Here is the entire text of that NYT article about CineComm.
April 16, 1999
Curtain rises on digital cinema
Filed at 7:16 p.m. EDT
By Margaret Quan for EE Times, CMPnet
The biggest hit since Al Jolson sang "Mammy" on
screen in The JazzSinger, in 1927, or the biggest flop
since Sensurround? As the NationalAssociation of
Broadcasters exhibition opens Monday (April 19) in
Las Vegas, the movie industry is abuzz over digital
cinema, a filmless upgrade for today's analog theaters
that ultimately promises high-definition, real-time
broadcasts to neighborhood movie houses.
In meetings next week, the Society of Motion Picture
and Television Engineers (SMPTE) will hammer out
a draft spec for how an electronic image should be
displayed on a theater screen. The work adds to the momentum that's fast
building for so-called e-cinema - spurred on, at least in part, by George
Lucas' decision to show his much-ballyhooed Star Wars I: The Phantom
Menace using digital projector technology at four U.S. movie theaters in
June. But critical debates still remain over projection, compression and
encryption technologies, as well as over digital's potential effect on the art of
cinematography.
"Everyone is scrambling - filmmakers, artists, the display industry - it's a
very hot topic," said Al Barton, chairman of the SMPTE working group,
which expects to draw more than 100 engineers and film-industry executives
to define specs for e-cinema.
Digital cinema promises to transform the movie industry by enabling studios
to save the cost of shooting, printing and shipping film. Instead, movies
would travel to theaters in digital form via satellite, phone lines, fiber optics or
the Internet. Digital technology also makes for a consistent product, movies
that don't degrade over time the way film does. Gone will be the faded
colors, scratches and thumb prints that mar films today, proponents say.
Eventually, digital cinema could turn theaters into virtual stadiums, where
moviegoers see a high-definition feature film in real-time along with, say, a
live 15 minute-rock concert - all for the price of a ticket.
"It will make theaters distinctive once again, giving people a reason to go out,
rather than stay home and watch a movie [on TV]," said Russ Wintner, chief
technical officer at CineComm Digital Cinema (Los Angeles), a company
planning to provide end-to-end turnkey digital delivery systems to movie
studios and theaters by 2001.
Amid the excitement, though, some wonder if e-cinema is ready for its
close-up - and whether the industry can coalesce rapidly around specs.
Setting standards may be a tall order, they say, because of the inherent
differences between film and digital images.
"Hollywood has been bamboozled by the demos, but when they see what
lossy compression does to their movies [wherein data is lost as it is
compressed and decompressed], the industry could [see a] backlash in six
months," one source said.
The hype surrounding digital cinema will be fed by a flurry of product
announcements and demos at the NAB99 conference, including exhibitions of
projector technologies by Hughes-JVC, whose D-ILA (direct-drive image
light amplifier) solution is preparing to duke it out with the Digital Light
Processing (DLP) technology from Texas Instruments Inc. Projector
vendors Digital Projection Inc. (Kennesaw, Ga.) and Electrohome Projection
Systems Ltd. (Kitchener, Ontario) will show their DLP-based projectors,
which use subsystems from TI.
Interestingly, Lucasfilm Ltd. opted to use both for the digital Star Wars
"prequel" tour, scheduled to begin June 18. CineComm will provide the
Hughes-JVC projector on four movie screens in two cities, and will work
with Lucasfilm to transfer the finished film to CineComm's digital system.
Lucasfilm has also signed on with TI to use projectors based on DLP.
Beyond Star Wars, several major studios are rumored to be producing movies
completely digitally, and independent studio Miramax exhibited its Oscar
winners Shakespeare in Love and Life is Beautiful using digital projector
technology at its Sedona, Ariz., film festival earlier this month. Wavelength
Releasing LLC, a media-delivery company in Pennsylvania, used technology
from QuVis (Topeka, Kan.) to compress a movie to be shown at the Cannes
Film Festival on a DLP-based projector.
The SMPTE, the National Association of Theater Owners and the THX
division of Lucasfilm, as well as individual movie studios, are keeping an eye
on all these technologies as they inch toward setting standards.
But industry sources say before the transition can proceed, many issues must
be resolved. Among them are the minimum requirements for digital
projectors, how digital images are presented on screen, compression and
encryption technologies, and methods of delivery to theaters. Looming over
all the discussions is the biggest question of all: Who will pay for the
expensive transition to digital technology in theaters and movie studios?
At NAB99, engineers from SMPTE's Committee on Theatrical Projection will
draft specifications for how electronic images should be displayed on a large
screen, said Barton, chairman of the Working Group on Electronic Imaging
of Theatrical Presentations. Barton told EE Times the standard will cover
contrast ratio, detail resolution and brightness. After the meeting SMPTE
members will vote on the standard, and SMPTE will publish it by late 1999.
SMPTE will also organize other committees to examine encryption,
compression and data formats, Barton said.
During the two years SMPTE has been considering digital cinema, it
appeared that e-movies were still several years away. But fireworks at
various industry conferences, along with the announcements from Lucas and
other filmmakers, have lit a fire.
SMPTE's standard is likely to affect the two front-runners in digital
projectors: Hughes-JVC and TI. Hughes' D-ILA is a reflective liquid-crystal
design in which electronic signals are directly addressed to the device. It
produces SXGA graphics and a resolution of 1,364 x1,024 pixels.
TI's DLP technology is based on its digital micromirror devices (DMDs),
which projector makers can use to produce XGA resolution (1,024 x 768
pixels). TI has shown at recent movie-industry trade shows and meetings a
digital-cinema-specific prototype projector it built with next-generation
DMDs capable of SXGA resolution, 1,280 x 1,024 pixels.
TI will have next-generation DMDs available for projector makers by the
third quarter, but they won't be the same ones used in the prototype, said
Paul Breedlove, digital-cinema program director for the Dallas company.
Devices used in the prototype were tweaked for higher contrast and a wider
range of colors, requiring more bits per pixel of data, Breedlove said, but TI
won't develop a cinema-specific DLP subsystem for projectors until it's
convinced there's a healthy market.
David Mentley, display-industry analyst at Stanford Resources, said all digital
projectors trade off resolution or contrast for brightness in an attempt to
meet the 12-foot lamberts on-screen SMPTE film standard. He said digital
projectors are not quite ready for the discriminating tastes of
cinematographers and film devotees.
"There are limitations to the technology," he said. "Good projection of movies
depends on more than just brightness." For instance, Mentley said, digital
models have a tough time projecting the image of a bright candle in a very
dark room, something easily done with film projection. He said
cinematographers will continue to opt for film because it gives them more
artistic freedom. And until cinematographers are pleased with digital
technology, the market won't develop, he said.
Some sources said the transition to digital cinema will hinge not on projection
but on compression. Hollywood has yet to see how digital compression will
work with digital projector technologies - all the demos thus far have used
uncompressed digital images from a high-quality Panasonic D5 tape.
If a compression algorithm does a bad job of compressing an image, said
Chuck Collins, national market-development manager at Digital Projection,
the projector often is blamed when the resulting poor image hits the screen.
Beyond MPEG
Digital Projection has worked with compression technology from QuVis,
which calls its QuBit box a "digital-image motion recorder." QuVis said the
box handles data rates and image sizes beyond what MPEG or JPEG can do,
as well as real-time encoding and decoding. QuBit does wavelet-based
transform compression in the range of 15:1 to 25:1 using an array of Orca
FPGAs from Lucent Technologies, a proprietary operating system and bus,
said George Scheckel, vice president of marketing and sales at QuVis.
Another compression technology that has piqued interest in Hollywood is
from Qualcomm Inc. (San Diego). CineComm will use Qualcomm's
compression and encryption schemes to deliver images via Ku-band satellite,
showing them via a Hughes JVC D-ILA projector. Qualcomm uses
adaptive-block-size discrete-cosine-transform algorithms to achieve 40:1
compression.
Wintner of CineComm said Qualcomm is embedding its proprietary
compression and encryption technology into ASICs that will go into telecines
(machines used by movie studios to scan films and turn them into digital
images) as well as into the JVC digital projectors CineComm expects to
provide to theaters.
Encryption is key to preventing piracy of digital movies as they are
transmitted from studios to theaters. This issue, of critical interest to
Hollywood, has drawn the interest of Scientific Atlanta, General Instrument
and Sarnoff Labs, among other suppliers.
Although digital movies could theoretically be delivered over phone lines, fiber
optics or the Internet, many in the industry believe satellites will be the
near-term solution. Loral spin-off CyberStar, one of several satellite service
providers interested in the e-cinema market, currently uses existing Telstar
satellites owned and operated by Loral Skynet in the Ka band. The venture
expects to have dedicated satellites in 2000 and to be fully operational in
2001.
(c) 1999 CMP Media Inc.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company |
