Cinecomm, which is jointly owned by Qualcomm Inc. and
Hughes-JVC.
nytimes.com
ARAMUS, N.J. -- As Theater 1 at the Loews Cineplex filled for an afternoon
showing of "Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace," Peter Melnyk,
a movie projectionist for 28 years, repeated the time-worn ritual of his trade,
spraying air into the innards of a 1960's vintage movie projector to clear dust
before lacing the film through its spools.
But this time, he and the baked-enamel and chrome Century projector were just
there as a backup. In this theater, the Loews Meadows 6 in Secaucus, and two
theaters in suburbs of Los Angeles, George Lucas's high-tech hit was projected
from a computer hard drive by a technician wielding a mouse.
On June 18, Lucas and 20th Century Fox began these special four-week runs
of the movie to test two new competing types of digital projectors, which use
banks of hard drives, microchips, prisms and liquid crystal arrays to beam a
film onto a standard screen – without the seven heavy reels of film and the
unavoidable accumulation of dust flecks, scratches, and pops that come with
using a century-old medium.
As the audience from the 1 P.M. show filtered out of the theater, viewers-- most
of whom had already seen the standard version of the film -- gushed over what
they had just seen. "You're making no friends at Kodak," John Rybacki, a viewer,
said during a tour of the projection booth led by Kevin Romano, a co-founder of
Cinecomm Digital Cinema, the company that made the digital copies of the film.
"I saw it the old-fashioned way, and this just blows it away," said Rybacki, who
is a video technician from Norwood, N.J. Another film, "An Ideal Husband,"
produced by Miramax Films, is being shown until July 15 using the digital
projection method at the Clearview Chelsea 9 in Manhattan and at the Laemmle
Sunset 5 in Los Angeles. In 5 to 10 years, many film industry experts say, digital
cinema is likely to begin replacing film reels. The technology will allow the
industry to distribute movies from studios to theaters via coded satellite links,
avoiding the high cost and delay of making thousands of prints of a new
movie and shipping them across the country.
Carl Goodman, the curator for digital media at the American Museum of the
Moving Image in Queens, said that a digital screening for directors and
cinematographers there in May aroused admiration. He said the shift to digital
technology at both ends of the movie business -- making them and showing them
is an inevitable part of a larger shift in all electronic entertainment, similar to the
move from scratch-prone LP's to CD's.
Gordon Radley, the president of Lucasfilm Ltd., said the decision to unveil
digital projection to the public came after Lucas decided the digital projectors
were as good as existing film projectors in many ways -- and far superior in
others. At a side-by-side screening of film and digital versions of "The Phantom
Menace" for movie business executives and journalists in Los Angeles in mid-June,
he said, half of the audience could not guess which was which.
Miramax, which is also eager to shift to digital pictures, decided to hold its own
screenings, said Mark Gill, president of Miramax's Los Angeles division. Gill said
the company chose a traditional film, a period piece with many subtle
cinematographic touches, so that audiences would understand that the method can
be used with any movie. " 'An Ideal Husband' is the antithesis of a digital movie,"
he said. The industry has already realized the business benefits of the new projection
method. When a movie is an unexpected hit, like "The Full Monty," cinemas in small
towns will no longer have to wait for one of the few remaining copies to be shipped to
them. And when a movie is a box-office bomb, like "Godzilla," there will be no wasted
cost in making piles of prints, at up to $2,000 apiece, with no cinemas interested in
showing them, said Michael Targoff, the chairman and chief executive officer of
Cinecomm, which is jointly owned by Qualcomm Inc. and Hughes-JVC. His company
made the digital copies of the Star Wars film that are being shown in Paramus and
Winnetka, Calif., using projectors made by Hughes-JVC Technology.
A competing digital projection system, made by Texas Instruments, is being tested
in Secaucus, N.J., and Burbank, Calif. The systems will not immediately show up
in the largest theaters, like Manhattan's Ziegfeld, industry experts said, because of
limitations on how far digital images can be projected. But, they added, there will
probably be no limit to where they can be used in the near future. Engineers are
also still working on matching the quality of 70 millimeter movies, which have
negatives twice as wide as those in a conventional 35 millimeter print. The buzz
has already been spreading. The digital showing of "The Phantom Menace" in
Paramus attracted amateur technofiles from as far away as Maryland, said the staff
at the theater. Studio executives from Sony and Disney, as well as owners of other
theater chains, also visited to gauge audience interest and assess the quality of the
picture, said Romano of Cinecomm. It will be shown at the theater until July 15.
As the 4 P.M. start time for the next showing approached, Romano walked to the
41-foot wide screen at the front of the darkened auditorium and introduced himself
and the digital machinery 125 feet away, behind the glass panel in the back. The
new projector, a hulking black box with a trio of glowing red, green, and blue lenses,
sat next to the old projector, with its single lens. "Film is wonderful," Romano said.
"It's done tremendous things for us over the last 75 to 100 years. But another way is
here. You're watch in history." The transition to digital cinema is not likely to be
quite as smooth as Romano predicted, with industry experts saying the studios and
theater owners have not even begun to negotiate who will pay what share of the cost
of switching to the new projection systems.
But the first audiences for the new method certainly seemed awed by what they were
seeing. About 20 people who had seen the previous showing of the movie stayed
afterward for a tour, and soon they were engaged in a jargon-laced conversation
with Romano. He explained that it takes three weeks to scan all the frames in a
14,000-foot-long movie, the length of "The Phantom Menace," turn it into more
than a trillion zeros and ones, the basic code of the digital era, and then compress that
data. The prototype projectors cost about $250,000 to make, and are expected eventually
cost each theater less than $100,000, he said.
The dialogue during the tour ranged from data compression ratios to xenon bulbs,
from encryption software to the Pluto hard drive array, which stored the film on a
bank of 20 hard disks. And that data was just the visual part of the film. The digital
soundtrack was across the room in another black box. Zev Eth, 17, a computer and
Star Wars enthusiast from Englewood, soaked it all in. "All my friends who've seen
it before are coming to see it again in 'dij'," he said, using a shorthand term for the
word of the moment, digital. "It's 30 times better this way."
In another corner of the movie complex, the Star Wars film was showing on a
screen using a standard projector. But a few minutes before the next show there,
only one couple had settled into the seats. When a visitor mentioned that the digital
screening of the same film was about to start down the hall, they quickly rose and
scurried to see it. In the booth for the digital screening, Richard Sutton, a technician
for Hughes-JVC, clicked his mouse on the "play" icon on a monitor, and the trailers,
advertisements and finally the film itself rolled -- at least in a virtual way.
Occasionally, viewers glanced over their shoulders at the flickering red, green and
blue beams emanating from the projection booth. The system works like a home
projection television, with each movie moment dissected into its red, green and blue
components, which are recorded separately and then projected as three beams of light.
When the three beams merge at the screen, the viewer sees the full-color scene.
But that is where the similarity between the digital projector and a home television
ends. In the digital system, every frame of a movie is recorded as hundreds of
thousands of bits of information so that the subtless nuance of shading or color is
captured exactly as it was originally filmed. As Melnyk, the 49-year-old gray-haired
projectionist, watched the digital movie projector upload the sci-fi epic, he recalled
the days when he danced between two projectors, readying each successive 20-minute
reel of a film to run seamlessly as the preceding one ended, and replace the burning
carbon filaments in the light source every 40 minutes. "This is the future -- I'm
looking at it," Melnyk said of the digital projector, even as his old projector started
up in tandem. The four-foot-wide platter holding the film rotated, and the film
snaked into the projector. But the lamp would be flicked on only if there was some
unexpected glitch. There was none
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