Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Studios agree to pay for digital projectors.

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Posted by Christian Volpi (Member # 2370) on 03-30-2005, 12:48 PM:

IMDB News
Studios Agree To Pay for Digital Projectors

Hollywood's major studios are close to an agreement to finance the installation of digital projectors in theaters across the country, Investor's Business Daily reported today (Tuesday), citing unnamed people in the industry. The agreement would end the years-long standoff between the studios and the theaters over who should pay for the digital projectors. Theaters have long held that they would receive little benefit from the new apparatus (although Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner who also owns the Landmark Theater chain, announced recently that he plans to install them in his theaters in order to present concerts, sports events and other live entertainment). IBD said Walt Disney, Sony and Warner Bros. plan to raise some $3 billion for theater owners to use to buy the digital projectors. There was no mention of the four other major studios in the article. Sony, one of the three studios involved in the deal, may have a special interest in promoting the digital rollout since corporate sibling Sony Electronics has developed the ultra-high definition projection system that Landmark is planning to install in its theaters.

Posted by Lyle Romer (Member # 1266) on 03-30-2005, 12:54 PM:

To me "finance the installation of" and "pay for" are two very different things. "Pay for" would mean the studios were going to buy the projectors and give them to the theatres. "Finance the installation of" sounds like a loan program. GM is more than willing to "finance the purchase of" a new car.

Remains to be seen which one they mean.

I guess the biggest downside if the studios do decide to pay for them is that they will be the ones to decide if 2k is good enough or if a push should be made to 4k. My guess would be that they will decide that 2k is good enough.

Posted by Dan Lyons (Member # 1454) on 03-30-2005, 01:04 PM:

I'm guessing this is an April Fool's Day thing, but the dumbass at IMDB News doesn't know how to read his calendar. ha~! [thumbsup]

Posted by Richard May (Member # 2627) on 03-30-2005, 01:06 PM:

I will believe it when I see it. I've heard a lot over the years that was just a bunch of [bs]

Posted by Darryl Spicer (Member # 711) on 03-30-2005, 08:04 PM:

Looks like something of that magnatude would have shown up more when I did various google searches. Nothing brought up an Investment Business Daily artical about the subject. The site does require registering so that may have prevented it. Only thing I got was the IMDB info. No other news sources or organizations matched the exact search terms just random old news. By the way that link is no good now or at least it didn't work when I tried it. I have a feeling there may be trickery when it comes to financing. Someone has to pay it back.

Posted by Louis Bornwasser (Member # 3063) on 03-30-2005, 08:16 PM:

The main difficulty with this is the promise "that ALL theatres in an area would get the Digital equipment." Light must be a significant problem, judging from the tests that use 35mm=3000 watt versus TV with 5000 watt. Am I to understand that every small and large cinema and drive in will be served on the same financial basis?? Be realistic. No one is really going to spend this level of money across the board. Class action lawsuits will abound if they don't. (And I am not even including weekend resort cinema, monastaries, prisons, etc......in other words some of my customers who are not, how we say, completely commercial.)

Other questions: does anyone know if ANY of the installed Digital systems were actually paid for by the customer theatre circuit? Or were these "placed?"

Posted by Darryl Spicer (Member # 711) on 03-30-2005, 08:22 PM:

I think the ones that cinemark uses were put there by Texas Instruments and were not a cost to the company. They have two in Plano Texas and one maybe two in Valley view Ohio both locations near Texas Instruments facilities

Posted by Jon Miller (Member # 163) on 03-30-2005, 08:54 PM:

So the studios are helping finance original installations...

Just how do they plan to cover the inevitable obsolescence of the equipment? Even though replacement equipment will cost less than the equipment originally installed, upgrades of digital projection hardware will still cost far more than a major upgrade for film-based equipment, especially when you have to upgrade an expensive projection head or movie server to enjoy a resolution upgrade.

Knowing that digital and video equipment gets obsolete very fast (and that film resolution is self-upgrading whenever Kodak and others introduce improved film stocks), I would be leery of replacing a technology with a proven track record (that's film) with something that could very well be a technological fad.

Posted by Ken Layton (Member # 133) on 03-30-2005, 11:35 PM:

Yeh, what about the constant 'upgrades' that will be required every few months to these video projectors? Who's gonna pay for that? The studios are gonna figure out some way to make you keep paying and paying for these video projectors.

Considering that a lot of theaters have film projectors 20+ years old and happily chugging along, how long before you have to throw one of these video projectors away? One year? Two years?

Posted by Bill Enos (Member # 440) on 03-31-2005, 12:33 AM:

Three billion dollars? That paltry sum won'r make even a small dent in the cost of fitting the thousands of theaters in the U.S. alone

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 03-31-2005, 02:16 AM:

Sure it would. Figuring $100,000 for each projector, and approximately 36,000 screens in the U.S., that's $3.6 billion. Projectors would probably cost less than that if bought in that kind of quantities.

As for the question "who's going to pay for it," it's obvious the studios should just shell out. They will be saving the cash, the theatres won't.

Posted by Alejandro Lopez (Member # 2854) on 03-31-2005, 03:30 AM:

Hi: I work in a TV studio since 1985. We started with 1" Ampex (and then Sony) VTR´s, Ampex and Sony Betacam VCR´s for news. Since them we upgraded to Betacam SP, them to Digital Betacam and, finally? (I don´t think so...) to DV Pro and Avid Non Lineal Edition and PostProduction. All this in less than twenty years... A Digital Betacam recorder costs more than 36.000$ and this is only a video recorder... Due to its youth we can suppose that Digital Cinema will become obsolete every few years and theater owners will have to invest, if they can, a lot of money to update and/or upgrade their digital equipment several times in the first ten years. Presumibly most of independent exhibitors will have to close...

Alejandro.

Posted by Thomas Jonsson (Member # 1902) on 03-31-2005, 05:26 AM:

Exactly! I hope this Digital shit never happens. What scares me
most is what happens if the damn thing breaks down on a weekend
with the opening of Star Wars Episode 3. How fast can I get a
data freak to fix the problem for me - how many shows do I have
to cancel? Will the audience happily return after so and so many
cancelled shows? I don´t think so.

So far, I´ve never had to cancel a show because of technical
problems. But with this Digital stuff, I will probably be as
helpless as a new-born baby, totally at the mercy of the data
freaks.

Thomas

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 03-31-2005, 07:33 AM:

Out of curiousity, why would a TV station go from Digi-Beta to DV? That sounds like a pretty substantial downgrade to me....

Posted by Alejandro Lopez (Member # 2854) on 03-31-2005, 09:28 AM:

Well, as the Engineering chief said to me, Panasonic offered them very good economical conditions for chanching with free maintaning costs for some years. I also think it´s a downgrade. I can even understand choosing DV Pro for news gathering, but not for feature films, series and programs broadcasting.

Alejandro.

Posted by Chase Hanson (Member # 2779) on 03-31-2005, 12:47 PM:

Our DLP unit crapped itself significantly less than any of the other 20 Strong Projectors in the booth.

Personally I think most of you are whining for no good reason.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 03-31-2005, 01:31 PM:

Upgrade costs will definitely be an issue.

I know (and have worked at) a number of theatres which run fifty-year-old film projectors on a daily basis, with few if any problems. If anyone uses a ten-year-old (or older) computer on a daily basis for any purpose, I'd be quite amazed. Just try buying an AT power supply or EISA network card now. Those parts were far more popular in their heyday than specialized theatre equipment ever will be. Oh, and lamphouses and sound systems used for [dlp]

projection aren't much different from those used for film projection and their failure rates do not change simply when film goes away.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that at my day job we actually _do_ have an AIX machine which is over ten years old and which is still running as a license server for some older CAD software. It is an old-timey IBM machine which was built like a tank. It will die eventually but, unlike DLP, its death won't kill the company's revenue until it can be replaced.)

It will also be interesting to see what, if anything, will happen to the venues which are equipped for 35mm but run film irregularly. Will anyone pay to "upgrade" to DLP in a venue that runs film a handful of times every year?

Finally, I'm not as anti-DLP as this post probably makes it sound. I'd love for every theatre to have image quality that exceeds that of 70mm film for every show. I believe that this will be not only possible but cost-effective at some point in the forseeable future. I'd just hate to see the industry get locked into some expensive and inferior standard too early in the technology development cycle.

Posted by R. Andrew Diercks (Member # 1725) on 03-31-2005, 02:21 PM:

The computer aspect has always been my biggest issue. I seldom ever have projector issues, but often have sound issues, all run by computers. How often to all of you have to re-boot your processors? More than that, your ticket computers? I doubt digital cinema will offer a BYPASS mode and still show an image during a reboot. I forsee a lot of interruptions that could result in the death of theatres as we know them. Why pay $7-$20 if you get similar quality at home without interruptions.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 03-31-2005, 02:43 PM:

Most of the Digital Cinema "crashes" that I've seen myself or heard of, seem to be either server or operating system related and not due to a projector failure (although projector issues can certainly adversely affect image quality).

The Digital Cinema SYSTEM needs to be reliable, and that starts with the components chosen, and the design of the operating system. The Digital Cinema SYSTEM also needs a competent and reliable service organization that can provide service quickly, be it troubleshooting over the phone or on-line diagnostics, or a service engineer quickly on site.

Kodak is becoming one of the major providers of Digital Cinema systems and services, both for pre-show and feature presentation:

http://www.kodak.com/go/dcinema

quote:
"We are committed to doing our part to help ensure that the digital projection technology of the future matches or exceeds the best possible image quality that exhibitors can present with 35 mm equipment," says Kodak Entertainment Imaging Division President Eric Rodli. "We believe that will ultimately require higher resolution digital projectors with a capacity for faithfully reproducing the full dynamic range of nuances in colors and contrast that today's films are capable of recording."

The Kodak CineServer unveiled at the conference is designed to enable exhibitors to decrypt, decompress and send content to up to 2K resolution projectors. Rodli says that Kodak is committed to a 4K system and will provide leadership as digital projection technology continues to evolve. He also stresses that film quality sets a moving target.

And BTW, Kodak makes lots of great motion-picture FILM too. [Smile]

Last year was the best year ever, and 2005 is off to a great start.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 03-31-2005, 06:07 PM:

Scott,

I still use my old Mac SE/30. I don't load new software on it anymore but as functionality goes...it still does quite well for me. It is pretty darn stable too.

In fact, I'm only on my second computer....an iMac DVSE and it is years old.

As to DCinema projectors...I have some experience with those...I've had color board failures ( I think the count is up to 3 in three years)...these are made by TI.

In terms of sound processor reliability...I've had CP500 issues over the years but the CP650 has been more stable than just about any processor I've ever had to deal with.

Posted by R. Andrew Diercks (Member # 1725) on 03-31-2005, 07:16 PM:

Another interesting question I thought of regarding this issue. If the studios own these projectors, how long until they dictate when and what is run on them? I'm sure the theatre owners are intelligent enough to cover those bases, but has that been discussed yet? They already have a significant amount of power in deciding our bookings and how long we run product and what shows we have to guarantee.

Posted by Paul Konen (Member # 41) on 04-01-2005, 09:48 AM:

I had my first DLP projector, a prototype, in my booth for 5+ years with only a dead pixel or two over it's life. Ran well without any upgrades until I got my new stuff. The new stuff was required because of The Incredibles. My new stuff (1K & 2K) has been working great since I got it.

I trust my system well enough to not have to build my backup prints.

I don't believe that the studios will have ownership of the equipment that is installed. They will be subsidizing it. The exhibitors wouldn't allow that type of control.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 04-01-2005, 10:03 AM:

quote: Paul Konen
I trust my system well enough to not have to build my backup prints.

So you still get backup film prints for your Digital Cinema screens, even though your theatre has not had problems? [Confused]

Do you still need someone to visit in person with the security "keys" or to verify the proper transfer of the data to the server?

Posted by Lyle Romer (Member # 1266) on 04-19-2005, 02:45 PM:

Paul (or anybody else who has actually seen 2K),

How does 2k DLP look compared to both "Film Done Right" and an average crappy multiplex. So far I have only seen 1K DLP (EPII and some horrible mars movie that I can't remember) and although it had some flaws and noticeable pixels in some scenes, it looked a heck of a lot better than I thought it would.

How close have you been able to get to a 2K screen before seeing the pixel grid.

Thanks.

Posted by Louis Bornwasser (Member # 3063) on 04-19-2005, 07:05 PM:

I think anything in "an average crappy multiplex" will eventually have some kind of deficiency. Right now we know about the FILM BASED problems; soon we may know about D-TV based problems. NET result will be: minimal service, maximal price to customer.

Posted by Lyle Romer (Member # 1266) on 04-19-2005, 09:25 PM:

Louis,

I'm sure that is true but what I'm looking for is observations of people who have seen 2k DLP and for them to compare how it looks vs. "Film Done Right" and also vs. an average crappy multiplex. I'm trying to get an idea of the picture quality of 2k DLP.

Posted by Paul Konen (Member # 41) on 04-19-2005, 10:44 PM:

John, a company contracted by TDC still comes out to check the transfer and install the security keys.

Lyle, I have always felt that the 1K image was great. The 2K is even better. I don't recall how close I have gotten but being 12-20 feet back, you won't noticibly see them, unless you are truly bent on finding the pixels.

Posted by Kevin Orman (Member # 3076) on 04-23-2005, 06:33 AM:

quote: Chase Hanson
Our DLP unit crapped itself significantly less than any of the other 20 Strong Projectors in the booth.

Personally I think most of you are whining for no good reason.

Okay, so, if DLP is so reliable and cost-effective then why do you have 20 strong projectors in your booth and not 20 DLP's?