Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Digital Theatre

my profile | my password | search | faq & rules | forum home

»	Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE » Community » Film-Yak » Digital Theatre - She's coming... (long) (Page 1)

This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3

Author

Topic: Digital Theatre - She's coming... (long)

David Buckley
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 525
From: Oxford, N. Canterbury, New Zealand
Registered: Aug 2004

posted 08-13-2004 06:10 AM

I'm not a professional projectionist, hell, I'm barely an amateur projectionist, but I do have a lot of background in IT, and in making businesses work better through the use of IT. I've been following the digital theatre thing a bit, and haven't seen any comment on the issues that I believe will force Digital Theatre down peoples necks.

I offer the following thoughts... If all this is old news then apologies up front, I've just not found it yet [Smile]

And I may have misunderstood and/or misinterpreted things I've read about on here, and if so I apologise for that too. And I'm sorry its a bit long.

Meanwhile, on with the show.

The Coming of Digital Theatre

This is a crystal ball attempt at how movies will be shown in chain multiplexes within ten years. I’m talking here about large national chains in the USA that have many hundreds or thousands of multiplex theatres. Smaller chains and independents won’t be able to leverage the commercial advantages outlined here, so what will happen to the huge numbers of these theatres is a bit of a mystery. The public will determine their fate. As to other countries – they also generally don’t have all the pieces to achieve the economies that USA theatres will, but something similar will arrive in most advanced countries in the world, though maybe over a long timespan.

In the Drive-in Workshop web site, it states “Consider the operation of a drive-in theatre as a restaurant. Contrary to popular belief, theatres see little of the money that is taken in at the boxoffice; film companies get the lion's share. Concession sales are literally the theatre's bread and butter. If the entire theatre operation is kept foremost in mind as primarily a restaurant business, for which movies are shown as added entertainment, then the financial success of the operation as a whole can better be served.”

The chain owned multiplex theatre of the future will be more a restaurant than ever before, or possibly less of a movie theatre – the manager won’t even have the keys to the projection booth. The manager and the staff will be free to concentrate on the profitable front-of-house activities, leaving the actual business of screening the movies to head office and their computers.

Most discussions concerning digital cinema have focussed (sorry – poor pun) on the actual affair of projection, and the advantages and (more usually) the disadvantages that digital projection has compared to the traditional 35mm presentation. This, however, isn’t a good point to start from when looking at the future of a multiplex chain. Indeed, it seems almost the least important element. The entire value chain needs to be examined, as much of the benefit of digital cinema (as seen to the commercial arm of the multiplex chain) is outside the booth.

Before detailing how this will all work, we should consider the most important person in the whole process – the audience member.

It is very sad, though maybe not so surprising, that many folks who visit the movies either don’t care the presentation is naff, or don’t even realise they are seeing a naff presentation. A small percentage of the worlds projectionists are represented on film-tech, and it is assumed most of these projectionists either don’t suck at all, or suck less than the typical projectionist. Whatever is the case, every day lots of people are going down their local multiplex and seeing a mediocre presentation, and walking away blissfully happy.

This typical bunch of people who are blissfully happy with their mediocre multiplex presentation are going to be really happy getting digital cinema, as they don’t know or care enough to know if its better or worse, and as long as whatever technology is rolled out doesn’t truly blow goats, its likely to be at the least more consistent than they are used to, and in all likelihood probably a slicker “better” presentation. And its digital, it must be better – right?

There are endless debates about how good (or otherwise) digital projectors are, and indeed how good they need to be, and what they will require to do to compete with 35mm on a level playing field. But I worry this may all be a bit academic. In the sadly now defunct Electronics Australia magazine, November 1966, The Serviceman (who we never found out who he was) reporting on a TV set in need of repair mused “I will never cease to wonder at what people will listen to in terms of distortion while ever there is a picture on the screen.” I wonder if the converse is true: as long as the Dolby Stereo is pumping, how much does Average Joe agonize over picture quality?

There are two (other?) groups of losers in this incessant march of technology.

The first is the person who can appreciate “film done right”. There will be many less venues capable of showing 35mm at all. As stated above, those few independent non-monolithic chain establishments will be fighting for their existence.

The second group of losers will be the projectionists. This is a job title that will be almost non-existent after the digital revolution. Today, many people “operating” projection equipment are “sort of” projectionists, often with job titles including the word “usher”. This is already degrading to “proper” projectionists, but all are a species under threat.

On then to how this all will work.

Let’s start with Printing and Distribution

Today there is a massive industry built around the making of prints. A movie heading for a big first run requires thousands of prints. It’s not much easier to make a thousand prints than ten prints; each print requires a copying process, and a development process. There are few economies of scale.

Then when you’ve got this mountain of prints, you need to get them distributed.

You need to get the right print to the right theatre at the right time, and these days that includes trying to stop prints from being “borrowed” en route, and thus copied. This is a large logistical nightmare.

Just when you think you’ve got it cracked, you’ve got lost prints and damaged prints which need replacing quickly, in time for the scheduled screenings. So you had to make spare prints, and you hope you have enough.

And then a couple of weeks later you need to move them all around to different theatres, and then finally you need to dispose of the print mountain, because the next big movie has arrived.

This entire operation will be replaced with digital distribution.

Given the number of target theatres, the obvious digital distribution mechanism is via satellite. Satellite is a very expensive method of distributing data, but it is very cost effective when you have to distribute identical data to many places. So every theatre will be equipped with a dish to receive the (dual) encrypted movie. The data will be transmitted using techniques like Forward Error Correction (FEC) so that noise bursts or rains pots will not cause data integrity failure.

Inside the (locked, remember) booth will be a receiver and a disk storage system. This will store the encrypted data stream. There will also be a decryption mechanism that will take off the outer wrapper of encryption. This decryptor will operate very like the decryptors used to ensure the integrity and privacy of money transactions. These devices are highly tamper resistant, and will self destruct if they think they are being interfered with. Bring on Mission Impossible.

The outer encryption will offer powerful over-the-air security, far in advance of what is used in most of today’s satellite broadcasting. It also will allow control of when the movie can be decrypted. Only first-run theatres can extract the movie stream for the first period of time, and then second run etc. It is conceivable that home users could also retrieve the data from satellite, but not extract it until the DVD release date.

This all sounds expensive, but it is all available today, and the costs can easily be amortized over a long period. And it will cost a fraction of what all those prints cost, over the long term.

Many people who work in the print production and distribution industry thus have an uncertain future.

So the studios can deliver a movie securely to a theatre. What next.

Digital Projection.

Its coming, and its getting better and cheaper by the year, and it will be more reliable, and with remote management. The least reliable element of the projection system (or put it another way, the element that is likely to interrupt a presentation) is the light source, the xenon arc. Digital projectors will adopt the same approach that lighthouses have used for years, namely a standby light source. If the prime source fails, the standby source will take over. This is likely to happen automatically, so an exploding xenon lamp is not the end of the show.

Given that the local staff doesn’t have access to the booth, the ability of the system to self-heal and for the “vital statistics” of the projection system to be stored, analysed and reported on, all at the head office, will be important innovations. The same techniques and tools used today to manage computer networks and computers thereon will manage the theatres of tomorrow.

As an example, when that light failed, the projectors own intelligence allowed it to carry on operating with the spare. The projector raised an (SNMP) “alert” which was recorded on the alert management systems at head office, which automatically raised a “trouble ticket”. Tomorrow, an engineer will be around to replace the failed bulb.

What happened to The Manager

The other thing that will change dramatically is the manager’s role; particularly in relation to how little control he will have over his/her facility. This is because it won’t actually be the manager’s facility any more, the key decisions a manager makes today will be taken at head office, and in many cases by computer. The manager’s role will be to keep the concessions selling, and to keep the concession sellers in order.

The key to this entire approach will be centrally driven automation of the entire multiplex operation.

Today many theatres have automation to do the mundane things on a per presentation level, like dimming the house lights, and the clever things, like changing from flat to Scope. Tomorrow’s automation will run the entire show. But it won’t be programmed by the projectionist, not that there is a projectionist there any more. Head office will build the program for the features presentation, and this will be downloaded to each theatre. Presentation consistency across a chain of multiplexes will be the name of the game.

In the book “McDonalds, Behind the Arches”, Richard Kearns who built the (now well gone) Red Barn hamburger chain stated “We all had star stores that could keep up with the best of McDonalds, but on a companywide basis, nobody compared”. McDonalds (love ‘em or hate ‘em) have a consistent product identically delivered at all outlets. That is the multiplex of tomorrow. And centrally programmed automation is the key to that consistent experience.

But that’s only scratching the surface.

The same central, head office computer system that delivers the show to the theatre will also book the advertising in the local papers, provide the recorded announcements of what is on where, and allow you to book your ticket over the phone or the web. It will also instruct the computer systems in every multiplex as to what is on when.

The multiplex’s slave computer will then make sure the LED signs (or video walls) outside the theatre have the right shows and showtimes on them. And that little LED sign behind the ticket seller, and the ticket sellers computer will all have the right things on them too. And the ticket selling machines in the foyer, just swipe your card, madam, no need to wait in a queue.

But here’s the really cool bit. A screen won’t be allocated to a movie until the computer is ready to instruct the staff to let the audience in. So the computers can “oversell” movies, as if a particular screen fills, it can “swap” the movie to a different screen. Any screen can show any movie. There is a branch of computer science entitled “constraint programming”, often used to generate school timetables or nursing rosters, which would be ideal to solve the “how best can I fill this theatre overall and make most money” type problems.

And of course, all this attendance data is summarized, analysed, localised, regionalised, drilled down and a million other things that data warehousing techniques offer head office, so they can “better know their customer”. And decide just when to change the schedules in the hope of attracting a bigger audience. Or, to be really honest, the audience that does best at the concessions.

That means that if a movie sucks, or some B feature becomes popular, the theatre can instantly adapt. Some turkeys are going to find themselves dumped off an entire chain within hours of opening.

So just to wrap up - the staff’s job is to get the people to the screen when the computer says so, and to press the green button when most folks are in. That’s it. Oh yes, and sell food.

Endspiece

That then is the future of the large chain multiplex. As individualised as McDonalds, slick mechanical presentations. No projectionists, no managers to speak of, just a money generating machine that cranks the handle on a daily basis. Movies untouched by human hand.

The only people who will decide if this is what happens, or it doesn’t, are the paying public. Projectionists, managers, industry figures, media will all be ignored and frankly trampled under foot as the boards of directors of big chain multiplexes are caught in the glare of the headlights as the economics of the big picture of digital cinema roll in. Only if the public don’t buy it will it fail.