Digital Cinema's Costs Divide the Film World
Posted: Tue May 11, 2004 8:02 am
Digital Cinema's Costs Divide the Film World
By ALAN CANE, FT.com
Published: January 6, 2004
Captain Incredible is in trouble. The call to save the world has come but his wife has just served supper and he can't fasten his costume over his spreading paunch. Well, to see how the eponymous superhero resolves his local difficulties you'll just have to catch The Incredibles later this year. It's a computer animated movie from Pixar, the Californian studio which pioneered the genre with Toy Story. And to see it at its best, you'll have to go to a digital cinema (D-cinema). If you can find one, that is.
The Incredibles is expected to prove the latest in a string of hits including Monsters Inc., Shrek and Finding Nemo through which computer animation has entered Hollywood's mainstream. But if digital animation has found its seat in the dress circle, D-cinema, where images are stored as bits on the hard disk of a computer rather than 35mm film, and screened using special projectors, is still negotiating the price of admission.
"We're still looking for that breakthrough, for the installation of thousands of screens," Bill Kinder, head of post-production for Pixar, told a recent conference at the National Film Theatre. Indeed, the film world has been waiting for that breakthrough for a decade or more as distributors and exhibitors bicker over costs and quality.
To many, especially the big Hollywood studios, D-cinema is a solution looking for a problem. They argue that the quality of digitally projected images is inferior to those from 35mm film unless prohibitively expensive equipment is used. The cinema-going public, after all, does not care how a film is projected as long as it looks good. "Can we say to the customer 'You're getting something better'?" John Wilkinson of the UK Cinema Exhibitors' Association questioned. "We might spend a lot of money for no advantage."
There are, as a consequence, only a handful of cinemas equipped to project digital images. Patrick von Sychowski, senior analyst with Screen Digest which co-sponsored the NFT conference, calculates there are about 175 D-cinema screens in 154 sites world-wide, or about 0.1 per cent of the global total of 150,000 screens.
The UK is planning to add significantly to that total through a UK Film Council initiative which will see millions of pounds of lottery cash spent on establishing 250 digital screens in 150 cinemas across the country.
The scale of this initiative can be gauged in relation to von Sychowski's estimate that there are 23 digital screens in the whole of Europe at present. In the US earlier this year, Landmark Theatres, a specialist in screening independently made films, announced that in conjunction with Microsoft, it would equip all 177 screens in its 53 theatres for digital screenings. (Why Microsoft? Because it is pushing its Media Series 9 technology for everything from mobile phones to cinemas.) Currently the US has 84 digital screens.
A number of questions demand to be answered. Is D-cinema of equivalent quality to 35mm film? Who will benefit from its introduction? And what reasons are there for believing D-cinema would improve film-going for the public?
see the link for the rest of the article-
http://www.nytimes.com/financialtimes/b ... 92387.html
Jim Noyd
Jefferson/Acker Advertising + Communications
By ALAN CANE, FT.com
Published: January 6, 2004
Captain Incredible is in trouble. The call to save the world has come but his wife has just served supper and he can't fasten his costume over his spreading paunch. Well, to see how the eponymous superhero resolves his local difficulties you'll just have to catch The Incredibles later this year. It's a computer animated movie from Pixar, the Californian studio which pioneered the genre with Toy Story. And to see it at its best, you'll have to go to a digital cinema (D-cinema). If you can find one, that is.
The Incredibles is expected to prove the latest in a string of hits including Monsters Inc., Shrek and Finding Nemo through which computer animation has entered Hollywood's mainstream. But if digital animation has found its seat in the dress circle, D-cinema, where images are stored as bits on the hard disk of a computer rather than 35mm film, and screened using special projectors, is still negotiating the price of admission.
"We're still looking for that breakthrough, for the installation of thousands of screens," Bill Kinder, head of post-production for Pixar, told a recent conference at the National Film Theatre. Indeed, the film world has been waiting for that breakthrough for a decade or more as distributors and exhibitors bicker over costs and quality.
To many, especially the big Hollywood studios, D-cinema is a solution looking for a problem. They argue that the quality of digitally projected images is inferior to those from 35mm film unless prohibitively expensive equipment is used. The cinema-going public, after all, does not care how a film is projected as long as it looks good. "Can we say to the customer 'You're getting something better'?" John Wilkinson of the UK Cinema Exhibitors' Association questioned. "We might spend a lot of money for no advantage."
There are, as a consequence, only a handful of cinemas equipped to project digital images. Patrick von Sychowski, senior analyst with Screen Digest which co-sponsored the NFT conference, calculates there are about 175 D-cinema screens in 154 sites world-wide, or about 0.1 per cent of the global total of 150,000 screens.
The UK is planning to add significantly to that total through a UK Film Council initiative which will see millions of pounds of lottery cash spent on establishing 250 digital screens in 150 cinemas across the country.
The scale of this initiative can be gauged in relation to von Sychowski's estimate that there are 23 digital screens in the whole of Europe at present. In the US earlier this year, Landmark Theatres, a specialist in screening independently made films, announced that in conjunction with Microsoft, it would equip all 177 screens in its 53 theatres for digital screenings. (Why Microsoft? Because it is pushing its Media Series 9 technology for everything from mobile phones to cinemas.) Currently the US has 84 digital screens.
A number of questions demand to be answered. Is D-cinema of equivalent quality to 35mm film? Who will benefit from its introduction? And what reasons are there for believing D-cinema would improve film-going for the public?
see the link for the rest of the article-
http://www.nytimes.com/financialtimes/b ... 92387.html
Jim Noyd
Jefferson/Acker Advertising + Communications