I take it you haven’t heard about Digital Cinema? You’re right that it is inefficient to distribute film prints in the digital age. And theaters around the world are beginning to convert to digital projection. Ultimately, nearly all theaters will receive the “films” they show via satellite or the Internet or some other broadband channel. But we’re not there yet. (FYI, I’m a journalist who covers this field.)
The obstacles to converting film theaters to digital were numerous and complex, and they have only recently been overcome. The process of conversion got started about three years ago, and to date there are more than 4,000 digital screens worldwide. However, with well over 100,000 movie theaters in the world, there is still quite a way to go. Film projectors will still be operating somewhere in the world for at least a decade, and maybe much longer.
Here are the three biggest problems that had to be solved.
Technical. Since the invention of television, people have been predicting that film would eventually be replaced with something electronic. It didn’t happen with conventional video because the image quality couldn’t support being blown up to theater-screen size. Film was clearly superior for large screens. With the advent of analog HDTV in the late 1970s, the pundits again began to predict the end of film in just a few years. But analog HDTV never took off, either. Finally, digital HD and digital storage and distribution channels solved many of the problems of previous formats.
In 2002 a group of Hollywood studios formed a consortium, Digital Cinema Initiatives, to research and develop standards for digital cinema to assure filmmakers that any digital system installed in theaters would provide quality that was at least as good as film, and to meet several other important criteria. They determined that an image 2048 pixels wide by 1080 high, aka “2K,” is at least as good as a 35mm “answer print.” (FYI, 2K is nearly the same as, but not identical to, HD, 1920x1080.) The current state of the art for a single projector is 4K: 4096x2160, which consists of four 2K images.
Security. However, no studio was going to allow its billion-dollar blockbusters to be zapped out over a satellite or the Internet only to be pirated by any hacker with a dish or a PC. They had to be assured that their films would be encrypted and that the entire transmission chain included digital rights management that would only permit authorized systems to play them. This involved incorporating encryption technology into the server and projector hardware, and was another significant part of the work of the DCI.
Financial. This was perhaps the most significant obstacle. The technological problems might have been solved much earlier, but there was a Catch-22 in the business plan for digital cinema. The companies that would benefit from not having to make and ship film prints were the studios and distributors. But the ones that would have to pay for the digital projection hardware, the theater chains, would see little or no benefit. Their old 35mm workhorses were running just fine, and paying $100,000 per screen or more for digital projectors wouldn’t bring in more customers or allow them to raise their ticket prices. Furthermore, in the absence of any standards, they feared that these systems might quickly become obsolete. So there was little or no incentive for them to switch.
At first, the studios offered to pay for the equipment, but insisted on the right to program the theaters in return. Even if this had turned out not to violate anti-trust laws (in the U.S. the vertical integration of studios and theater chains was ended in the 1950s), the chains weren’t interested in giving up such power to the studios, which already have the upper hand in most bargaining for films. It was a standoff.
The solution came with the model of the “virtual print fee.” A third party would finance the purchase and installation of the digital projectors at little or no cost to the theaters and recoup its expenses by charging the studio a fee comparable to what they might have paid to make a physical print. (In most cases it was less.) Ultimately, as the infrastructure was built up, the virtual print fees would drop to nearly zero.
Of course, these third parties were not entirely altruistic. The largest is Access Integrated Technologies, a subsidiary of Christie Digital, one of the largest manufacturers of digital projectors. Guess what brand they install in those theaters?
So, as I said, the process is well under way, and even accelerating, but it will still be many years before the last film print is shipped. And there’s something to be said for film. Most cinematographers insist there is a quality to an image created by passing light through a piece of film that cannot be replicated digitally. Even if we grant that they are like the purists who said that vinyl was better than CD (and personally, in the case of film, I’m more inclined to agree with the purists), the resolution and contrast ratio of a frame of properly exposed and projected film is greater than today’s best 4K projectors. It’s just that in your neighborhood multiplex you rarely get to see a perfectly projected image. Furthermore, believe it or not, film technology has been improving at least as fast as digital, according to experts I know.
Also, consider that today’s conventional 35mm movie projector could, with little or no modification, show a film print that was made 100 years ago. The stability of film projection technology has virtually no parallel in the modern world, and it should not be rejected without careful consideration as to the benefits – and drawbacks – of its replacement.
Finally, as for delivery, it is my understanding that most digital “prints” are actually delivered to theaters on hard disks. Satellite and the Internet are simply not “fat” enough “pipes” (or perhaps are still considered too insecure) for this purpose. Hard disks are significantly smaller and lighter than 35mm prints, but for now some things still require moving atoms instead of electrons.