Digital Cinema
Category: Filmmaking | 1 Comment | 25th May 2007
Digital Cinema hits the UK!
I was very excited to learn that my local independent cinema now has a digital projector. The Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal showed Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest in digital. Needless to say, the quality and definition was really fantastic, and as to be expected, there was no degradation, dust or scratches anywhere in the film.
I decided to investigate the technologies behind digital cinema a little further.
The Brewery Arts Centre is one of 150 cinemas in the UK to be fitted with digital projectors. The UK Film Council has awarded a contract worth £11.5m to Arts Alliance Digital Cinema (AADC), who will set up the network of up to 250 screens. High definition projectors and computer servers will be installed to show mainly British and specialist films.
Most cinemas currently have mechanical projectors but the new network will see up to 250 screens in up to 150 cinemas fitted with digital projectors capable of displaying high definition images.
The equipment at the Brewery is the Dolby Digital Cinema system. I suspect that this is the equipment that will be installed in most of the 150 cinemas. To find out more about the Dolby system, visit dolby.com
Basically, each cinema has a digital projector capable of projecting "2K" - this means it can display resolutions of up to 2048x1080 pixels.
Each projector is linked to a computer server which has a RAID 5 array of hard disks which will contain the film. This array means that playback will not be halted even if one of the hard drives fails.
The films are distributed on portable hard disk in an encrypted format. Each cinema gets its own copy and only that cinema can decrypt the data. It should mean that film piracy is made slightly harder.
The systems also allow films to be played from DVD which is great for independent cinemas like the brewery who host film festivals such as the famous Kendal Mountain Film Festival.
The thing that interested me most about digital cinema is how it should be fairly straight-forward to project HDV footage on the big screen in incredible quality. HDV 1080i resolution is 1920x1080 pixels (16:9). This is the same resolution that a digital cinema projector would project a 16:9 image.
Effectively this means that anyone can by a sub £3000 camera, such as the Sony FX1e, make a film using PC or Mac based editing software and create a film with the same definition as a Hollywood movie. This really is a fantastic opportunity for low budget film makers. The future of film has suddenly been brought a lot closer!
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11.04.2008 / 7am