posted 01-06-2004 12:06 PM                       

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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?

The quality question is complex. D-cinema enthusiasts argue that digital projection can be superior to 35mm. Images are sharper, colours are brighter and more intense and digital images do not suffer from the flaws, scratches and dirt that affect film prints after a few showings.

There is some evidence that, subjected to both, audiences prefer the digital experience to film. But a lot depends on projection. A 35mm print from a big studio has a resolution equivalent to 4,000 lines (4K) and these studios argue they will accept nothing less if quality is to be maintained.

Digital projectors today provide a resolution of about 1,300 lines and the first 2,000 line systems are becoming available. 4K projectors do not exist except as experiments and are unlikely to become commercially viable for years. Nevertheless, as the NFT audience saw, Finding Nemo screened using a 1.3K projector is still visually stunning. And in a recent move which may help to break the logjam, the Digital Cinema Initiative, a group of big studios including Fox, Universal and Sony Pictures, indicated they would be prepared to accept 2K projection of movies scanned into digital format at 4K.

Fine: except that a 2k digital projector costs $150,000 or more against $50,000 for a conventional projector and lasts only one third as long. This is the heart of the matter. Exhibitors are faced with the huge expense of moving to digital projection, but have no guarantee their investment will be repaid in larger customer numbers or in being able to charge premium prices.

Creators and distributors, on the other hand, anticipate huge savings. D-cinema can be distributed by satellite, over the internet or as disks through the post without the need to make and distribute prints at £1000 and more a time. The savings have been calculated at some $800m annually across the industry. So until the two sides can come to an agreement over how the cost burden should be spread, it is unlikely there will be any change in the status quo.

In the end, it is likely that distributors will have to help to finance the conversion. Still to be resolved are issues of technical standards - digital movies are compressed and a choice of compression standards are available - and security. The movie business does not want to experience the digital piracy which is afflicting the music industry.

"Hollywood", meaning the big studios, is only part of the equation. The UK Film Council's initiative has not been taken with them in mind. Steve Perrin, the council's deputy head of distribution and exhibition says the plan is to "widen the choice of film available to audiences and so allow the whole market to expand". A big problem for independent and specialist filmmakers is the sheer cost of making prints for distribution. Distributing content digitally is a way of slashing that cost as long as quality can be maintained. So it comes as no surprise that the running in D-cinema is being made by specialist filmmakers in the UK, in Holland, in Brazil and elsewhere.

Perrin says: "We have to be able to say to somebody like Pedro Almodovar 'If you're film is seen in the UK in a digital format, we can guarantee that it will be seen in the best possible light'."

But the council is taking an inclusive approach: "We have to balance the needs of Almodovar against those of a local Birmingham filmmaker," Perrin maintains. If the big studios don't get their act together quickly, they could find digital cinema has gone ahead without them.

Help! Call Captain Incredible.

alan.cane@ft.com

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posted 01-08-2004 02:37 AM                    

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Images are sharper, colours are brighter and more intense

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Until they can go up against an IBtech print and look the same, they should shut up about that.

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against $50,000 for a conventional projector

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posted 01-08-2004 02:47 AM                       

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Finding Nemo screened using a 1.3K projector is still visually stunning.

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