MONDAY, 29 January 2001
Breakout: Technology
Digital Cinema: From Mastering to Exhibition
Rich Mizer, moderator
The goal of SMPTE and other groups working on digital standards is to create an original digital master that can be converted into whatever release format you need, whether it's theatrical or home theater, so you don't have to reencode, compress, etc. You convert it for the
| "The goal is to create an original digital master that can be converted into whatever release format you need." RICH MIZER |
media you need, something you can't do with film. We are studying digital rights management and the various encryption standards. Obviously an original movie is the most valuable asset of the studio – and if you think they're worried about pirated DVDs, imagine getting a new release of a film in the months before it's released to theaters, how much you could sell that for in the worldwide pirate market. We're also studying the different transport options. In today's Disney theaters, they actually deliver the movie to the theaters on a group of DVD-R disks, but they're looking at how to distribute over satellite and fiber networks so you can get it to every theater virtually overnight. And they're looking at the equipment that goes in the theaters besides the projector - the file servers that will store the movie as well as generating play lists making it possible to match the schedule in the local newspaper.
Jerry Pierce, Universal
I'd like to talk about the development of digital cinema - how you create the elements that will eventually be used for distribution. While this is currently an effort of the hardware manufacturers and the studios, the standards we create are going to be open for everyone and should reduce the cost of releasing a major motion picture by between five and ten million dollars. That's the goal.
We see digital distribution as significantly reducing distribution costs, but there's a lot of other things in the way. Things will only make sense once there are a significant number of theaters that are fully digital. Right now only 35 theaters are digital out of a total of some 30,000. It costs about $100,000 to transfer a movie to 35 screens. Ultimately, we're talking about savings in print costs of $600-700 million annually, but this will take about 20 billion dollars' worth of infrastructure to generate. The movie studios will be the beneficiaries.
Everything we do envisages the 65-foot theatrical screen, but the standard has to work on a DVD player, even on a handheld device like Palm. Today, film distribution is based on 35 millimeters with square sockets and it works anywhere in the world. This is the true advantage and the joy of film-based distribution. The issues in the rollout and the evolution to digital cinema are extremely convoluted. It's not a straightforward process of getting from here to there. For example, there are digital-projector field trials going on. In fact, the Sony Metreon complex already includes a digital projector and digital screening room. But this may give you the false sense that digital cinema is being rolled out.
| "The standards we create are going to be open for everyone and should reduce the cost of releasing a major motion picture by between five and ten million dollars." JERRY PIERCE |
First, digital cinema is more than the projector and the exhibition. It also involves digital capture, the DV, DVC Pro, Digital Beta or HD cameras. Second, it includes the digital production, the Avid or other ways things get acquired, digitized and put into the digital arena. Third, there is the digital master or the digital source master. Finally, you've got to move the digital data from point A to point B to get it to the theaters, and then in the theater you have to have a server that handles it before it is projected.
Tom Scott, ED NET
SMPTE's work on mastering came very early in the establishment of standards for digital cinema. However, in the process, it became clear that along with video we were going to have audio standards as well. There are some huge impediments to moving forward, not the least of which is the equipment cost and the distribution infrastructure - right now it's largely teamsters carrying heavy steel cases that will eventually be replaced by fiber optic or satellites.
The digital cinema system that seems to be evolving is a file-based system, similar to the way that you store your DV, either your dailies or your work print. You could think of it like an Avid or a FinalCutPro, something that's playing files out of a player, stored locally in the theater, not streamed via a satellite or over a video link. Our group is not particularly interested in live-event streaming, but we plan on doing nothing that would stop someone from bringing this kind of entertainment to the theater owners.
We've got digital sound in the movies and it sounds pretty nice actually, in most cases, but it's not exactly the same as what we're talking about with regard to digital cinema. It's being played on a linear piece of film, so for every foot of film there's a foot of sound. There are fallback options like digital audio systems and analog film track that can be played in case the digital fails. With digital cinema, there's no analog back up.
There are three competing formats: (1) Dolby, the biggest name, which is based here in San Francisco - almost 30,000 theaters have Dolby equipment, 13,000 of them in North America; (2) DTS, which was used for "Jurassic Park" and comes from Universal and is in close to 20,000 theaters, 11,000 of them in North America; and (3) SDDS, from Sony, now in 8,000 theaters, including 6,500 in North America. Dolby and DTS deliver 5 or 5.1 tracks of audio, and Sony can deliver a few more tracks. The truth is that these three are all fairly expensive, completely incompatible, use different compression methods and different methods for getting the sound out of the projector and into the sound system. And they use different speaker systems. This has made the theater owners very unhappy, to put it mildly, because they don't want to hear about three different digital cinema systems coming in.
Let me conclude by asking the $64,000 question: What's in this for independents? Everything I've talked about up to this point is for the big guys and it doesn't really help the small filmmaker. However, once there are projectors in larger numbers in theaters locally, there will be any number of alternative routes for signals to get there. As I mentioned, we're not going to do anything in the digital cinema specifications that would prevent bringing in live events through an external video input. There's no reason why small filmmakers could not find alternative ways to bring a film in; they might do so with a DV player and perhaps a fire-wire input that would allow them to plug a player directly into the theater playback system. Of course, all the business aspects would have to be addressed, but the very installed capacity of theaters to play digital on a large screen will inevitably open the door to all sorts of content as well as Hollywood blockbuster fare.
Al Barton, Sony
We're putting a lot of effort into how to get that original master because you need to go to a lot of different places. Not just to the theatrical presentation, but to the home, to the web and anywhere else where you can stream or play media. At Sony, we look at the studio side, the hardware side, the computer side and the home device side. Our awareness is shaped by the fact that there are between 110,000 and 130,000 screens worldwide, but there are some three billion people at home throughout the world. Our effort is to address both ends.
However, the purpose of digital cinema is to make the experience of theater-going more enjoyable for the consumer, not to make it easier or whatever. As the theater owners have said, look, if you can't make the experience better then why are we doing it? Why reinvent the wheel? And does the audience really care? As Rob Nielsson said this morning, he wants to make a film that touches the heart of people, so I don't think it takes a huge studio to make that happen. The purpose is to create a presentation with new artistic characteristics and bring it an audiences.
| "Our awareness is shaped by the fact that there are between 110,000 and 130,000 screens worldwide, but there are some three billion people at home throughout the world." AL BARTON |
Let me give you an idea of what it's going to cost. With between thirty and thirty-five thousand screens in North America alone, the current cost estimate is $100,000 per screen - this includes the projector, the server and all the other infrastructure. To start off, you need at least a thousand screens to justify making digital copies at all. So you need about a billion dollars up front to equip these theaters and make the thing work. Now, to hit the approximately 20,000 theaters you need to make it really worthwhile, you're talking about $20 billion up front and that is quite a bit of dough.
Let's look at this from another perspective, one that might speak more directly to you as independents. If you look at 50 prints, and whether you look at DVD, ROM or satellite for distribution, the economics could work this way. For 50 film prints, the average costs is $1,500 apiece; if you're printing up to 2,000 prints, that costs about $75,000. As an independent, if you make a DVD ROM, your up-front costs are $40,000 to press the first disk and then, for the balance of that $75,000, you can make about 1,500 copies. Same thing with satellite, in which you can reach up to 2,000 downlinks with the same type of costing.