The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Circuit Is Up For Sale

[Ryan Gallagher]

Keep in mind that replacement tiles have to be calibrated, in order to get to a uniform color representation, especially since it concerns a cinema screen and not just a random billboard.

I should clarify, the industry overlap i'm referring to is not to advertising/billboards. It's to multi million dollar live events rigs, with video walls far bigger than any that would be installed in a cinema (Think Apple or Nvidia Keynotes etc etc). Granted the color and panel to panel calibration tolerances are going to be higher for a permanent cinema install, but the skillset involved is already out there doing it.

[Bobby Henderson]

These LED boards all operate off the same basic principals, regardless if the units are for indoor or outdoor use and regardless of size.

The boards sold today (from reputable companies) have far greater capabilities than jumbotrons of the past. Color and contrast latitude is far wider than other kinds of electronic image displays; the outdoor LED units can get painfully bright. They need the capability to overpower ambient sunlight during the day. But it's very important to have a solar cell or timer installed to turn down brightness levels at night. The boards have a lot of room in color, brightness and contrast levels for making adjustments. It shouldn't be any problem making them conform to a particular color specification, such as DCI P3 or do things like HDR. Refresh rates on modern LED boards range from 600Hz to in the thousands of hertz. In the past they typically ran at 60Hz. Today you can point a video camera at a newer LED display and not see any flicker at all. It's one reason why the LED boards are showing up on some movie/TV production sound stages.

[Terry Monohan]

Yes It's too bad Drafthouse is for sale. I think they built too many tiny screens with expensive food and drinks. The new bank owners got rid of all the union projectionist people a few months ago. We will miss the 35mm/70mm films shown in select markets and the best pre show entertainment clips you will never see at AMC, Regal or Cinemark Theatres. Maybe the new owners of Landmark Theatres will buy some of the larger Drafthouse Cinema sites and offer drinks and food for the first time and keep on showing new and classic movies on real film. This may be the end of 35mm films shown If new owners take over and just do DCP with food and drinks. They will not bother doing all the work It takes to do the pre show entertainment for each cinema market. Drafthouse started out as a nitch art circuit with beer but mostly now they show the same movies the big chains show but on way smaller tiny screens. People like larger big screens and kick ass sound that they don't get at home.

[Lyle Romer]

These LED boards all operate off the same basic principals, regardless if the units are for indoor or outdoor use and regardless of size.

The boards sold today (from reputable companies) have far greater capabilities than jumbotrons of the past. Color and contrast latitude is far wider than other kinds of electronic image displays; the outdoor LED units can get painfully bright. They need the capability to overpower ambient sunlight during the day. But it's very important to have a solar cell or timer installed to turn down brightness levels at night. The boards have a lot of room in color, brightness and contrast levels for making adjustments. It shouldn't be any problem making them conform to a particular color specification, such as DCI P3 or do things like HDR. Refresh rates on modern LED boards range from 600Hz to in the thousands of hertz. In the past they typically ran at 60Hz. Today you can point a video camera at a newer LED display and not see any flicker at all. It's one reason why the LED boards are showing up on some movie/TV production sound stages.

I assume the dimming systems have to be designed that if they fail, the display defaults to night mode. I can't even imagine a highway billboard being that bright at night.

[Bobby Henderson]

It's very unlikely a solar cell or timer setup would fail. I've only seen these boards show daytime brightness during night right after the display was installed. That's a result of improper setup. Needless to say, the issue usually gets fixed very quickly. It's not fun looking at a jumbotron at night when its "high beams" were mistakenly turned on. It's really bad if it's a large LED billboard. Complaints will rain in fast and hard.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I should clarify, the industry overlap i'm referring to is not to advertising/billboards. It's to multi million dollar live events rigs, with video walls far bigger than any that would be installed in a cinema (Think Apple or Nvidia Keynotes etc etc). Granted the color and panel to panel calibration tolerances are going to be higher for a permanent cinema install, but the skillset involved is already out there doing it.

I've said this here before. Right now, I think that the DCI requirements for "D-Cinema" are more a burden than a blessing for the industry. The argument before had been: There is no cheap route to D-Cinema and this would ensure some kind of base-line level of quality. Ever since $10K can buy you a used server/projector combination, I guess that argument has become moot.

I see quite a potential in direct view screens. Those screens are getting better and more affordable with each and every iteration. But right now, we're limiting the technology again to a tiny handful of suppliers, meanwhile, there is no reason why people that install and maintain those screens for other settings won't be able to maintain such a screen for exhibition purposes.

I remember a few years back, where we implemented a content warping solutions to present movies on a dome screen. While there were many incentives to use this for first-run Hollywood releases including from some local Hollywood studio representatives, there is simply no way to get DCI content on such a screen...

Given the seemingly shrinking market for exhibitors in the movie space, I expect stakeholders in the exhibition industry to look for other ways to make money. So I expect a sharp increase in multi-purpose venues.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Given the seemingly shrinking market for exhibitors in the movie space, I expect stakeholders in the exhibition industry to look for other ways to make money. So I expect a sharp increase in multi-purpose venues.

I was thinking along those lines as people commented about Alamo's penchant for tiny screens. Any new construction multiplexes should definitely plan to accommodate action in front of the screen, at least 6' of "stage" space if not more. For value adds, Q&As, cosplay contests, and even just a space for someone to speak about the curation of that particular offering.

It would also turn any screen into a mini conference room for keynotes and other corporate type rentals. We have a couple local companies that do their quarterly's in both of our rooms (depending on availability).

Anyone building or modifying a single-screen house should consider just turning it into an actual theatre with cinema capabilities, if possible given architectural constraints.

How to make some or all of the seating "flexible" would be the next big quandry to consider.

[Bobby Henderson]

I see quite a potential in direct view screens. Those screens are getting better and more affordable with each and every iteration. But right now, we're limiting the technology again to a tiny handful of suppliers, meanwhile, there is no reason why people that install and maintain those screens for other settings won't be able to maintain such a screen for exhibition purposes.

Actually, I think there are too many suppliers of LED variable message display boards. The numbers of reputable suppliers are somewhat low, as are companies that make good quality LED components. There are literally hundreds of other companies selling a lot of crap.

In the sign industry we have to put up with some customers who go out price shopping. There are lots of sign companies who have no ethics. They'll undercut us on price to sell a client a piece of shit LED board that will be dead in less than 5 years. Something important fails by then and they can't get replacement parts. The customer only sees the up front price difference between that Chinese "OEM" display the other guys are selling and the Daktronics unit we're recommending. Over the years we've seen a lot of customers learn the hard way about buying the off-brand junk.

I'm pretty amazed at how much LED displays have improved over the past 10 or so years. There are indoor LED displays with pixel pitches of less than 1mm between pixel centers. Samsung's "The Wall" product can be ordered with a .085mm pitch. A commercial cinema screen doesn't need a pixel pitch that tight unless they're trying to do something like 8K in an average sized cinema screen footprint. Note: a 146" (diagonal) 4K Samsung Wall costs over $200,000.

Given the seemingly shrinking market for exhibitors in the movie space, I expect stakeholders in the exhibition industry to look for other ways to make money. So I expect a sharp increase in multi-purpose venues.

With these stupidly brief theatrical windows and just fewer movie releases overall the theater chains need to do something, but what? For each multi-purpose idea they're going to have serious competition.

Dine-in theaters are still somewhat popular, but the food and service has to be good. There are plenty of other restaurants after all. Renting out cinema auditoriums as meeting space for seminars or conventions sounds decent. Many hotels, colleges, churches and dedicated convention centers have been doing that for a long time. While it would be cool to rent a cinema equipped with a huge LED screen for a seminar it's likely many potential clients could be scared off by the price. Bowling alleys seem to be making something of a limited come-back. Arcades with classic coin-op games are popular, but keeping those things operational can be a big challenge.

Cinemas could try showing other kinds of content on their screens, if they can negotiate good deals to show things like pay per view fights, the Super Bowl or whatever. They'll have to compete with any bars or restaurants showing the same event.

[Leo Enticknap]

On the cinema LED front, I have recently completed my third install (as a member of quite a large team): I've done one Samsung and two LGs. Two more LGs are imminent. My impression is that the technology is combining what the signage / billboard / jumbotron industry has been doing on a much bigger scale for a long time, with the imaging requirements of DCI. The initial installations require an order of magnitude more technician hours than a projector and screen would, and on all the projects I've worked on, there was a much longer tail of punchlisting and optimizing, too.

I can't see any obvious way of cutting down on the installation labor hit. Assembling the frame (and as a quality control measure, at MiT we assemble all our frames fully on the shop floor to confirm all is good, before taking them apart again and packaging them for shipping to the site), mounting the modules, aligning the modules in relation to each other to achieve seamless joins, and then installing the cables that connect them (power and signal) followed by the DCI tamper cabinet covers (several hundred of the bastards, in the case of larger screens) is fiddly, delicate work, and can only be done by guys and gals wearing LED headlights crawling along catwalks with a screwdriver. If a module sprouts a bad pixel, two techs are needed to swap it out: one pushing the bad one out from the back, while the other catches it from the front, and vice-versa. For the larger displays, a big A-frame ladder or even a scissor lift could be needed in front of the screen. Several modules have had bad pixels out of the box on all the installs I've worked on.

So either these things will have to have lower maintenance costs (relative to a projector or screen), or a higher total cost of ownership and operation will need to be accepted as a price worth paying for the image quality that they offer. They look absolutely beautiful when all is done. But even if the hardware cost can be driven down by economies of scale, I'm skeptical that they will ever become price competitive with traditional projectors and screens. Like Cinerama and Todd-AO before them, I suspect that cinema LED displays are going to find a niche as a premium product at a premium price.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Anyone building or modifying a single-screen house should consider just turning it into an actual theatre with cinema capabilities, if possible given architectural constraints.

How to make some or all of the seating "flexible" would be the next big quandry to consider.

If you have the money to do so, I'd indeed consider to combine both theater and cinema in the same room. I'd still consider luxury seating options, as those are still pretty rare in the traditional theater space. But, I think that, in most cases, adding a small to medium sized stage in front of your screen will already be sufficient. Unless there is no real theater in town and the given town is big enough, you're probably not going to compete with that theater for full stage productions.

Actually, I think there are too many suppliers of LED variable message display boards. The numbers of reputable suppliers are somewhat low, as are companies that make good quality LED components. There are literally hundreds of other companies selling a lot of crap.

I agree that there is a lot of crap out there. Every time I go to a trade show, I'm amazed at the sheer amount of Chinese companies offering LED screens nowadays, a lot of them with questionable reputation, although there can also be some potential hidden gems in there. I can understand the frustration regarding price-gauging customers that go out shopping for those cheap Chinese alternatives. Those are often the same customers that later come back to you, asking you to fix their self-inflicted drama... But to some extend, I think it's also good there is a lot of competition, because it will put the pressure on the big players in the market to keep their prices in check and it will force them to keep on innovating in this space.

With these stupidly brief theatrical windows and just fewer movie releases overall the theater chains need to do something, but what? For each multi-purpose idea they're going to have serious competition.

There certainly is a lot of competition in the event space already, but I do think that a well-equipped, well-prepared multi-purpose-cinema venue can outclass many of them on many levels, especially with a high quality LED screen at hand.

Most modern theaters have, for example, far better seating options than most other multi-purpose venues have on offer. For theaters featuring stadium seating, they may offer better sight-lines towards the stage compared to common flat conference rooms and banquet halls. And finally, but not least, if done right, the theater will have far better audio and video capabilities out-of-the-box, than most competing venues. A LED screen would be perfect here, since it can still operate unobstructed with considerable light levels in the room. The fact that the screen is self-illuminating also helps using it as a dynamic backdrop, without worrying of blocking the beam of the projector.

If you combine the above with the catering options comparable to what e.g. Alamo Drafthouse has on option, I do think that you have quite a strong proposition for corporate and cultural events of all kinds.

So either these things will have to have lower maintenance costs (relative to a projector or screen), or a higher total cost of ownership and operation will need to be accepted as a price worth paying for the image quality that they offer. They look absolutely beautiful when all is done. But even if the hardware cost can be driven down by economies of scale, I'm skeptical that they will ever become price competitive with traditional projectors and screens. Like Cinerama and Todd-AO before them, I suspect that cinema LED displays are going to find a niche as a premium product at a premium price.

Given the amount of hardware you need to need to put in, I guess it will remain the premium option for a while, even though cost will come down and people will come up with quicker and more innovative ways of installing and maintaining those walls. Given the current state of the movie industry at large and the foreseeable future, I think the time of the 20+-room multiplexes, except maybe for the biggest of markets, is pretty much over. People going to see a movie are going to demand a more premium experience, a picture that outclasses what most people have at home should be on the list. If this same screen can be used as a selling point for other high-class events, that should only entice more venues to consider switching to such a screen.

By the way, it's "interesting" to see how the DCI requirements are even causing headaches with this technology. What happens if the tamper switch of one of those many hundreds of tamper covers gets triggered? I guess the screen goes dark?

[Leo Enticknap]

The big 4K LG system consists of 176 cabinets, each of which has four tamper switches (one in each corner), so 704 DCI tamper switches per display! If any one of those opens, it stops DCI content from playing to that specific cabinet. I'm told that above a certain number of tamper-triggered cabinets (though I wasn't given the number), the IMB marriage breaks, and there goes the whole display. Thankfully these are large, spring-loaded buttons (that are held down by the cabinet's rear cover, once seated and screwed in place), not the failure-prone, tiny microswitches found in NEC projectors. They look to me to be pretty easy to replace if necessary. The receiver board in each cabinet, to which they connect, is also an easy swapout (I had to replace a couple during the last install). But even so, here is a system with 704 potential single points of failure in it...

[Ryan Gallagher]

For anyone who hasn't spent any time assembling video walls... the better brands all share this feature set per module:

- structural frame that manages the frame to frame connection and "closing the gap", mechanism varies brand to brand.

- a swappable processor module.

- multiple "swappable" LED panel modules, how fiddly they are depends on the brand, but typically one person in the back to disconnect, one in the front to receive. (These are what get replaced when pixels go bad)

- short power and data interconnects (typically Tru1 and Ethercon).

- some brands even allow "curvature" at the interconnections... but best viewed as concave, convex typically introduces a small module gap, unless their frame design is very clever.

I had no idea the ones being designed for cinema were including tamper switches per moudle. Ooof.

Future innovations that are starting to appear on some systems include module to module power and communication, instead of link cables (but that seems harder to service IMHO). Matt vs Gloss over-coatings for large "TV" style walls... though most large scale walls are still just raw pixels with the matt grills and tiny louvers between pixels. Front only service access with magnetic modules... (for something approximating flush mount panels).

[Randy Stankey]

Thinking it through... The way an unscrupulous person would break in to a display system like that is likely to be different than an authorized service person would open things up. An authorized tech would have all the access he needed so wouldn't be likely to try to break in.

Why not have the ability to put a system into some sort of repair mode? The tampers would be ignored while in service mode and they would all have to be in secure mode before you would be allowed to come out of service mode. You could play test files to be sure things were working. Unencrypted programs could be played too. In order to restore from service mode, you'd need to be authorized to restore a marriage tamper. You'd need to know the passwords to get into and out of the system. Just for extra safety, why not have another password to get into and out of service mode.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Why not have the ability to put a system into some sort of repair mode? The tampers would be ignored while in service mode and they would all have to be in secure mode before you would be allowed to come out of service mode. You could play test files to be sure things were working. Unencrypted programs could be played too. In order to restore from service mode, you'd need to be authorized to restore a marriage tamper. You'd need to know the passwords to get into and out of the system. Just for extra safety, why not have another password to get into and out of service mode.

The thing is, you can design as many "functional sweeteners" you want, but in essence, you keep designing them around what amounts to (in this case) 704 spring-loaded booby traps in your system. Once a single one of them fires, you're already in a world of hurt. Even if the rest of the display keeps working, you still will have a big black rectangle in your screen that most people won't really appreciate, especially if it's right smack in the middle of the screen.

The internal engineer in me starts crying and shouting if he encounters those kind of designs. You don't easily and willingly design 704 SPOFs into your system...
Those systems only add complexity and cost and a potentially degraded customer experience, while adding nothing to the bottom line for the exhibitor.

Keep in mind what we're trying to prevent here: We're trying to prevent someone to tap some proprietary signal from, in this case, 176 individual cabinets, so 176 sources, in order to somehow capture the unencrypted digital pixel data and reassemble it back into one big, high-definition picture. The hardware necessary for such an undertaking would probably at least be as expensive as the video wall itself and then you also still need that video wall, as the thing you're trying to do will be potentially destructive, even in the best case, when there wouldn't be a security cover in-place. Wouldn't it be more likely someone would just put a well-positioned 4K camera on that same screen?

Also keep in mind that we're implementing all those security shenanigans in order to please a bunch of failing studio bosses, so nobody copies their precious jewels, within the release window between a theatrical (pre-)release and a release to streaming/rental. Which is anywhere between zilch and a few weeks at best. That is, if they manage to NOT leak it themselves in the meanwhile...

Meanwhile, lots of cheap second hand DCI hardware is now slowly entering the bootlegging circuits. It will probably be just a matter of time before DCI security will be breached, if it didn't already happen...

[Randy Stankey]

I agree with you. There are enough pathways to steal a signal without having to tap into the screen, itself. As you say, you'd have to reassemble the mosaic of squares to get a viewable picture, anyhow. I was only considering the screen, itself. Any equipment feeding the screen display would also present vulnerabilities that would, likely, be easier to exploit, anyhow.

My thinking was more about the hundreds of tamper switches. Yes, every one of them is essentially a booby trap that could stop a show. My idea of a service mode was aimed at that problem more than any other possible exploit. Otherwise, how do you assemble the screen, engage all of the tampers then test the system? There would have to be some sort of service mode. Wouldn't there?

The idea of how to password protect any type of service mode was aimed toward those "anxiety prone individuals" who don't really understand how things work, in the first place.

I'm with you. More and more complexity only serves to create more and more paths to failure that we don't really want or need.

The way I see things, procedural security is more important than physical security. You can lock things up any of a million different ways but if you don't limit access to only a few trusted people with proper training and clearances, there is no technical solution that can prevent unauthorized viewing of movies.

In other words, lock the booth doors and only give the key to people you trust to do the job right.