Tweet
https://spectrum.ieee.org/bits-on-the-big-screen
BITS ON THE BIG SCREEN
Computer servers and digital projectors are about to replace the canisters of film and spinning sprockets of the world’s movie theaters
RUSSELL WINTNER
01 DEC 2006
14 MIN READ
The annals of film history enshrine the movies that heralded breakthroughs in cinematic technology. There’s The Jazz Singerin 1927, which was the first feature with sound; Becky Sharp in 1935, which pioneered three-color Technicolor; and Glory Road, which…
Glory Road ?
Yes, Glory Road. You may have missed it, but earlier this year that Disney feature about a scrappy Texas basketball team became the first motion picture released in a standardized digital form. Setting aside their film projectors, 29 theater owners ran the movie as a stream of bits from a stack of hard drives. In earlier attempts to launch digital technology, movies were encoded to play on proprietary systems, beginning with Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, which hit two screens in New Jersey and two more in California on 19 May 1999. The largest nonstandard digital release was the three-dimensional version of Chicken Little, which played on 100 screens in late 2005.
But by the end of this year more than 2000 North American theaters will be projecting bits instead of frames; by the end of 2007, more than 5000 North American screens will be digital. And the digital invasion is advancing around the globe. In Ireland, for example, 500 screens will be digital by the middle of 2007; in India, 2500 will convert by the end of that year.
After nearly a decade of talk and no action on the commercial front, digital cinema is taking the world by storm. The reason for the tempest? In a word: standards. On 27 July 2005, seven movie studios got together and published the first specification for digital cinema, and the motion picture industry launched its biggest transition since black-and-white movies gave way to color.
The ongoing shift to digital cinema will bring major benefits to moviegoers, theater owners, and the movie studios. For moviegoers, the move will mean a larger variety of features and possibly even other entertainment at their local movie theaters. The movies will have higher-quality images, and there will be more offerings in a 3-D format. In a digital world, much of the expense and difficulty of displaying a movie in 3-D disappears, and 3-D becomes a real option for moviemakers instead of just a gimmick [see sidebar, “Digital Cinema: Another Dimension”].
For theater owners, digital will make movies easier and cheaper to handle, ship, store, and discard. But for these exhibitors, the biggest benefit may turn out to be the simple ability to replicate a movie on-site for showing on multiple screens when it becomes an unexpected hit.
Studios will also save money—lots of it: the movie industry estimates that it currently spends close to US $1 billion annually to process and ship 35-millimeter films to theaters; it expects to save several hundreds of millions of dollars when 35-mm films are replaced with digital releases. Already, too, new applications are starting to emerge, including the showing of live sports events, legitimate theater offerings, and even operas at movie theaters.
While the bits themselves are much cheaper to replicate than reels of film, the up-front costs of putting a digital picture in front of a theater audience are about $100 000 per screen compared with about $35 000 for the corresponding film projection equipment. (The cost of the sound system is basically unchanged.)
And therein lies the rub. Theater owners who considered running digital pictures balked at making that kind of investment without assurance that the technology would be compatible with the offerings of all movie studios for the long term.
For instance, when Boeing Digital Cinema, CineComm, and Technicolor introduced incompatible digital cinema systems back in 2001, they didn’t catch on. The systems supplied by CineComm worked only with a particular brand of projector made by a Hughes/JVC joint venture, and that projector didn’t reproduce colors in the same manner as the new projectors being shipped by Texas Instruments. Lack of interoperable standards meant that each system required a separate master, or else the color red on one projector system, for example, might display as pink on the other.
Meanwhile, the Technicolor system used a compression technology from Qualcomm, which was completely incompatible with the more standard MPEG (for Motion Picture Experts Group) compression used by the Boeing system. Studios had to produce two completely different digital files. The situation was, frankly, a mess.
So in March 2002, seven studios—Disney, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal, and Warner Brothers Studios—established Digital Cinema Initiatives, in Los Angeles, to create a specification for digital cinema. They first set a quality threshold: the image resolution had to be, at a minimum, 2048 by 1080 pixels, a resolution loosely called 2K. The systems also had to be upgradable to double that resolution, called 4K. The consortium specified that the systems had to produce essentially the same range of colors as film does, with the future potential to include all colors visible to the human eye.
The group then began looking at how equipment manufacturers could put together a system that would provide that high-quality picture using a minimum of protected intellectual property. The studios knew that the fewer proprietary technologies they chose, the more widely and inexpensively they could implement the systems.
They ended up specifying a video compression technology and recommending uncompressed sound. But they didn’t recommend a specific projection technology, though the industry seems, for now, to have settled on Digital Light Processing (DLP), a micromirror system developed by Texas Instruments. Meanwhile, an efficient method of getting the digital files from the studios to the theaters is still evolving.
The picture, of course, is key. And several things conspire against its quality in conventional film prints. After just a dozen showings, dirt, grease, and scratches visibly degrade the image. What’s more, copying a film print through several generations, which is what the film labs do to generate the immense number of copies needed for distribution, also reduces image quality, in the same way that making a photocopy of a photocopy does.
Starting out, a digital picture with its image clarity and range of color tones and a pristine film print of a movie displayed on a well-maintained film projection system are equal. But the digital version is made with the exact images approved by the director or the studio, and it maintains that quality through an indefinite number of showings and copies.
Today, movies may still be shot on film and then digitized. The digital files typically used in movie production to capture, store, and edit movies after they are shot on 35-mm film are massive, as large as 6000 terabytes. The final uncompressed movie files are a few terabytes. Yet even these files would be too expensive for studios and theaters to store, ship, and handle.
Obviously, some sort of compression was needed to bring costs down. But the movie industry widely recognized that if digital cinema didn’t start out with quality that was as good as 35-mm film, it was doomed. Selecting a compression technology that would enable digital movies to be packed down to a reasonable size and without any visible loss of quality required Hollywood’s most discriminating observers to do a lot of testing. These “golden eyes” included cinematographers, movie directors, theater owners, and studio executives—all people who spend much of their professional careers examining the minute details of images, such as color, contrast, and even the tiniest artifacts that might somehow render an image less realistic.
These cinema experts converged in 2002 on the Hollywood Pacific Theater, a grand old movie palace taken over by the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California and turned into the industry’s Digital Cinema Laboratory. After replacing the old 35-mm projection systems with the best film projectors available, the group invited digital technology vendors to set up test equipment and asked providers of compression technologies to face off against one another. And the games began.
An important technology contender was MPEG-2, the compression system created in 1994 and now ubiquitously used around the world for television, DVD, and Internet video. The problem with MPEG-2, however, is motion artifacts—the appearance of discontinuity or jerkiness in action scenes, particularly ones involving speeding cars or fire.
These motion artifacts appear because MPEG-2 uses temporal compression. The technique essentially encodes only the differences between frames, so, after the initial frame in a scene, the digital files typically need to add very little information for subsequent frames. But in scenes with a lot of action, many changes occur between frames, and the processor that decodes the compressed data cannot keep up, making movement on the screen appear jerky or displaying chunks of the picture as single-color blocks. Motion artifacts are rarely noticeable on a television screen but are all too apparent when magnified on a large screen.
Truncated due to character limit. For full article, see https://spectrum.ieee.org/bits-on-the-big-screen
BITS ON THE BIG SCREEN
Computer servers and digital projectors are about to replace the canisters of film and spinning sprockets of the world’s movie theaters
RUSSELL WINTNER
01 DEC 2006
14 MIN READ
The annals of film history enshrine the movies that heralded breakthroughs in cinematic technology. There’s The Jazz Singerin 1927, which was the first feature with sound; Becky Sharp in 1935, which pioneered three-color Technicolor; and Glory Road, which…
Glory Road ?
Yes, Glory Road. You may have missed it, but earlier this year that Disney feature about a scrappy Texas basketball team became the first motion picture released in a standardized digital form. Setting aside their film projectors, 29 theater owners ran the movie as a stream of bits from a stack of hard drives. In earlier attempts to launch digital technology, movies were encoded to play on proprietary systems, beginning with Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, which hit two screens in New Jersey and two more in California on 19 May 1999. The largest nonstandard digital release was the three-dimensional version of Chicken Little, which played on 100 screens in late 2005.
But by the end of this year more than 2000 North American theaters will be projecting bits instead of frames; by the end of 2007, more than 5000 North American screens will be digital. And the digital invasion is advancing around the globe. In Ireland, for example, 500 screens will be digital by the middle of 2007; in India, 2500 will convert by the end of that year.
After nearly a decade of talk and no action on the commercial front, digital cinema is taking the world by storm. The reason for the tempest? In a word: standards. On 27 July 2005, seven movie studios got together and published the first specification for digital cinema, and the motion picture industry launched its biggest transition since black-and-white movies gave way to color.
The ongoing shift to digital cinema will bring major benefits to moviegoers, theater owners, and the movie studios. For moviegoers, the move will mean a larger variety of features and possibly even other entertainment at their local movie theaters. The movies will have higher-quality images, and there will be more offerings in a 3-D format. In a digital world, much of the expense and difficulty of displaying a movie in 3-D disappears, and 3-D becomes a real option for moviemakers instead of just a gimmick [see sidebar, “Digital Cinema: Another Dimension”].
For theater owners, digital will make movies easier and cheaper to handle, ship, store, and discard. But for these exhibitors, the biggest benefit may turn out to be the simple ability to replicate a movie on-site for showing on multiple screens when it becomes an unexpected hit.
Studios will also save money—lots of it: the movie industry estimates that it currently spends close to US $1 billion annually to process and ship 35-millimeter films to theaters; it expects to save several hundreds of millions of dollars when 35-mm films are replaced with digital releases. Already, too, new applications are starting to emerge, including the showing of live sports events, legitimate theater offerings, and even operas at movie theaters.
While the bits themselves are much cheaper to replicate than reels of film, the up-front costs of putting a digital picture in front of a theater audience are about $100 000 per screen compared with about $35 000 for the corresponding film projection equipment. (The cost of the sound system is basically unchanged.)
And therein lies the rub. Theater owners who considered running digital pictures balked at making that kind of investment without assurance that the technology would be compatible with the offerings of all movie studios for the long term.
For instance, when Boeing Digital Cinema, CineComm, and Technicolor introduced incompatible digital cinema systems back in 2001, they didn’t catch on. The systems supplied by CineComm worked only with a particular brand of projector made by a Hughes/JVC joint venture, and that projector didn’t reproduce colors in the same manner as the new projectors being shipped by Texas Instruments. Lack of interoperable standards meant that each system required a separate master, or else the color red on one projector system, for example, might display as pink on the other.
Meanwhile, the Technicolor system used a compression technology from Qualcomm, which was completely incompatible with the more standard MPEG (for Motion Picture Experts Group) compression used by the Boeing system. Studios had to produce two completely different digital files. The situation was, frankly, a mess.
So in March 2002, seven studios—Disney, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal, and Warner Brothers Studios—established Digital Cinema Initiatives, in Los Angeles, to create a specification for digital cinema. They first set a quality threshold: the image resolution had to be, at a minimum, 2048 by 1080 pixels, a resolution loosely called 2K. The systems also had to be upgradable to double that resolution, called 4K. The consortium specified that the systems had to produce essentially the same range of colors as film does, with the future potential to include all colors visible to the human eye.
The group then began looking at how equipment manufacturers could put together a system that would provide that high-quality picture using a minimum of protected intellectual property. The studios knew that the fewer proprietary technologies they chose, the more widely and inexpensively they could implement the systems.
They ended up specifying a video compression technology and recommending uncompressed sound. But they didn’t recommend a specific projection technology, though the industry seems, for now, to have settled on Digital Light Processing (DLP), a micromirror system developed by Texas Instruments. Meanwhile, an efficient method of getting the digital files from the studios to the theaters is still evolving.
The picture, of course, is key. And several things conspire against its quality in conventional film prints. After just a dozen showings, dirt, grease, and scratches visibly degrade the image. What’s more, copying a film print through several generations, which is what the film labs do to generate the immense number of copies needed for distribution, also reduces image quality, in the same way that making a photocopy of a photocopy does.
Starting out, a digital picture with its image clarity and range of color tones and a pristine film print of a movie displayed on a well-maintained film projection system are equal. But the digital version is made with the exact images approved by the director or the studio, and it maintains that quality through an indefinite number of showings and copies.
Today, movies may still be shot on film and then digitized. The digital files typically used in movie production to capture, store, and edit movies after they are shot on 35-mm film are massive, as large as 6000 terabytes. The final uncompressed movie files are a few terabytes. Yet even these files would be too expensive for studios and theaters to store, ship, and handle.
Obviously, some sort of compression was needed to bring costs down. But the movie industry widely recognized that if digital cinema didn’t start out with quality that was as good as 35-mm film, it was doomed. Selecting a compression technology that would enable digital movies to be packed down to a reasonable size and without any visible loss of quality required Hollywood’s most discriminating observers to do a lot of testing. These “golden eyes” included cinematographers, movie directors, theater owners, and studio executives—all people who spend much of their professional careers examining the minute details of images, such as color, contrast, and even the tiniest artifacts that might somehow render an image less realistic.
These cinema experts converged in 2002 on the Hollywood Pacific Theater, a grand old movie palace taken over by the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California and turned into the industry’s Digital Cinema Laboratory. After replacing the old 35-mm projection systems with the best film projectors available, the group invited digital technology vendors to set up test equipment and asked providers of compression technologies to face off against one another. And the games began.
An important technology contender was MPEG-2, the compression system created in 1994 and now ubiquitously used around the world for television, DVD, and Internet video. The problem with MPEG-2, however, is motion artifacts—the appearance of discontinuity or jerkiness in action scenes, particularly ones involving speeding cars or fire.
These motion artifacts appear because MPEG-2 uses temporal compression. The technique essentially encodes only the differences between frames, so, after the initial frame in a scene, the digital files typically need to add very little information for subsequent frames. But in scenes with a lot of action, many changes occur between frames, and the processor that decodes the compressed data cannot keep up, making movement on the screen appear jerky or displaying chunks of the picture as single-color blocks. Motion artifacts are rarely noticeable on a television screen but are all too apparent when magnified on a large screen.
Truncated due to character limit. For full article, see https://spectrum.ieee.org/bits-on-the-big-screen
Comment