Digital technology edging into movies

Max Jacobson

Friday, April 7, 2000 | 9:03 a.m.

We live in a digital age, so it seems inevitable new forms of digital technology will soon have an impact on our lives. It might take a little longer for digital technology to take over at the local movie house. But take over it will, if the wags are correct.

This shouldn't come as a major surprise. Ever since the video revolution, attendance has been flat at movie theaters, and theater owners have constantly been searching for new products to get the audience to come back.

That has led to the development of new generation sound systems like THX and Dolby, and to the new stadium style seating used in most of the new multiplexes. But this next step, namely the digital one, rates to have truly long lasting effects.

The new technology is called DLP, which is an acronym for digital light processing.

DLP was the hot new topic at ShoWest 2000, the convention of North American Theater Owners recently held at Paris Las Vegas. Innovative products were on display at ShoWest, everything from interactive flat panel plasma displays for theater lobbies, to competing new projection systems for feature films in the DLP format.

DLP works in a way that is almost incomprehensible to the normal imagination. Individual data pixels are reflected off microscopic mirrors built into sophisticated computer chips. Those pixels are then bounced off prisms built into special projection devices, and finally projected onto the screen, minus any emulsion, scratches or similar imperfections.

Each chip, framed in gold and with a shiny reflective surface, is roughly the size of a Nabisco Wheat Thin, and contains as many as three million tiny reflective mirrors. These chips are currently being produced by Texas Instruments, the leading developer in this technology. The company is working in conjunction with a few other companies, people who physically assemble and build new generation projection devices.

Developing this technology isn't easy, nor is it cheap. Chips alone cost upwards of $20,000 each. The projection devices can run into the hundreds of thousands. That begs the first question likely to pop into everyone's mind: who is going to pay for all of this?

The immediate answer is the theater owners, but as is the case with most businesses, these costs will ultimately be passed along to the consumer. (One multiplex theater in Brussels, Belgium already uses this technology, for instance, and charges about a dollar more for digitally enhanced features.)

Many of the attendees at ShoWest experienced a 45-minute DLP presentation, where selected movie prints were screened side-by-side with their digital counterparts. To achieve this effect, a standard sized movie screen was divided in half. Half frames of the same film were projected onto the screen at the same time, and the audience was invited to observe the contrast.

With regard to one of the films viewed, "Toy Story 2," the effect was dramatic. The digital print had sharper contrasts, clearer images and brighter colors. But with others, films such as "American Beauty," "The Cider House Rules" and "Snow Falling on Cedars," the effect was less obvious, and the digital version wasn't always able to demonstrate a clear superiority.

Proponents of digital cinema claim that their prints have blacker blacks, whiter whites and more depth, as well as being pixel perfect. Detractors say that the images are too perfect, making them cold, almost clinical.

One could liken this to the criticisms often leveled at the famed violinist Jascha Heifetz. No one ever played his instrument with more note-perfect, superhuman perfection than Heifetz did with his violin. Yet many music critics complained that his playing was devoid of warmth, short on emotion.

This may all be a moot point, though, because the direction that this technology is taking has become clear. The big studios like digital because it will enable them to distribute their films more easily, and to secure their properties by means of sophisticated data encryption. The technology will also enable studios to deliver their films with greater ease, on small discs, instead of in large, unwieldy cans of film.

There are advantages for the theater owners as well. Here is just one: Let's say a film is sold out for a particular showing, and demand for tickets would fill another auditorium in a multiplex. When one is limited to film in the can, extra showings are impossible without extra prints. But if one were to use film in a digital format, the only thing necessary would be a data transfer to a second disc. Then the theater would simply open up another auditorium.

Implementing this will take time, although DLP has already been made commercially available on a limited basis. In 1999, approximately half a million viewers throughout the United States and Canada watched DLP Cinema showings of Toy Story 2 and Bicentennial Man at specially selected, first run theaters.

DLP Cinema technology had previously featured all-digital showings of Disney/Pixar's "Tarzan," and Lucasfilm's "Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace", and all-digital showings of "Toy Story 2" began March 11 in Tokyo, to reportedly enthusiastic audience response.

According to Don Rogers, President of Real Image Digital Cinema, a Studio City, California company, it should be "at least four or five years before this technology gains widespread acceptance among theater owners. The conversion is going to be a costly process, but the prices for new equipment should come down, as they do with any new technology."

It's all going to be a moot point, anyway, until the movie studios get fully involved. HDTV (high definition) TV monitors are on the market now.