Starkville Mississippi Movie Theater Enters Digital Age

http://www.digitalcinemainfo.com/hollywood-premier-cinemas_12_22_08.php

December 23, 2006

Source: Barco

Silence. It’s a subtle – though noticeable – clue that times are changing for Starkville moviegoers. The distinctive, familiar sound of a film projector at work is giving way to the quiet of the digital era. In comparing the two machines in the projection room at Hollywood Premier Cinemas, the film projector gives off an audible sensation akin to that emitted from a small piece of lawn equipment. The slight whirring of an exhaust fan is the only auditory clue a digital projector is running.

“In a silent spot in the movie, you don’t hear the clack, clack, clack of the projector,” said Doug Bedsaul, HPC’s general manager. HPC recently added two digital projection systems. “The way the industry is moving, some content is produced only in digital format, and that percentage is increasing,” he said.

On Nov. 21, HPC showed its first digital movie, “Bolt,” in three dimensions. Films developed in 3D are now only available digitally, Bedsaul said. The 3D films carry an extra $2 charge “because the film companies charge us more,” he said. Some of the advantages of digital films include a much brighter picture and the elimination of “any sort of manmade errors, such as miscues and splicing errors,” Bedsaul said. Plus, “it’s a perfect fit to the screen,” he said. Bedsaul says company officials plan to continue the conversion to digital, but “it’s far off in the future.”

“We invest $150,000 per screen up front for digital with no increased revenue. There is no change in ticket price, nor does it draw additional customers,” he said. “Over time, fewer pictures will be available in film, so if we don’t convert, we’ll have to close the doors.” But, keeping all that in mind, “we will convert additional screens but it will take a while,” he said.

Digital automation

If Bedsaul schedules it, the digital projection system can perform such tasks as running the movie, turning down the lights, switching over sound and reverse it all on its own though automation, reducing the amount of human interaction needed, he said. In the digital era, gigantic, spliced film reels are gone. The digital movie is on a hard drive, which is protected from piracy. It takes about 45 minutes on average to load into the server. It takes about the same amount of time to prepare a film for showing, but the older technology is more open to human error, he said.

The digital projection system includes a Barco projector, a Dolby computer and RealD Cinema (3D) components.

Bedsaul described the basic elements involved in showing a 3D movie. These include programming, decoding in the projector, a liquid crystal filter which polarizes the left and right images and the glasses needed to see the movie.
People can see a 3D movie without the glasses, but it looks out of focus and and has no 3D component to it, Bedsaul said.

HPC opened in June 2000 with eight screens and expanded to 11 screens in 2006. It has the largest curved screens in Mississippi and is the second theater in the state to show digital movies, Bedsaul said.

Independent releases

In explaining why HPC receives only a few limited films, Bedsaul says there are roughly 4,200 movie theaters in the country and no movie gets into every theater. Wide release films usually get to about 3,600 theaters, while limited release films reach about 1,800. Some of the critically-acclaimed films tend to be limited release and they often start off in 300 theaters, then expand from there each week. It takes about eight to 10 weeks for some of these films to get here. Film company business decisions are the reasons for this, he said.

Film companies say it takes about $1,500 to make a film copy of a movie, Bedsaul said, so an independent film company does not have the resources to make 3,000 copies. Digital film copies cost on average about $30, but the independent companies don’t have the equipment to produce digital copies.

“The more support each film gets, the better our chances of getting independent films are in the future,” Bedsaul said.

For information on what’s showing at HPC, visit http://www.hollywoodpremiercinemas.com/