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This topic comprises 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
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Author
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Topic: News item: UK pioneers digital film network
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Hugh McCullough
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 147
From: Old Coulsdon, Surrey, UK
Registered: Jan 2003
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posted 06-01-2005 06:34 AM
The information below was given to me from a very reliable source.
The projectors cost between £40,000 and £60,000 each depending on who you are talking to.
The cinema will have to pay the Value Added Tax (VAT) on the cost of the machine.This will be between £7,000 and £10,500.
Whilst it is true that the VAT can be reclaimed from the government, can many small venues afford to wait for up to a year to get back this rather large sum of money.
The cinema must purchase spare parts to the cost of £2000, and enter into a service contract of £3000 per year.
There must be a minimum of two shows a week using the digital projector. Whether this means two different films, or two showing of the same film is not clear.
The cost of any building work required, new portholes, reinforcing floors etc., must be paid for by the cinema.
Just because your theatre is on the list does not mean that you will be given one of these machines. A survey will be undertaken, and if it is thought that your box is unsuitable then the projector will be given to someone else.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 06-01-2005 07:26 AM
Thank you Hugh and Leo; all interesting stuff. Hugh, the figures you quote are somewhat lower than I was expecting; maybe prices are starting to come down, or maybe you just get a discount if you buy over 200 of the things. To the best of my knowledge nobody in the World has ever ordered anything like this quantity. The last I heard the total number of installations was somewhere in the low to mid hundreds, but that was some months ago now.
Leo, I've always considered this to be a problem with digital projection. The cinemas don't want to pay for it, as they have little to gain, so the suggestion has been made that the costs should be at least partly paid higher up the chain, e.g. by distributors and/or studios, but this will almost certainly lead to them wanting some degree of control over what is shown. This remains a serious issue, which needs to be resolved. Don't ask me what the answer is.
Another member contacted me by private e-mail, expressing general agreement with what I had said. I can't quote exactly what he said, and some of my reply to him was on a different matter, and not something for a public forum, but some of my reply to him was as follows:
quote: Myself
I think a lot of people do. It's not a question of being pro or anti digital per se, I just cannot see how this scheme can possibly give value for money. The costs are so high, and the possible benefits rather limited. I just think the money could be much better spent in other ways.
<snip>
As I understand it, this was partly funded by the National Lottery; If I'd been responsible for assessing the application I would have turned it down flat, for several reasons:
It is available only to currently operating cinemas, Im not sure if that includes multi-purpose venues that show film part time, but it doesn't allow for opening new cinemas, or resurecting dormant ones, and therefore does nothing for people wth no access at all to a cinema within a reasonable distance.
The digital equipmant is supposed to vastly improve access to minority film, or words to that effect. While it is not being used it is making no improvement at all. For there to be any benefit at all a film screening must take place using it that could not have been done without it, or could only be done with a poor quality film print or video. When this happens, and assuming that there are people who come to see it, there will be some benefit, I'm not sure how you put a value on it, but it will have to be a hell of a big benefit to justify the costs involved.
It is claimed that it will enable people in other parts of the Country to see films which at the moment are seldom seen outside London. All very good, but if the films are being screened in London then prints must exist, which could be screened elsewhere. You could make a few more prints, and transport them, for vastly less cost than this. Also, a fair number of the cinemas selected are in - London! Others are already very well equipped, and some even have digital.
I would far rather have seen the money spent on making a few more prints, making modest improvements to the equipment in existing cinemas, and equipping existing buildings, public halls, arts venues etc., to show film in towns and villages where there is no existing cinema. Good reconditioned equipment FP-20s, Vic. 5s, CP-65s etc. doesn't cost that much, <snip>
Im sure that this could deliver greater benefits in terms of the stated aims of the project, at far lower cost.
My prediction is that much of the equipment will be little used, and when it is used it will be showing material that is available on film, or which exists only on video, and could have been shown using a normal video projector. I also predict that it will not broaden the programming policy of most of the cinemas where it is installed. In short, very little benefit, at very high cost.
What would be interesting is for full records to be kept, and published, of all digital screenings made, the films involved, where there were shown, numbers of tickets sold, and the alternatives, i.e. readily available on 35mm, only poor quality film print available, only available on video, not otherwise available etc. so we can judge the success of this project in its own terms, but I bet that won't happen. Meanwhile there are many local organisations that cannot get funding of just a few thousand pounds from the Lottery to make vital improvements, that in some cases will mean closure.
Something else interesting; a few months ago I was speaking to a manager of a cinema, I won't name it, but it's a long was from London. She told me that they had applied to this UKFC digital thing, but that they didn't expect to be selected. They were doubtful that they had much to gain if they were selected, but felt that they really had to try, because they had nothing to lose, and if it turned out that they were wrong, and the digital thing did become really necessary, there was no way they would ever be able to afford it themselves. As it turns out, they have been selected.
[ 06-03-2005, 12:16 PM: Message edited by: Stephen Furley ]
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 06-01-2005 08:34 AM
quote: Stephen Furley
...the figures you quote are somewhat lower than I was expecting; maybe prices are starting to come down, or maybe you just get a discount if you buy over 200 of the things.
Does that £40-60k headline cost only cover the projector or do you get the server for that as well? Admittedly the server won't cost much. The one I saw was basically a glorified PC with a dual processor motherboard, five 40gb SCSI HDDs and an Ultrium drive - something like that can't cost more than £5-6k at a guess. But even so, that's another potential cost which could end up being passed onto the cinema. And I wonder if there'll be a clause in the contract which states that cinemas can only use the AA servers with their projectors, or whether they could, at some point in the future, connect their own HD servers, which support other file formats besides the AA one, and show material from those.
Last summer I went to the launch symposium for the final report of this European Union committee, which included a presentation by John Graham of the European Digital Cinema Forum. After 20 minutes of him evangelising about d-cinema, I put the headline cost relative to 35mm issue to him during the Q & A, and actually suggested that it would be less suitable for distributing arthouse and minority interest films than 35mm, because of the small number of prints needed relative to a Hollywood blockbuster. His response was that once organisations such as UKFC started buying hundreds of projectors, Moore's Law would kick in and the up-front cost would plummet.
From his and other presentations it quickly became obvious to me that this probably has little if anything to offer the small to medium sized public sector film archive (i.e. me), mainly because the costs of encoding and mastering are going to be prohibitive. Where quality of presentation is important and where I can get the money to do it, it costs me less than half that of a 2k transfer to have, say, a 16mm preservation master sent to Prestech and blown up to a 35mm viewing copy for projection (plus it looks nicer, too). Until that situtation radically changes, the main beneficiaries of this scheme in its current form - if anybody - are likely to be the Hollywood studios and Arts Alliance, IMHO.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 06-01-2005 09:54 AM
quote: Leo Enticknap
I put the headline cost relative to 35mm issue to him during the Q & A, and actually suggested that it would be less suitable for distributing arthouse and minority interest films than 35mm, because of the small number of prints needed relative to a Hollywood blockbuster.
Spreading the mastering costs over a large number of copies, as with a mainstream release, brings down the cost of each copy, but then you have the problem of needing to equip a large number of cinemas. The number of cinemas is a problem; it's large enough that the total cost would be enormous, but too small for the cost to be drastically reduced by very large production volumes, as with something like DVD players.
With this type of film, (Art house rather than the classic stuff) not only is the number of screens quite small, but there's no real need for it to open on the same date in all of them. Indeed, the reputation of these films often builds up slowly by word of mouth, so there can actually be an advantage to opening it later, so to number of prints required can be even smaller.
Just suppose that this thing did actually take off, and the distributors of these films decided to release on digital in future. They might also decide that due to the cost of the digital mastering they would release only in this format, and would no longer have film prints made. Where would this leave cinemas which were not 'winners' in this scheme? How would the UKFC justify providing equipment to some venues, while leaving others to find the cost themselves, or more likely, close down, because they couldn't afford it?
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