Are deeply curved LED screens the way to the future for cinema?

[Marcel Birgelen]

Sure, go ahead and copy the movie. It'll be so large and unwieldy that you can't store it on anything but a large hard drive. Even if you did copy the movie, you still couldn't play it because it is formatted for a particular type of display which is too large to fit inside the average living room and too expensive to obtain. If, somehow, you could manage to view the file, the image would be so distorted that it would be uncomfortable to watch.

What do you consider large and unwieldy? Most LED walls won't exceed 4K resolution... My workstation currently drives 4 4K monitors at ease. An unencrypted file will be resized to something that fits on your 4K or 1080p set in no time by anybody with a halfway descent machine. Hollywood does not want this kind of high-res content out there, unencrypted... yet they don't mind spooling it directly to on-line streaming services, where it will be ripped and re-shared to "the masses' within several hours after publication.

If there are, I've haven't seen them but have seen presentations discussing them. That said, the dot pitch is such on screens like Onyx by Samsung that resolution would not be compromised, particularly for typical cinemas

Well, there are tons of examples, but take a look at an example rather close to home. Look at the LED wall or rather "LED curtain" in the back of this stage of this video. You can clearly see the spots arranged in a grid, shining through from behind the screen. The speakers are in front of the screen, but it's a festival stage, not a cinema. From a distance, the screen looks great, but in the close-ups you clearly can see the huge dot pitch. Still, this dot-pitch can easily be halved, and the screen would still be transparant. LEDs are getting smaller and flatter, so creating audio-transparent LED walls with a dot-pitch small enough it works in a cinema setup seems feasible to me.

No! Just no! The use of the screen as an audio reflector is an absolute horrible/miserable idea. the seat-to-seat variation is HUGE. Samsung/JBL has tried it...horrible.

I'm not a fan of the idea and it's not difficult to imagine the potential problems you create with such a setup, but I like to be somewhat openminded. The first digital cameras were horrible, the first digital projectors produced a horrible image, the first class D amplifiers were also horrible. Sometimes a bad idea remains a bad idea, but I honestly need a bit more imput to why this will never work before I want to entirely write off the the idea.

There is no distortion in the image. There is always distortion from one's seated perspective, no matter where they sit. On a flat screen, it is keystone perspective...you might be more used it it but it is very much there.

I guess it's a bit like looking at the moon... We're more trained to look at a "deformed rectangle" representing an image, than at any other forms and I guess our brains somehow compensate for it, without thinking the image somehow looks strange. The geometric deformations of e.g. an IMAX dome projection are often hard to oversee, especially with stuff close to the lens.

[Randy Stankey]

Make a 16-inch record that rotates counter clockwise at 60 rpm, with the groove starting at the center, going outward. It could only be played on a turntable that has the tone arm on the left and runs backward. Would anybody who tried to play it on a standard turntable even be able to get the music to play?

I am asking a similar question: If a movie was made for a 360-degree, wraparound, theater sized, flat-panel, LED display, would anybody even be able to play it on anything but the system it was designed for?

If so, the methods encryption would be made less complicated simply because, even if somebody did figure out a way to circumvent security, they still wouldn't be able to play the movie correctly. They would have to scale, crop and/or warp the image to fit a standard screen and it would still look wonky, even after all that work. The files for such a movie would likely be huge, even with compression. They wouldn't fit on an ordinary flash drive or any kind of removable media like a Blu-Ray disk and they would be unwieldy to send over the internet. A two-hour movie could, probably, only be stored on a multi-terabyte hard drive and would only be playable on the system it was designed for.

I'm not suggesting that there isn't a reason to encrypt. I'm wondering whether the encryption that would have to be used could be less complicated and less difficult to implement.

It would be like a Juggernaut Effect. A giant, wraparound movie could only be presented by somebody with a large amount of money, knowledge and resources like a large corporation.

I'm not saying that I like this idea. I'm just going, "Hmm..."

[Marcel Birgelen]

Release groups and hackers have gone to great lengths. Just look at how they defeated sophisticated copy protection schemes like those employed on multi-billion dollar game consoles. A record turning the wrong side round and at an odd speed would be easily defeated with modern technology, for example. It would take like a few seconds in ffmpeg to get that reversed and slowed down.

The encryption on DCPs also isn't difficult by any means, as the tools you need to decrypt it are available in your most common Linux install.

Since the release window has already largely been a thing of the past, the studios could maybe agree that something like HDCP 2.x is sufficient to protect the content from being stolen off (easily) exposed paths between the "media block" and the actual imaging device...

[Leo Enticknap]

Make a 16-inch record that rotates counter clockwise at 60 rpm, with the groove starting at the center, going outward. It could only be played on a turntable that has the tone arm on the left and runs backward...

About a grand (after shipping and California sales tax) would buy me this, which I could modify to play such a record in 2-3 hours. Although this is no longer in production, used examples appear on Ebay quite frequently. It would be an even easier option, because it can do 60 RPM out of the box. I have the turntable it is a modification of (the Vestax BDT-2500), and the variable speed function is great for digitizing records dating from the 1890s to the period between roughly 1912 to 1925, when 78.16 RPM (60 Hz territories) and 77.92 RPM (50 Hz) became established as the universal standard.

It would take me rather more than 2-3 hours of waiting around while my computer attempted a brute force attack on an encrypted DCP for which I don't have a KDM, though...

[Marcel Birgelen]

About a grand (after shipping and California sales tax) would buy me this, which I could modify to play such a record in 2-3 hours. Although this is no longer in production, used examples appear on Ebay quite frequently. It would be an even easier option, because it can do 60 RPM out of the box. I have the turntable it is a modification of (the Vestax BDT-2500), and the variable speed function is great for digitizing records dating from the 1890s to the period between roughly 1912 to 1925, when 78.16 RPM (60 Hz territories) and 77.92 RPM (50 Hz) became established as the universal standard.

There is an easier and cheaper way to recover the content: Simply play it on any decent record player the only challenge will be fitting a 16" record on there, but I've got an old German-built record player that could fit oversized records. although I've never seen them.

Load the recording into your favorite sound editing utility, reverse it and if you recorded it at 45 RPM, you slow it down by factor 0,75 and voila... no expensive gear needed. As I said so, you could do this even on the commandline with a tool like ffmpeg.

Outsmarting the smartest hackers on the planet isn't done by throwing a few half-baked hacks at them, first they'll frown at you and when they realize you're being serious, they'll laugh at you.

[Randy Stankey]

...exposed paths between the "media block" and the actual imaging device...

Ah! That's the thing I forgot.
I had figured that the path between the media block (or what have you) and the display would be complex but I didn't consider that, upstream of that, content would still need to be encrypted.

Leo, I used to have one of those Onkyo turntables. I wish I could remember where it went.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Ah! That's the thing I forgot.
I had figured that the path between the media block (or what have you) and the display would be complex but I didn't consider that, upstream of that, content would still need to be encrypted.

If it isn't encrypted, it needs to be in some kind of tamper-proof secure enclosure. This is the primary reason they moved from external mediablocks in the Series 1 to integrated media blocks in the Series 2: to shorten the pathways over which potentially unencrypted content would flow.

Capturing image data from unencrypted HDMIN DVI or SDI paths can be achieved with sub 500 dollar hardware.

A LED screen has much longer pathways of potentially unencrypted data...

[Frank Angel]

Thing here is, THE CONTENT needs to be considered -- the authors are creating content specifically to fit on that screen. with the story being nothing but a vehicle for the action....what would a hacker gain in being able to grab that cinematography....play it on an iphone? A tablet? even a 89in TV? The whole point of the work itself is the screen, not the story. Probably that's reason no one hacked Cinarama in its short heyday. Futurovision is not going to lose any significant ticket sales because someone bought a hacked DVD of it on a street-corner.

[Marcel Birgelen]

First off all, such a screen should be capable of playing regular DCI content too, especially scope content would be great contender, as flat would probably just look stupid on such kind of screen. So, in order to facilitate this, DCI compliancy would be a requirement already...

Also, you seem to underestimate those "hackers". For example, "they" have already grabbed 35mm scans of Star Wars and released a better original version on a "home format" than LucasFilm ever managed to do in 45 or so years. I don't see Hollywood releasing a lot of movies on in an ultra-wide-screen format, so there will be other AR versions of it, most likely just statically cropped versions or in ultimo, it would be a pan-scanned release. Statically cropped releases can be produced with two or three command-line options on ffmpeg.

Even then, there will always be folks that will want to get their hands on an ultra-high quality release of some oddball format and studios will want to prevent this.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Thing here is, THE CONTENT needs to be considered -- the authors are creating content specifically to fit on that screen. with the story being nothing but a vehicle for the action....what would a hacker gain in being able to grab that cinematography....play it on an iphone? A tablet? even a 89in TV? The whole point of the work itself is the screen, not the story. Probably that's reason no one hacked Cinerama in its short heyday. Futurovision is not going to lose any significant ticket sales because someone bought a hacked DVD of it on a street-corner.

Content Schmomtent! If it sells tickets that's all the top brass is interested. Take the old CInestage Theater in Chicago... It had an actual real Cinerama Strip Screen and DP-70's with Super Cinex's on them, even though it was not technically a Cinerama Theater. Mike Todd owned it and used it as his test laboratory, the first Smell-O-Vision machine was still there when the building was gutted in the late 80's. But there was an interim time when the theater was still operating and X-Rated films ran continuously on the Strip Screen and then later on a smaller screen placed in front of the strip screen. Liz Taylor, who inherited the building after Mike died had to pay the taxes somehow... The façade of it and the Michael Todd right next door to it were saved, but entirely new buildings are in back of those facades. We actually tried to salvage the strip screen out of there for reuse in an upcoming new build, but that didn't work out.

[Bobby Henderson]

This topic is getting revisited? I don't think much has changed since the last time the topic was discussed.

I really like LED "jumbotron" technology for signs, billboards and other types of specialty displays -like all those "spectaculars" in Times Square. There are still key stumbling blocks for the technology to make serious inroads into commercial cinemas.

The cost (or cost per pixel) is still too high for LED-based screens to achieve mainstream use in cinemas. The expectation is to have a display that sports at least 2K native resolution, if not 4K. Doing that is really expensive. Combine that with the overall life span of the product (maybe 10 years) and its ongoing maintenance needs. Individual tiles have to be replaced from time to time due to stuck pixels or other issues. Then you have to carefully balance the color/contrast of the replacement tiles with the rest of the existing screen. Otherwise you end up with a "quilted" appearance.

In order to push the cost down to more realistic levels I think it would take one or more large cinema chains committing to large volume orders. We're talking at least hundreds if not thousands of screens so there can be some cost benefit due to scale. It would also require limits on the number of product models, mainly the LED tiles. You get only so many resolution choices in which to build up a screen.

Audio is still a serious problem. None of the major LED jumbotron companies (Daktronics, Watchfire, Samsung, etc) are incorporating audio into their boards. That's because pretty much all their products are sold with no need for audio within the display. Signs and billboards don't need audio. That's the vast majority of the market there. Those companies would have to develop a new kind of LED tile for cinemas that can allow speakers installed behind it to pass audio through it. The tile would have to allow that without ruining the black levels in the image. The MSG Sphere project in Las Vegas ($1.8 billion) is the only LED-based installation I know of that will somehow have audio emitting from its enormous indoor dome screen.

I saw some comments saying content would have to be custom authored for these screens. That doesn't have to be the case if the boards are hitting native 2048x1080 or 4096x2160 resolution. The controllers can accommodate standards like HDMI. It shouldn't be a big deal to make such displays DCI compliant. I don't know if Samsung's Onyx product (for the handful of cinemas that use it) is DCI compliant.

Lately, thanks to COVID-19 and other global problems, it can be a real pain in the ass to order a new outdoor sign. You make the sale and place the order. Then expect to wait months for the product to be delivered.

If LED-based displays can break into the commercial cinema market in any kind of big way there would be a lot of interesting potential. For instance, the displays are bright enough that one could operate a drive-in theater with a LED-based screen and have shows during the day.

[Carsten Kurz]

Currently, there are 5 DCI compliant LED screens, two from Korea (Samsung/LG), two from China (AET Altai/SHENZHEN TIMEWAYING TECHNOLOGY), one from Japan (Sony).
As far as I know, sales numbers are low, except maybe for the two chinese ones on china mainland, and probably Korea for Samsung and LG.
When Sony stopped making DCI projectors in 2020, they probably also gave up their DCI CLEDIS plans.

[Allan Young]

Take the old CInestage Theater in Chicago... It had an actual real Cinerama Strip Screen and DP-70's with Super Cinex's on them, even though it was not technically a Cinerama Theater. Mike Todd owned it and used it as his test laboratory.

First I've heard that Todd-AO used a strip screen at one point. From the look of things in the photo it had the lower curvature of the solid Todd-AO screens. Presumably this was the first and only Todd-AO theater to have one?

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

That's hard to say. The Todd AO theater was right next door to this one and it had a flat solid sheet screen, and Century JJ's in a cramped main floor booth under the mezzanine. The Michael Todd theater and The Cinestage were literally right next to each other. So close that the lobbies connected.

Cinestage did open first, about a year before the Todd did. Sometime in the late1960's, Cinestage became a single strip 70mm Cinerama theater. I always assumed this screen was from those days. It may have been installed for 2001 A Space Oddyssey. However, once Todd passed away, the theaters ran what ever 70mm film they could book. I watched a lot of movies at both and later was invited in to look at saving the Cinestage screen for a customer planning a new build. But the screen really wasn't worth saving. At that time I could not venture into the Michael Todd because the ceiling had collapsed. But Cinestage was still in pretty good shape. Both buildiings were demolished, but the facades were saved for the new live theaters built behind them. M&R Theaters attempted to reopen and operate them, but it did not pan out so well and they closed down permanently until they were demolished. I'll post more pictures in a while.

[Allan Young]

That's hard to say. The Todd AO theater was right next door to this one and it had a flat solid sheet screen, and Century JJ's in a cramped main floor booth under the mezzanine. The Michael Todd theater and The Cinestage were literally right next to each other. So close that the lobbies connected.

Cinestage did open first, about a year before the Todd did. Sometime in the late1960's, Cinestage became a single strip 70mm Cinerama theater. I always assumed this screen was from those days.

Okay, makes sense now. When you said that Mike Todd used it as a "test laboratory" I assumed he'd installed the strip screen for Todd-AO.

I found this site https://incinerama.com/cinestage.htm, which has photos of the Cinestage screen from 1960 and it appears solid. Looks like Cinerama was installed in 1964 after it was taken over by an outfit called Cinedome Theaters.