructure has yet to develop.”
For Saul Mahoney, the digitalisation of the industry is fascinating, but there are a lot of questions still to be answered.
“Downloading a feature film like Toy Story 2 from those disks takes about ten hours” he explains, “so at the moment it’s not practical to do it on a wide distri- bution basis. Until that delivery system is refined we don’t know how it’s going to affect us in terms of print distribution. Unless they find a quicker way of down- loading a hard disk onto a hard drive we’ll still be working in a tangible medi- um like film, but if they find a way of sending it down a telephone line or through the airwaves, then that medium is effectively eradicated.”
Beaming film in through a phone or satellite link could also have security implications. As with any computer pro-
think many peo-
G