Film going digital, ending celluloid's reign
1:56 p.m. ET (1856 GMT) November 19, 1998
SAN FRANCISCO (Wired) — The projectionist is dead. Long live projection.
In a few years, movie-theater screens will glow with digitally projected liquid crystal displays, instead of celluloid prints, and the soft clicking of the 35-mm projector in the projection booth will fall silent.
Both Texas Instruments and Hughes JVC have been making the rounds in Hollywood with next-generation digital projectors that finally rival celluloid. Insiders say the results are stunning.
"I've been to a number of these technology demonstrations before and, for the first time, it looks like they're getting something close to film quality,'' said John Lawson, chief of engineering at MGM Studios. "It's my personal opinion that this is the future of broadcast entertainment.''
The new technology is called a moving mirror chip, pioneered by Texas Instruments in partnership with British projector company Digital Projection. It will enable production studios to complete production of films using current digital editing systems and transport them to theaters around the world without having to print them on celluloid film.
For theaters, digital projection promises clear pictures-with no cracks, pops, or scratches-that won't degrade over time. For studios, foregoing printing and distribution costs could save them hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Currently, it costs about $3,000 to put a movie on a single print of film. Distribute each film to 4,000 theaters, and costs can reach the tens of millions of dollars. Shipping is extra. Add to that the possibility of losing a print or master copy in transit, plus the ongoing replacement costs of long-running titles, and studios have compelling reasons to investigate the fledgling technology.
But studios are cautious. The infrastructure they are using to produce 35-mm films has been in place for decades, and it works. Conservative estimates say widespread use of the new digital systems is five years away or more.
"When you approach a new technology and new distribution mechanism many things have to be considered: economics, time to market, and change of current methodologies,'' said Jerry Pierce, vice president at Universal Studios. "At this stage, all of those have to be considered. There's no clear direction yet.''
One difficulty has been figuring out how to divide the expense of the new systems between movie theaters and studios.
"The real issues are the business model and politics,'' said Joe Butt, director of the entertainment and technology strategies group at Forrester Research, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The relationship between studios and theater chains-such as Loews, General Cinema, United Artists, and AMC-has been contentious since movie studios were forced to divest themselves of theaters in the 1930s, Butt said. Historically, studios have wanted a cut of ticket and popcorn sales at theaters and have vied for control over which films get shown where and for how long.
"It's built up a fairly adversarial supply-and-demand relationship,'' Butt said. "Exhibitors feel they're being taken advantage of, and studios feel they're not getting their fair share.''
Technological constraints also exist, such as what encryption technology will be used to secure films in transit, whether satellite or fiber optic will win out as the distribution pipeline, and whether large digital files will compress without loss of image and sound integrity. Theaters will be expected to build and maintain an infrastructure that can store multi-terabyte files and play them on demand, a proposition far more challenging than selling tickets or popcorn.
"We've always been expected to maintain our projection systems,'' said Mark Pascucci, vice president of advertising and publicity for Loews Cineplex Entertainment in New York. ''There's been a lot of discussion between distributors and exhibitors about it.''
Hughes JVC and its partner CineComm Digital Cinema have sold 13 systems to studios by resolving such details. The companies declined to name their customers.
CineComm offers a financing arrangement with its Electronic Cinema System that splits costs and returns between studios and theaters. Its solutions also include Qualcomm's encryption and compression technology, according to Alan Brawn, director of marketing at Hughes JVC, in Carlsbad, California.
The systems, priced at around $150,000 each, would work with digital copies of 35-mm prints, called "telecines.'' Large studios, including Sony, Universal, and MGM, are currently transferring their film archives into a digital format, at a cost of roughly $80,000 to $100,000 per film, so that the liquid crystal display-based CineComm system can project onto the big screen.
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