Electronic Cinema: Blasphemy or Reality?

LFexaminer

Shindler's Site: Electronic Cinema: Blasphemy or Reality?

By Marty Shindler

Blasphemy or reality, that is the question. The topic: electronic cinema, a.k.a. EC.

The answer may depend on where you sit within the food chain. For many people the answer to the question today may not be the same answer they would have given a few years ago.

Simply stated, electronic cinema is the process of delivering a motion picture via satellite, fiber optic cables or on removable hard drives to a theater where it is projected electronically.

The concept of electronic cinema has been around in one form or another for years. About five years ago, I spent a great deal of time exploring it when I worked with Cinesite, a subsidiary of Eastman Kodak. My idea was to keep the high speed, high-resolution film scanners working around the clock by doing conventional production work during the day and volume EC processing during slower times. But entering the EC market required Kodak’s approval, and the whole topic was likely to be seen as blasphemy to the world’s largest film manufacturer. The pitch we used was, "If we don’t offer the service, someone else will." To Kodak’s credit, they gave permission.

Why am I bringing this up now? Because EC has been in the news a lot lately, and we in the LF world have to be ready for the challenges we may face, if not this year, then soon. What are the implications of EC for the mainstream film production, distribution, and exhibition business? And what will it mean to the LF industry?

The ShoWest conference in Las Vegas in February included major presentations by several companies involved in EC. According to the trades, the side-by-side demo of the same test footage on EC and standard 35mm projectors was one of the best yet for EC technology. Electronic screen images were as clear and sharp as those projected from film.

To top it off, George Lucas, at ShoWest to promote Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, announced that four theaters, two in New York and two in Los Angeles, will present the next episode in the Star Wars saga electronically. Precedent is being set. Other pictures will no doubt follow, but how many and how soon is hard to foretell.

Lucas also confirmed rumors circulating in EC circles for months, namely that the Star Wars film after The Phantom Menace will be shot digitally in its entirety. Sony is developing the cameras now.

Image capture has been considered one of the more difficult aspects of digital production, due in part to the huge data files needed and the resulting storage requirements. However, if anyone can do it, it’s Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic. For all we know, by the time the fifth Star Wars film is released in 2002, there may be many electronic theaters. Lucas has always been a pioneer in film production and exhibition and by taking up the EC cause, he has undoubtedly sped up its acceptance.

For the LF industry, the implications of EC less clear, although ultimately I think it is a question of when, not if. Many industry pundits believe that LF will be the last film presentation format, viable long after all conventional theaters have gone electronic. No argument here. The question is just how long film will be cheaper and simpler to use for LF work than electronic technology. Five years? Ten years? Twenty?

Let’s examine each component of LF production and the implications of going digital from one end of the business to the other.

Image Capture. This has always been a slow process. The bottleneck comes in transferring data from the camera to the storage device. Consider that 24 times per second you have to move several megabytes of data from the camera onto a hard disk or other storage medium. In conventional formats we’re talking about up to 10 MB per frame, but LF images are ten times larger. Twenty-four hundred megabytes (2.4 GB) per second is a lot of data. For this reason, the few tests that have been done with digital capture for LF to date (by Sirius Films and nWave Pictures, for instance) have been stop-motion animation, not live action.

Then there’s the issue of how to store all the data that would be needed for a complete film: 2.4 GB times 60 seconds times 40 minutes equals 5.67 terabytes, and that’s not including all your raw footage. Even though storage costs are dropping and data compression is improving, it will probably be a long time before digital image capture for LF production is practical.

Production. Computer-animated LF production has been disappointing, to say the least, at a time when traditional feature films have seen such breakthroughs as Toy Story, Antz, and A Bug’s Life, each of which produced sizable box office. (Personally, I am anxious to see nWave’s Alien Adventure.)

The simulator business has taken a stronger lead in this area than LF feature producers. Race for Atlantis, Devil’s Mine Ride, Cosmic Pinball, and Dino Island come to mind as digital standouts.

Imax’s investment in Mainframe Entertainment (see page 4) will no doubt bring more digital work to the LF screen. If this relationship can produce compelling stories with the level of quality animation that audiences expect, it will be a winning combination. Imax has also greenlighted CyberWorld, due in 2000, which will feature original digital production as well as a 3D sequence starring TV’s The Simpsons.

Post production. LF has only recently seen films with significant levels of digital post production work, most notably T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous and Encounter in the Third Dimension. Sure, films before those had CGI work, but usually only in titles, minor fix-its, and selected short graphics sequences. And most of what passes for extraordinary CGI work in LF is old hat for the theatrical world. Assuming 3D theaters continue in vogue, high quality digital post and effects work will be essential.

Distribution. Distributing LF films digitally via satellite or fiber optic cables will probably not be a major issue. Although the files will be large, presumably by the time LF theaters have gone digital, sufficient bandwidth will be in place and available at a reasonable cost. Even if those resources are not available, physically shipping a few high-capacity hard disks or data cartridges will almost certainly be cheaper than 70mm prints. Fortunately, as with many of the other areas we are discussing, the theatrical industry will pave the way for us, developing technologies and infrastructure that will only have to be scaled up to handle LF’s larger data needs.

Film scanners (which will be needed as long as film is used for image capture) are already in place at several facilities. One such house has reportedly been digitizing full LF films for much of the past year in order to touch up scenes and produce perfect negatives. While this may seem extravagant, they maybe getting ready for EC, building experience before the rest of the industry catches up.

Exhibition. This may be the toughest nut to crack, given the enormous size of LF screens. Projection quality has been a key issue for the mainstream market, but it will be even more important to the LF world, whose reputation is built on ultra-high quality pictures. MaxImage! editor James Hyder spoke recently with Doug Darrow at Texas Instruments, developer of the Digital Light Processing technology that is at the heart of the latest generation of video projectors. Darrow sees no theoretical obstacles to scaling up the DLP technology to LF quality, but he points out that in conventional EC they have a potential market of tens or even hundreds of thousands of units. The R&D costs for an ELFC projector might be prohibitive in a market that presently numbers only in the hundreds.

So it seems that it will be many years before LF theaters feel the heat of EC. And we’ll have the benefit of seeing how the conventional film industry handles the conversion. But even though it will take some time, the transition will happen eventually. Will you and your company be ready?

Marty Shindler is a management consultant who provides a business perspective to creative and technology companies. Marty may be reached at shindler@aol.com.