The Hindu : National : A milestone in digital cinema

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Nov 26, 2004

National

National

A milestone in digital cinema

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, NOV. 25. The launch of a service by the leading Indian satellite services provider Hughes Escorts Communications Ltd (HECL) to deliver films to theatres, electronically as a `file' via satellite, marks the latest milestone in the nation's roadmap for global leadership in digital cinema.

Now it can legitimately claim that the world's largest producer of feature films is also the pioneer in deploying end-to-end digital techniques: in production, distribution and exhibition.

Digital techniques in creating special effects and in the editing process are now almost standard in Hindi and southern language film production. The recent Hindi film Lakshya was the first Indian film to go through a complete Digital Intermediate — a process by which an entire film is digitised through the use of a 35mm film scanner, into digital image files, and edited on computers to achieve the final cut.

A quiet revolution

At the theatre end, film-less and all-digital exhibition is a quiet revolution that has begun ironically in the B and C class mofussil theatres — nearly 200 cinema halls countrywide, mostly in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu have ditched the old film-based projectors for digital systems sourced from two Indian agencies: the Real Image-Prasad Labs combine in Chennai and the Mukta Arts-Adlabs partnership in Mumbai. Both use state-of-the-art digital projectors based on the industry-standard Texas Instruments Digital Light Processor (DLP). This is possible because almost all new Hindi and many other language films are being released in two formats: the conventional film-based reels and as a set of high resolution DVDs. The DVDs are couriered to reach dozens of theatres in the rural areas simultaneously with the national premieres. One set of DVDs costs the producer only Rs. 3000 or so, compared to Rs. 75,000 to Rs.1 lakh per conventional print. For theatres, the conversion may cost Rs. 10 lakhs to Rs. 30 lakhs; and most of the smaller outfits are leasing the digital projection equipment for Rs. 7000 to Rs. 8000 a week, says an article in Indiantelevision.com this week.

This week's announcement opens the possibility that the physical shipment of the digital product by way of DVDs can also be rendered `virtual' by streaming the product as a 20 to 80 gigabyte file from producer to theatre via satellite. The HECL technology will send these at broadband speeds of around 10 megabits per second which means typical Indian films can be downloaded at the theatre in 6-8 hours. Once received in encrypted form, the film is stored on a hard disk which is copy protected.

Trial run

A trial run at the Wave Multiplex theatre at Ghaziabad, near Delhi in February, using a Hughes satellite terminal to facilitate a 40-minute screening of the film Tera Naam, heralded the country's first satellite delivery of digital content to an electronic cinema theatre. HECL's SeniorDirector, Enterprise Marketing K. Krishna, told The Hindu today, that once a critical number of 100 plus theatres converted to the satellite mode of film delivery, the actual cost to the producer would be about Rs. 2 lakhs a movie.

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