What can I say? It looked great!

Now there are a few things to consider...
*They were using a higher powered xenon light source than was the film projector
normally used in that auditorium (5000 watts).
*The source material came from a D5 digital videotape UNcompressed, whereas
actual movies will be beamed down from satellite using compressed video.
*The actual projector was a prototype unit, which of course means by the time
the assembly line starts rolling them out, the design will have been changed to
keep costs down and quality will obviously suffer.
*The source material was transferred to digital videotape DIRECTLY from the
master film negative, bypassing all the internegs the image normally degrades
through.

So here's the bottom line as I see it...

What I saw today represented the absolute best possible presentation of the new
technology and will not be reproduced in actual theaters running actual movies
(unless they improve dramatically in the future). But in all fairness, I must say it
looked better than 95% of ALL theaters I have been to.

Note: My personal preference is if I wanted to see a movie that was not playing at
one of the couple of good theaters here locally, I would prefer to see it in digital
over a "typical" film presentation.

TI said the cost is about $80,000.00 for the projector and they don't expect to
see it in any number of theaters for several years, probably more than 10 years.

The way this will probably be set up is the movie will be sent over a satellite and
stored on a massive server in the theatre hooked up to the managers' computer.
The studios will subplant a code that makes the movie "expire" after a certain
amount of weeks, that way there is no pirating or anything like that. If the movie
does well, the studio can extend the playing time. With all of the movies pn one
server, the management can easilly "move the print" to another auditorium witht he
computer mouse. But what happens when they forget and you have every movie
playing on the wrong screen? I guess it would be easy to assign the data to new
screens on the fly. But the typical management forgets a lot of things. This will be
humorous.

Also, if they are going to go ahead and replace EVERY SINGLE FILM
PROJECTOR IN THE WORLD with digital projection, why don't they just go all
the way and make the quality BETTER than 70mm? That way every movie would
look phenomenal. But they stopped just shy of 35mm quality. That's like DVD
coming out when it did, but it's not compatible with HDTV, so they will need to
come up with a whole new DVD scheme to take advantage of the high resolution
of HDTV. They should take the time NOW to make sure that at worst, digital
projection EXCEEDS 70mm quality even on an 80 foot screen.

My point is that it seems that it would be easy to thwart movies played by the
computer. It takes planning, time, skill, and effort to thwart the whole booth when
it is running film., plus there is a better chance that it can be fixed, and your whole
theatre does not go down.

I have not seen the images yet but hope to during one of my shifts.

Lamphouse is a Christie SLC70-2. This is in our biggest house using the 3rd porthole. It was attached to a disk array with 18 hard drives. Size unknown.

Will try to get more information this evening.

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At the demo I saw, it was announced the xenon was a 4000 watt running below 4000 watts. Not so...I looked at the lamphouse myself and it was running at full blown 5000 watts, against a 4k 35mm presentation.

1. George wouldn't release the sound track until yesterday. When this is over, sound disk drive is sent back. Video drives stay with system.

2. System is projecting 1280 x 1024 resolution.

3. Up close viewing showed very little pixelation. Not any different than being right in front of a TV

4. Image was very bright and smooth. Saw about the first 10 minutes. Even the scene with Queen Amidala talking through the porthole with the wavy lines was very smooth.

5. System runs one disk 9GB for sound, 18 9GB drives for video. Very little compression at this point. They anticipate total disk space at about 50 GB in future.

My Impressions:
WOW! I know that we may not want to hear this but I was truly impressed. During the pod racing scenes, everything there was great detail. Even fine items like whisps of hair blowing in the wind were clear. Busy scenes like the light saber battle and the red doors. Very fine detail.