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http://dcinematools.com/advices/societies/1299-10-years-after-revisting-the-heinsohn-report.html?showall=1
The following paper was given by Hugh Heinsohn at a SMPTE conference in April of 2000. Nearly 10 years later, April of 2010, the first fully SMPTE-standards-based digital movie presentations will be distributed. It will likely take another full year to fully leave the current InterOp stage, as mandated by many studio VPF agreements (and the logic of being able to receive their movies.)
Hugh was looking into technology which wouldn't be decided upon for several years. The decision to JPEG-2000 was certainly 4 or 5 years away, with resulted in R&D hell for the MPEG-based companies, those which did much to carry the industry during its many development years...actually leading to the demise of several.
The paper mentions JVC's reflective liquid crystal technology, wouldn't mature into prime-time availability for 7 years...and that by different company. Not only did JVC leave the field, but other large companies with large early investments like Qualcomm and Boeing walked away, perhaps recognizing the length of time before that their investments would come to fruition.
In fact, over half the manufacturers in the links at the end of the article are gone, one way or the other. Other companies,noteably DTS and Kodak, who made their investments later, have also left, which others such as Technicolor have scaled back.
Without further comment, this is a report that Hugh wrote, and memorably delivered well, to an appreciative audience – looking 10 years into the future. Hugh is now runs marketing plans for several entertainment technology companies. You can contact him via HughCan.
SMPTE Point of View
Digital Cinema and the Coming of the Apocalypse
Draft 1
Updated 18 April 2000
Abstract: Digital cinema has finally become a real possibility due to recent advances in electronic projection technology. Various industry organizations, equipment manufacturers and studios are working to develop practical systems that will be used to replace film as the primary distribution medium for feature films. This paper presents one person's observations and perspectives on the potentials and pitfalls of digital cinema for the technical community involved with producing and distributing movies.
Introduction
The subject of digital cinema has generated enormous interest in the theatrical distribution, movie production and postproduction industries over the past year. We have seen a number of highly publicized demonstrations, the studios are actively funding development programs and major equipment vendors are presenting solutions and looking for their first big customers. This paper is a personal perspective on digital cinema; it attempts to describe the state of the business as well as point out some of the advantages and problems we're likely to face when digital cinema eventually becomes a bonafide industry.
The Good News and The Bad News
It is generally agreed, even among the "golden eyes" in our industries, that a digital cinema system will be capable of at least duplicating typical moviegoers' experience of today. In the digital future, people will no longer pay good money to watch scratched up, dirty film prints with washed out, inconsistent color and gate weave. Instead, they will pay to experience system crashes and software bugs.
The Big Questions
At this time, there is not general agreement about the central question for digital cinema. Are we trying to:
create a system to duplicates or even incrementally improves on the best quality 35mm theatrical film experience?
or
create a system that goes well beyond today's experience and show movies with very substantially improved visual fidelity that provide a much more absorbing, realistic environment for feature films? (Obviously, a system like this might ultimately change the way movies are made and promoted and perhaps even raise the expectations of the audience.)
Several people have pointed out something resembling Option b. has been available for about 50 years and yet is hardly ever used: 65mm film. And the primary reason 65mm isn't widely used today?: Cost. The movie business is, after all, a business. The studios, distributors, exhibitors and audiences have made a collective decision that the improvements in image quality available from 65mm film aren't worth the extra money. Based on this, can we expect that moviegoers will be willing to pay even one extra dollar to see a movie in a digital format?
We must give cost major consideration in any system. Most of the money will be spent on equipping the theaters with the necessary new digital equipment, of course, but we can't forget the costs of mastering, archiving, handling, moving and protecting digital versions of feature films. In addition, the movie distribution system will have to support 35mm film as well as its digital equivalent for a long time. Many thousands of 35mm film projectors will still be operating when we're all happily retired.
Additional big questions need to be asked as well: Do we want a system that allows filmmakers to send different versions of the movies to different regions of the country, or to send out slightly different versions over time in order to attract larger audiences? Should the system allow filmmakers to continue their creative work until the day (or hour) before the scheduled release? And perhaps the biggest question of all: Who's going to pay for all this?
The Conventional Wisdom
The conventional wisdom at this point indicates that digital cinema in the theater will involve a system that includes a projection device, a system to decompress the movie file, some sort of local storage system (probably using hard disks) and a method for delivering the movies to the venue. The whole thing will be protected by sophisticated security and encryption systems which will eliminate the possibility movie piracy (or at least make it highly inconvenient for the pirates.) In addition, the system will be absolutely reliable, robust, and easily maintained and controlled by the theater chains' existing personnel. It will indeed be a wonderful thing.
The movies themselves will be produced as they are today, although this continues to evolve as well. Eventually films may be produced entirely in the digital domain and celluloid need never be involved. But for the purposes of a digital cinema discussion, it doesn't matter whether the movie was shot on a borrowed 16mm camera, a consumer camcorder or with a major cinematographer behind a million dollars worth of cameras and lenses. The film will be finished and converted into a digital master either through a telecine process or some digital-to-digital process. This digital cinema master will then be compressed by a system that will reduce the file size by several orders of magnitude. The compression is necessary to make it cost effective and practical to move the compressed movie file around to thousands of theaters. Compression isn't necessarily an evil thing and a properly designed compression system will produce pictures that are virtually indistinguishable from the original.
In addition to all of this, a digital cinema system might allow exhibitors to show live events, including pay-per-view programs like fights, NASCAR races or professional wrestling. The system might provide venues for multi-player high tech video games. Presumably, promoting these types of events might prove to be more profitable than showing feature films, since the movie theaters might have to share less box office revenue with the software provider than in the case of feature films.
Digital cinema systems should substantially reduce the incremental cost of distributing movies, making it more attractive for filmmakers, including independent studios, to distribute "smaller" films to a larger audience. The experience of the "Blair Witch Project" is still fresh on everyone's mind; what if such a movie could have been distributed at a cost similar to its production costs? Another idea is to use digital cinema to put restored classic films into wider release. These are all good ideas and might help the exhibitors survive and grow in the coming years. It's even possible that the studios will get on board with these alternative uses for the theaters, since many of them either own, are owned by, or in alliance with the independent studios, games companies and events promoters whose software will be shown on all of those digital screens.
There's The Rub
This all sounds fine and most industry people seem to agree (at least in principle) on the basic technical ingredients and architecture of the system. The problem is that there are a lot of choices that have to be made if we are to establish a standard. No matter how carefully designed the standard is, these choices will by their very nature impose certain limitations on the capabilities of the system. Getting all of the creative and technical people in the business to agree on one set of standards is no mean task. The even bigger task, of course, is getting the people who control the purse strings at the theaters, the distributors and the movie studios to agree on a business model.
Triangle of Business Interests
There is a triangle of business interests involved in digital cinema formed by the studios, the distributors and the exhibitors. (The audience is left to view the new digital technology with awe and open wallets.) These major players that must agree on the business model for a digital cinema system to survive and grow. Among other things, this model will determine how money is distributed to pay for the capital equipment needed at the theaters (over 37,000 in US alone at least count), how fees are charged to pay for the distribution of digital masters and how revenues generated by the system are shared among the players. There are at least three major requirements that a successful business model must meet:
- No one gets hurt.
- Everyone keeps their job.
- Everyone makes more profits, except for the other two guys in the triangle.
At this time, it seems clear that the major obstacles to the adoption and implementation of a digital cinema system are mainly political and economic and not technical.
Major Promoters of a Business Model
Today, this author is aware of three major companies that are actively promoting business models for digital cinema. It's probably best for each of these firms to speak for themselves, but let's say that each one was a unique, although essentially similar, take on the correct technical implementation and divergent ideas on the business model. Each of these companies made presentations of one sort or another at the recent ShoWest2000 Convention in Las Vegas.
AndAction Corporation promotes it's "Secure Media Network" concept and states on its web site that, "Through its Secure Media Network (SMN), AndAction applications and services enable secure distribution and management of a limitless variety of big screen digital entertainment. AndAction's Digital Entertainment Infrastructure spawns new revenue generating opportunities including digital cinema, multiplayer video games, pay per view events, corporate presentations, distance learning and e-commerce."
Real Image Digital's focus is "on developing, integrating and maintaining the digital distribution network using the flexibility of electronic distribution technology. Real Image's vision is that it is a 'behind the scenes' service provider managing the back and forth link and information flow between distributors of content and exhibitors." Technicolor made a major investment in Real Image Digital last year.
Qualcomm has a group developing an end-to-end solution. Their site states that Qualcomm is, "combining its expertise in advanced image compression, electronic security, network management, integrated circuit design and high speed digital communications to provide a completely electronic delivery system for distribution of motion pictures to cinema theatres around the world."
All of these companies are offering a complete technical solution as well as a business model.
Industry Groups Grapple with the Problem
Several industry groups are working to study the various business and technical aspects of digital cinema and are hoping to develop practical proposals and ideas which they can sell to the other industry groups, as well as to the studios, distributors and exhibitors.
The Motion Picture Association (MPA) has formed a study group that is primarily concerned with preventing piracy of digital cinema files.
NATO, the National Association of Theatre Owners, has formed a committee to look at the subject from the exhibitors' perspective.
SMPTE has formed the DC28 Study Group, which is broken up into several sub-groups to examine the technical aspects of the various approaches to digital cinema.
Projection Technology Being Considered for Digital Cinema
The centerpiece of digital cinema is of course the projector. There are endless discussions going on right now about which technology is best suited for a rollout. It should be pointed out that, while projectors are the focus of today's discussions, other solutions involving flat panel displays or similar technology might eventually become available that work even better.
The most popular projection technology today for digital cinema applications is based on the Texas instruments Digital Light Processing (DLP) system. TI itself has produced a prototype projector based around its special DLP Cinema technology, which represents an enhancement of its standard DLP products. The DLP technology is based on its digital micromirror devices (DMDs) and can produce SXGA resolution (1280 x 1024 pixels).
The JVC Professional Products Company offers a system based on a reflective liquid crystal technology developed by Hughes and JVC. This Image Light Amplifier ("ILA") technology resolve up to 1500 TV lines. At this time, JVC is the only vendor of cinema quality ILA-based projectors.
A new company called Silicon Light Machines has described a laser-based projection system that could prove to be very useful for digital cinema, although they have yet to make a public demonstration of this technology.
Other technologies are coming into the market that may also prove themselves useful for digital cinema applications, but the ones listed above are the most popular today.
Compression
Most people in the digital cinema business today agree that feature films will have to be compressed in some way to make transporting and storing them economical. In addition, compression technology has evolved to the point where there is little or no penalty in terms of visual quality to be paid by compressing a movie. There are several basic technologies being seriously considered for digital cinema applications, including:
MPEG2 is an established worldwide standard that supports 4:2:2 video formats all the way up to HDTV. The standard is very flexible, well understood by legions of engineers around the world, and supported by a large number of relatively inexpensive chipsets, software and other off the shelf technology. There is also a worldwide organization that supports and maintains the standard. There was been some resistance to the use of MPEG2 due to certain dynamic range, resolution and colorimetry limitations; MPEG2 may also be too closely linked with the idea of "television" to be accepted as a standard for true "cinema quality" applications.
Wavelet compression is often discussed in digital cinema circles. Wavelet systems are currently proprietary and have been developed by a number of different companies.
One company has developed a proprietary variant on MPEG2 that utilizes adaptively scaled macroblocks. This may improve compression efficiency and therefore allow better looking pictures to be reproduced at lower bitrates than standard MPEG2 algorithms.
Other compression schemes are being discussed as well, including MPEG4, Motion-JPEG and various lossless systems.
Encryption and Security
Piracy is, of course, a major concern for the studios and other organizations that may supply content to digital cinema exhibitors. A successful system must protect the assets entrusted to it and do everything possible to defeat the pirates. The system must make it extremely difficult to directly copy an unencrypted file of a movie and ideally must also make it difficult or at least very inconvenient to use a camcorder to capture a movie off the screen.
It's important to understand the difference between encryption and security. Think of encryption as the method used to scramble a file so that it becomes unreadable without to correct key (or keys) and decryption algorithm. Security is how you handle the files and the equipment necessary to store, encrypt, decrypt and transmit the files so as to prevent theft. For example, a perfect encryption scheme is completely valueless if a worker in a theater knows a password that allows him to decrypt and copy or project a movie without the proper authorization. A well thought-out security system must protect the hardware and wiring in a theater with tamperproof housings, protect the passwords and keys required to decrypt a movie so that only authorized personnel have access to them and make it extremely difficult even for authorized people to decrypt, copy or project a movie except as authorized by the content owners.
Part of a good security model will involve "watermarking", which will imprint a time and location stamp in each showing of a movie. This watermark must be invisible to the moviegoer and still be capable of being decoded and displayed by the content owner should a pirated copy of a movie be found. The watermark will have to be capable of surviving multiple digital and/or analog copy generations and not interfere with the normal scheduled screening of the movies.
There are a number of very well established encryption and security systems in daily use all over the world by banks, governments and other big institutions. These systems guard our cash and our investments and allow us to move money around in a reasonably convenient, easy to use and extremely secure way. Digital cinema should build on these established and well-understood technologies and systems.
A number of companies are now publicly suggesting different encryption schemes and security models for digital cinema. The studios' lawyers are seriously discussing these.
Part of a good security model will involve "watermarking", which will imprint a time and location stamp in each showing of a movie. This watermark must be invisible to the moviegoer and still be capable of being decoded and displayed by the content owner should a pirated copy of a movie be found. The watermark will have to be capable of surviving multiple digital and/or analog copy generations and not interfere with the normal scheduled screening of the movies.
There are a number of very well established encryption and security systems in daily use all over the world by banks, governments and other big institutions. These systems guard our cash and our investments and allow us to move money around in a reasonably convenient, easy to use and extremely secure way. Digital cinema should build on these established and well-understood technologies and systems.
A number of companies are now publicly suggesting different encryption schemes and security models for digital cinema. The studios' lawyers are seriously discussing these.
Servers
Any digital cinema system will involve relatively large data storage requirements and a number of companies have demonstrated server technology for this application. Most of these systems are adaptations of computer systems used as video servers; some use the Windows NT operating system, some use UNIX and some have proprietary operating systems. They generally utilize RAID technology to safeguard the data from hard disk crashes and also offer a variety additional failure protection, including redundant power supplies and so on.
It's expected that servers will be located at each theater and that movies will be downloaded into them a day or two prior to the first scheduled screening. Some companies have proposed that each projector get its own server in addition to a central server feeding all of the screens in a multiplex.
Hardware technology for fileservers is extremely advanced and we can expect that the servers used in a digital cinema system will be robust, reliable and even fairly inexpensive. The software, however, required to run the movies may be a different matter.
Software
This author believes that the single greatest technical weakness in any digital cinema system will be the software that schedules, handles, moves and plays the movies. This software will have to be very easy to use and will have to work almost completely automatically with very little operator intervention. It must be part of a networked system that may accept commands and schedule changes from remote (hopefully properly authorized) locations. It will have to log errors, successful showings and possibly even track audience numbers for each showing. It may even have to communicate with the theaters' cash register and ticketing systems and the movie distributors' accounting systems. It must be perfectly robust and fault-tolerant and it must never crash. Show of hands, please, for everyone who has worked with software demonstrating these characteristics?
Moving the Movies
The movie files will have to be moved around from central distribution points to the theaters. A successful system must support at least two delivery methods:
Physical Delivery. The movies might be stored on optical disks of some type or other physical media that can be sent to the theaters by normal courier services.
Telecommunications networks. The files can also be transmitted to the theaters over fiber-optic, copper wire or satellite communications links.
Not every theater will be able to accept delivery over satellite, fiber or wire networks; physical delivery may prove inconvenient or too expensive for many locations. We must be able to get movies delivered safely and efficiently to all screens, including those located in rural areas, in the basements of urban skyscrapers or in the outskirts of third world metropolis.
Forward, Into The Past
Digital cinema has definitely become a "when" question and not an "if" question. Electronic projection systems are the basic enabling technology and they have finally become good enough for us to consider putting together a system that will replace film as the primary medium for distributing feature films. The ancillary equipment, software and systems necessary to complete a workable solution are either available off-the-shelf or can be developed relatively easily.
The primary hurdles that the industry must overcome are economic and political. Who benefits? Who wins? Who loses? Who makes money? And who pays?
These are not trivial issues. The industry has been playing with this concept for a long time and we're still really in the talking stages. The drawing below is based on an actual demonstration conducted at the New Yorker Theater in Manhattan in 1941. RCA collaborated with 20th Century Fox on projection television systems for showing special events. (Photo courtesy of the David Sarnoff Collection, Princeton, New Jersey.)
We must remember that new technology alone will not necessarily bring more people into the theaters. One notable industry wag has stated that only one technical innovation has brought more people to the movies over the past 75 years. It wasn't sound. It wasn't color. It wasn't multi-channel digital sound systems with 5000-watt sub-woofers. It was stadium seating.
We must keep the technology in perspective. Theatergoers will indeed pay for a good time away from the house, not merely for dust-free pictures. With digital cinema, we will redefine the way they experience the second most popular form of entertainment in the world. Whether the movies get any better or not is, of course, a separate question.
For More Information
Here's a partial list of web sites about various organizations and companies that are active in digital cinema. This is by no means a comprehensive list of digital cinema resources but should provide the interested reader with a starting point for more research.
AndAction Corporation — www.andaction.com
Barco — www.barco.com
Christie — www.christiedigital.com
Cinea — www.cinea.com
Digital Projection — www.digitalprojection.com
Digital Vision — www.digitalvision.se
Electrosonic — www.electrosonic.com
Grass Valley Group — www.grassvalleygroup.com
JVC — www.hughesjvc.com
MPEG — http://drogo.cselt.stet.it/mpeg/
NEC — www.nec-pj.com
Panasonic — www.panasonic.com/presentations
Pluto Technologies — www.plutotech.com
Qualcomm — www.qualcomm.com/digitalcinema
QuVis — www.quvis.com
Real Image Digital — www.realimagedigital.com
Silicon Light Machines — www.siliconlight.com
SMPTE — www.smpte.org
"Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace" — www.starwars.com/episode-i/news/1999/24/digital_ei.html
Texas Instruments — http://www.ti.com/dlp/products/cinema/
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