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Author
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Topic: Digital Cinema article in Orlando Sentinel
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 06-13-2007 02:13 PM
This is one of the better articles I've seen on DC. It doesn't get too technical, yet gives a good overview with only a small amount of misinformation.
Orlando moviegoers get clearer view in digital era
Orlando Sentinel link
by Roger Moore | Sentinel Movie Critic
Posted June 13, 2007
It's been promised for the better part of a decade: movies that are never out of focus, with pristine sound, where scratches and splices and the dreaded screen meltdown never trouble moviegoers again.
But the digitization of the nation's more than 6,000 cinemas has always been "just around the corner," the experts said at movie trade shows such as the National Association of Theater Owner's ShowEast convention, held every year in Orlando.
Until this summer. Now, it's finally coming true.
Digital cinemas are popping up nationwide. In Orlando, two theaters have converted to digital screens for the summer movie season -- seven of the 14 screens at Premiere Fashion Square and all eight screens at Carmike's University 8.
Going to the movies will never be the same.
"Just perfect," said Efron Martinez of Orlando, a patron of the Fashion Square multiplex, after coming out of a recent digital showing of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. "Sound, perfect; picture, perfect."
"It's a major upgrade in quality of presentation," said Larry Jacobson, president of QuVIS, a company that provides the computers that download, store and send movies to projectors. "So many problems with how you see a movie in a theater are just going away."
"It's long overdue," said Premiere Fashion Square manager Anthony Delgado.
It's the picture, stupid
It's always high on the list of gripes of people who give reasons they don't go to the movies any more, right after cell-phone yakkers and overpriced popcorn: The picture just isn't right. As theaters downsized themselves out of having diligent professional projectionists, the quality of the show has fallen. Filmmakers are the first to notice that.
"Projection," said Orlando director Rick Pamplin (Hoover), "has become a lost art form. The projectionist, who is underpaid and overworked, runs back and forth loading platters all day long and has little control over the projected image."
Digital projection automates that process almost totally.
Jack Kline, president and CEO of Christie Digital Systems, which is turning all of the 2,400 screens in the Carmike chain digital, says that, with digital projection, focus "becomes a nonevent. Movies will no longer ever be out of the frame." And "you should never have an R-rated trailer in front of a G- or PG-rated movie again."
The picture resolution, long a sticking point with the studios, is now roughly on a par with celluloid, said Terri Westhafer, director of business development for Barco -- like Christie, a manufacturer of theater projectors. "The contrast ratio is about 2500 to 1 with film, and 2,000 to 1 with digital, right now," she says.
Though purists may see a slight difference in crispness, the image is sharper than the sharpest home HDTV. And it's brighter -- an important distinction, as anybody knows who has watched a worn film through an aging film projector with its always fading bulb. Westhafer, who worked for the Kodak film company for years before "going digital" herself, peeks through a window at a Fashion Square screen showing Pirates.
"The quickest way to tell if you're walking into a theater showing a movie digitally is to look at the top edge of the screen," Westhafer said. "The light is brighter, more uniform with digital. Even ideal film projection can't get the light all across the screen just right."
There have been boo-boos -- brief transmission problems -- at the newly digital Carmike. For instance, a showing of Pirates had surround-sound problems. But when the sound failed, the manager simply hit a computer key and rewound the film so that the audience didn't miss a word of Orlando Bloom's dialogue.
"You make a mistake, now you can go back and replay the movie from the point of that mistake," Kline explained. "You could never rewind a movie on film."
Who pays?
Ensuring quality by eliminating projection mistakes and cutting costs are the big selling points for Hollywood and the movie exhibitors. But is it a selling point with the public? Not one member of a recent matinee audience at Premiere's Orlando theater realized they were watching a digital version of Pirates.
"I don't think I'd pick a movie based on whether or not it was being shown digitally," said Chris Johnson, a tourist from Arizona who had just seen a digital film. Her friend Dee Greenwood, of Houston, agreed.
"I've seen plenty of 'perfect' movies from film projectors," Greenwood said. "If you can't tell the difference, why would you pick theater because it's showing it one way or the other?"
Since there's money to be saved, "can't tell the difference" makes a big difference to Hollywood. As the equipment and digital image it provided improved -- making even 3-D movies such as Meet the Robinsons simple to project -- the call from Hollywood to get theaters to make the switch grew louder. The big hang-up for all those years was cost: Who was going to pay up to $150,000 per screen to make the conversion?
"We have over 2,400 screens," said Dale Hurst, director of marketing for the Columbus, Ga., based Carmike. "Who could afford that?"
After six years of negotiations, a consortium called the Digital Cinema Initiative found a solution. Theater companies and projection equipment suppliers got together to let Hollywood actually foot much of the bill for the switch. Hollywood took into account a "virtual print fee" that the studios would be saving (upwards of $3,000 per copy of the movie sent to theaters). Not having to make celluloid copies of every film and then ship them by truck to almost 38,000 screens will save studios millions. Christie, NEC and Barco, the projector companies, provide projectors and are paid by studios based on that savings, with the theater chains agreeing to pay to install and maintain those projectors.
"All of a sudden, we could do it," said Hurst. "We'll have 2,000 screens switched by August," and all 2,400-screens in the 37 states with Carmike theaters by October.
Christie Digital Systems is converting screens to the new technology at the rate of 200 to 400 a month, said CEO Kline. The first to go online are the smaller chains.
"We'll have done 4,000 screens nationwide by the end of October," said Christie CEO Kline. "We're doing 200 to 400 screens a month in this phase, getting a lot of smaller circuits converted. In the next phase, the Regal/AMC/Cinemark consortium will be converted. We'll start with them at the end of this year."
Smaller cities served by smaller chains -- Destin, Brandon, Melbourne, Panama City and Pensacola, for instance -- have gotten their digital gear early. Cities dominated by the biggest chains have had to wait.
"Until Regal [more than 6,000 screens], AMC [more than 5,000] and Cinemark [some 4,500] pull the trigger, much of Florida won't be served by digital movie theaters," Kline said. "But that's happening very soon, and it'll change very quickly once we start on them."
Both Regal and AMC locations in Florida have installed single digital projectors for such one-off releases as Disney's 3-D digital Meet the Robinsons.
Premiere -- a 14-cinema, 161-screen chain -- is using its Orlando cineplex as its "prototype," said company president Gary Moore. He expects that theater to be all digital "by sometime later this summer," paving the way for converting the rest of the Texas-based circuit's theaters.
How it works
Theaters that go digital add a satellite dish, a master computer, a management server and new cable network within the theater. Then, new projectors are installed. Shows are assembled as computer files -- "dragging and dropping" the movie, age-appropriate previews, ads and short subjects into one big file -- explained QuVIS president Jacobson. That file is then sent to the projector, where a xenon lamp surrounded by a cluster of 1.3 million light-magnifying mirrors shoots it to the screen. Many newly digital cinemas, such as the Carmike University 8, have everything but the satellite dish, and thus have to have hard drives (with movies on them) delivered for each new movie. When everybody has the satellite link-up, theaters will be able to show digitally telecast sporting events, operas and concerts, some even in 3-D.
Kline's company has been making film projectors for 70 years. But Christie saw the writing on the screen and ramped up to do digital conversions early on.
"It's probably the most disruptive technology the world has ever seen," he said. "For 100 years, nothing much changed in the way movies were shot, edited, transported and shown the world over. Film didn't change. Now, it is, almost overnight."
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 06-13-2007 06:12 PM
Overall, I think it was a pretty good article. Only a few inaccuracies to nit pick.
Although the computer-based time line makes it very easy to drag and drop movies, trailers, commercials and other material into the program the computer does nothing to prevent the user from having the once in awhile brain fart.
I chuckled when I saw TV off the air style color bars on the front of a commercial for the Army National Guard. That may have been mistakenly edited into the spot when it was produced.
There's also those weird technical kinks that take awhile to solve. Meet The Robinsons was prone to popping up a solid bright green screen when the RealD system activated.
quote: Orlando Sentinel Article
The picture resolution, long a sticking point with the studios, is now roughly on a par with celluloid, said Terri Westhafer, director of business development for Barco -- like Christie, a manufacturer of theater projectors.
That would be true if the movie is like a lot of features these days: processed in post production with a 2K resolution digital intermediate. If you have an all 4/35 work flow, especially something in anamorphic 35mm, then it would take 4K projection to really do some justice to all the image detail in the original negative.
quote: Orlando Sentinel Article
"All of a sudden, we could do it," said Hurst. "We'll have 2,000 screens switched by August," and all 2,400-screens in the 37 states with Carmike theaters by October.
The deal Carmike Cinemas has with Christie/AccessIT is for 2300 digital cinema installations. Not 2400.
As of a recent count done this week, Carmike has closed a number of locations and is now down to a current total of 2392 theater screens. 1920 of those screens are now equipped with digital projection, just over 80% of the theater chain.
I'm skeptical Carmike can get all of its remaining screens equipped with the Christie/AccessIT d-cinema systems before October. Why? It doesn't seem to make sense to upgrade some of those screens. Even more work has to be done to bring up many of those locations to a level worthy of showing digital projection. It doesn't appear to be worth all the expense.
Carmike has 24 second run locations in several states. None of those locations have been upgraded to d-cinema at this point. The company has at least 8 first run locations that sell tickets at heavily discounted prices. It would seem the first run theaters that charge full price for tickets would have priority. Carmike doesn't have very many of those kinds of locations still waiting to be converted.
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Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster
Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 06-13-2007 07:57 PM
quote: Mike Blakesley
"We'll have done 4,000 screens nationwide by the end of October," said Christie CEO Kline. "We're doing 200 to 400 screens a month in this phase, getting a lot of smaller circuits converted. In the next phase, the Regal/AMC/Cinemark consortium will be converted. We'll start with them at the end of this year."
quote: Mike Blakesley
"Until Regal [more than 6,000 screens], AMC [more than 5,000] and Cinemark [some 4,500] pull the trigger, much of Florida won't be served by digital movie theaters," Kline said. "But that's happening very soon, and it'll change very quickly once we start on them."
You guys missed the smoking gun in the article and that is that Jack Kline claims that the Consortium is going with Christie. You would think that there are more proper places to make announcements like that. Is it true or not? I think not true!
Mark
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