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Is it adieu then to "reel" cinema?

Anand Parthasarathy

New Digital Cinema format by Hollywood studios

ANNOUNCING A NEW ERA: Digital Theatre System created by DG2L (left) and Hollywood executives Howard Lukk (Walt Disney) and Al Barton (Sony Pictures) with Brooke Williams of Texas Instruments, announcing the Digital Cinema Initiative at the Asian D-Cinema Summit. _ PHOTOS: ANAND PARTHASARATHY

BANGALORE: The release last week of the most detailed specification ever published for a new Digital Cinema format, may spell the slow end of the film-reel-based film distribution and exhibition prevalent for a century — and the birth of a new era of cinema — in the form of digital ones and zeroes.

The 176-page document was released by the Digital Cinema Initiative, a three-year-old forum that represents Hollywood studios: Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner. Sony is the new face of erstwhile Columbia and with its recent acquisition of MGM-United Artists, DCI, in fact, represents the Seven Sisters — original seven Hollywood studios that have dominated the world's English language cinema almost from the dawn of the movies.

The clout of the Hollywood establishment in global cinema means its embracing — after years of hesitation — of a single standard for the entire process of making and showing films digitally that is: Mastering, Compression, Encryption, Transport, Storage, Playback and Projection, will see the rest of the world follow, willy-nilly.

The full technical document, which can be downloaded from the web site: http://www.dcimovies.com/DCI_Digital_Cinema_System_Spec_v1.pdf, spells out the digital standard that must be met to qualify as better or equivalent to the best film-based projection system in use today — something that is known as `2K' cinema (a short hand for a sharp picture equal to 2048 dots by 1080 picture dots). However, the standard also allows "head room" for the next increment in quality known as `4k' that is equivalent to 4096 by 2160 dots or pixels.

Currently, there are less than 250 `2K' digital screens spread across 22 countries — about half of them in Asia. India has just one `2K' equipped complex — the Sathyam multiplex in Chennai which was launched in May this year.

However, the Indian cinema industry — the world's largest producer of films in a year — is poised to play a pivotal role in the global push from film-based to digital projection because it has uniquely, and quietly, embraced a more affordable version of digital cinema known as e-cinema, where the cost of equipping a theatre is drastically slashed to something like Rs. 10-20 lakhs, with a small sacrifice of projection quality.

Some desi solutions have emerged — from the Chennai-based Real Image Media Technologies and the Mumbai-based Mukta-Adlabs partnership, to quickly equip over 150 theatres with e-cinema systems.

This allows producers to reduce the cost of each film print — typically Rs. 70,000 — to something like Rs. 3,000 for a digital version distributed as a set of digital video disks (DVDs) or a single computer hard disk. The next push may see more of them eschew the physical medium and use the satellite channel to directly push the product from lab to theatre.

Another recent entrant is the Indian-owned Singapore-registered company, DG2L, which tied up recently with the Mumbai-based United Film Organisation (UFO) to equip a large number of theatres in India with digital systems.

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Is it adieu then to "reel" cinema?

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