posted 08-30-2004 09:26 PM                       

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...Over the last two years, while exhibitors installed new DLPC equipment in only 15 public North American auditoria (bringing the continent’s total to 88), reports of dramatic “d-cinema” activity overseas have been pouring in:

• “India taking lead in digital cinema: By year’s end, country to have more screens than U.S.,” boasted a headline in Variety last November.

• “Brazil could soon have the largest network of digital cinemas in the world,” gushed a headline in the United Kingdom’s Guardian Unlimited last December.

• “Ranked second in the world in terms of digital cinemas, China is eyeing building 2,500 more such cinemas within five years,” confided a February story on the English-language China View Website.

What, a casual industry-follower might ask, is going on out there? Have digital cinema’s files, servers, studios, consortiums, governments, and, finally, stars, somehow aligned for every land mass except North America? Have Asia, Europe and Latin America, beleaguered by piracy and a paucity of celluloid prints, taken U.S. exhibition’s spot in the digital-cinema vanguard?

Confusing Terminology
Answering that last question is tricky, say experts, because “digital cinema” means different things to different people, and too many compare apples to oranges.

• The Variety scribe put India just five d-screens shy of surpassing the United States, and already soaring beyond China. But India’s “digital cinemas” do not use the costly DLPC projectors U.S. and Chinese exhibitors use to screen major motion pictures. India’s exhibitors are using far less expensive non-celluloid projectors (commonly known as “electronic projectors” or “e-projectors”), much like those often used for U.S. pre-show cinema advertising.

• Similarly, the expected 100 Brazil “digital cinemas” described by Guardian Unlimited are expected to use an MPEG 4 compression system with Microsoft Windows Media 9, a system generally rejected by Hollywood as a viable standard for replacing 35mm.

• As for the China View story, sources indicate the announcement is misleading because all 2,500 of the “more such cinemas” will actually utilize LCD projectors and TiVo-like servers, also similar to U.S. cinema advertising systems.

“If you say ‘I’m a digital cinema,’ there’s nobody stopping you from saying that, even if you have a $2,000 Sony projector, and I wouldn’t go so far as to argue with that person,” says Bill Mead, creator of the DCinemaToday Website. He points out that the term “digital cinema” is comprised of two very generic terms and that even a cinema owner projecting a DVD can legally and legitimately claim “digital” status, because he is technically correct.

Unfortunately, many engineers and executives involved in the fast-growing field of digital movie distribution and exhibition simply don’t see it that way. They prefer the terms “digital cinema” and “d-cinema” be used only to describe expensive, ultra-sophisticated equipment like DLPC’s, while the terms “electronic cinema” and “e-cinema” be used to describe lower-end, less expensive non-celluloid equipment. (Even among these professionals, however, there is often confusion as to whether “d-cinema” should be considered a subset of “e-cinema,” or an entirely separate category.)

Too many journalists seem not to be buying into the professionals’ terminology – while too many laymen are simply confused by it...

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So, now how do I hook up that DVD player to my little digital projector to show movies? Can't I simply use a composite video cable? Or do I have to buy a S-video cable?