Digital cinema: How it works

Digital technology is nothing new. It's been there over a decade in some form or the other-from VCDs, DVDs, video recorder, mobiles and even online streaming. But films seem to be a rather recent entry in this field. This in spite the epic George Lucas release of Star War sequel being made using digital cinema and showcased likewise way back in 2002. So what really is digital cinema? Digital cinema is essentially a reelless approach to movie making. It refers to the use of digital technology to distribute and project motion pictures. Essentially a movie will be distributed via hard drives, optical disks (such as DVDs) or satellite and projected using a digital projector instead of a conventional film projector. The rise of digital cinema George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars series, has been widely attributed as the pioneer behind digital cinemas. Lucas, dissatisfied with celluloid and traditional filmbased special effects, developed the hardware to create the special effects he wanted. However, when the shots were projected onto the big screen, the film did not quite match the required quality. The effect, Lucas then involved the likes of Texas Instruments, Technicolor, Kodak and others to produce a video-based digital cinema system. Result was Lucas' 2002 epic Star Wars Episode II: Attack Of The Clones that was shot digitally and shown using a digital projector. The mechanism The basic idea that digital cinema works on is the use bits and bytes (strings of 1s and 0s) to record, transmit and replay images, rather than using chemicals on film like in case of celluloid. The biggest advantage of digital cinema (such as VCD, DVD and the like) is that it can store, transmit and retrieve in huge amount of information exactly as it was originally recorded. Unlike analog technology (such as audio tapes), it doesn't suffer from loss of information during transmission or degradation due to frequent viewing. Many faces of digital cinema However the lack of high quality image has done little to undermine the advantages of digital cinemas. Production-wise, digital video is much cheaper than film reel . There is virtually no processing involved before the editing stage. Filmmakers on a shoe-string budget can even reuse the tape multiple times. Distribution-wise, the most compelling argument in favour of digital cinema is that it reduces the dissemination budget by at least 50 per cent. Editing-wise, digital cinema is much simpler and faster to tweak with. Traditionally, filmmakers convert film footage to digital format for post-production and then back to film again for its theatrical release. With digital video one doesn't have to go through this conversion process and the editing can start right after they have shot the scene. Projection-wise, it maintains consistency. Be it the first or 501st time, digital movies will look the same every time it is screened. Also, since the content is stored in servers, theater owners can enjoy the 'Cut & Paste' benefit. So if there is no audience for a particular film, then it can be changed to another without a fuss. Are we there yet? While most Hollywood directors and a few Bollywood biggies like Anurag Kashyap, Dibankar Banerjee have already gone digital in some way or the other, a fully digitalized cinema system will take time. Here's why: First the cost. While there is a lot of savings to be made distributing movies digitally, it is costly to convert a conventional theatre into a digital one. Today, it costs about US$150,000 to do so. Unless movie theatres make full use of the opportunity to screen alternative content, the digital cinema bandwagon will be a relatively empty one. Next is the mammoth task of restructuring. Digital cinema makes a lot of economic sense on the distribution front, but involves huge changes in the industry; namely workforce restructuring. Even if the net result of the move to digital cinema is a cheaper distribution system , the possibility of restructuring poses a hurdle. In addition is the cost of the equipment. A 35-millimeter film projector costs about $30,000 and lasts for about 35 years, while a digital projector will cost $155,000 and might be obsolete in 5 years if technology changes. This makes it a loss-loss proposition for the distributor as well as the audience (read expensive tickets). Then there is also the issue of piracy. For conventional films, a movie 'pirate' either has to hold up the delivery van containing the movie reels or sneak-in a video recorder into a theatre.