Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: NAB on digital cinema

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Posted by Bruce Hansen (Member # 281) on 04-23-2004, 07:49 PM:

http://www.imaspub.com/nabdaily/mon_pm/Cinema_Summit.shtml

Future in Focus at Cinema Summit
By Geoff Poister

NAB DAILY NEWS

Gone from the Digital Cinema Summit was the customary hype attached to the digital revolution. Instead, the media professionals focused on identifying issues that need to be resolved.

The Saturday session, produced in partnership with SMPTE, consisted of panels addressing technical standards, regulatory issues and logistical problems. They grappled with details ranging from black and white perception to global distribution models.

The prelunch sessions covered most of the technical ground, while the afternoon sessions focused primarily on digital cinema systems, represented by companies such as QuVIS and Dalsa Digital Cinema.

CREATIVE CHALLENGES

The Sunday program, produced in partnership with the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California, focused on creative and production challenges.

The day started with a line-up of some of the motion picture industry's most esteemed ASC cinematographers: Allen Daviau, Michael Goi, Daryn Okada, Gil Hubbs and Karl Walter Lindenlaub.

There was a general consensus among all the cinematographers that the transition from film to digital processes requires caution.

Allen Daviau, known for shooting features such as "E.T." and "Empire of the Sun," urged cinematographers to monitor and manage the image from start to finish.

"Cinematographers need to see the process through digital intermediates to the end," Daviau said. He stressed that the "look" of a shot can be more easily altered anywhere in the digital process.

A central concern for cinematographers is what happens to the image once it enters the digital realm. Film scanned at 2k resolution, the current standard, misses a significant amount of image contained in the negative. The panel advocated upping the standard to 4k and archiving the conformed negative.

The potential impermanence of digital data was addressed in the session, Digital Archiving. Milt Shefter, president of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, noted that more data is stored digitally now than in any other form.

"If something caused this data to be erased," Shefter said, "we would mourn the loss of storage methods visible to the human eye."

If the goal is to archive material permanently, few people have confidence in digital storage. As Grover Crisp, vice president of asset management and film preservation at Sony Pictures Entertainment put it, "The best archival form now available is film."