Digital Cinema
The format that movie-goers have watched and listened to films at the cinema over the past 130 years has only changed slightly; in principle, since the 1880s movies have been projected from celluloid film reels.
In 2002, the cinema industry made the first step towards the future. George Lucas filmed the entire movie of “Star Wars II - Attack Of The Clones” on digital video. This was the first film to be captured this way and then, in theatres, projected on digital movie projectors.
In essence, the movie was filmed on a hard disc drive and then, in theatres, projected from a hard disc drive. Film reel was not used at all!
The difference is in the approach in making and showing movies. An analogue film reel uses chemicals that records the pictures on film. Digital movies use binary data (0s & 1s) to record, transmit and replay images.
There are 3 main areas where digital cinema affects movie making. In Production, the film capture is done by using a hard disc camera that is not too different from a consumer hard disc camcorder. The main differences are that a professional camera captures 30 frames per second and a consumer camcorder captures at 24 frames per second. The quality is far greater on a professional camera due to the way the light is captured using CCDs (charge coupled devices). Essentially though, the principle is the same: recording film and sound onto a digital device - hard disc drive. Using digital capture makes the production phase much more cost effective. Firstly, the actual film reel is hundreds of times more expansive than a disc drive. Secondly, in analogue production, the film is captured in analogue, converted to digital (to edit) and then converted back to analogue (to project). With digital capture, the format stays the same throughout - no need for conversion.
In cinema Distribution, production companies spend large amounts of money shipping heavy film reels all over the globe, only to collect them after the film has finished showing. In distributing digital films the production company pays only to ship small hard disc drives. To make things even more economically viable for the film production companies, theatres can link more than 1 projector to the disc drive! If a film sells out at the last minute, the theatre can open another auditorium and link its projector to the same drive.
The final area to be affected by digital cinema is Projection. As with normal music cassette tapes, each passing of the tape across the head will decrease the quality of the tape. This principle is the same with film reel. As well as the quality being affected with every turn, after a few weeks of projection, scratches and dirt will begin to appear on the surface of the reel. The beauty of digital projection is that the quality will remain the same on every screening, be it the 1st or the 1000th display!
Today, cinemas throughout the world, generally, have a split between film reel projectors and digital projectors. It is inevitable that digital cinema will one day replace film reel completely for the simple reason that digital cinema is easier, cheaper and of a superior quality.
