CINEMAS are hoping for more record box office takings next week when the
latest Star Wars movie opens in Britain. But the film could also mark
another landmark: the beginning of the end of celluloid film for film production
and projection.
The Phantom Menace was shot on film, but selected cinemas in the US
are using high-resolution video projectors to screen a digital version to see
how audiences react. And this month, British audiences will get a chance to
judge electronic cinema for themselves. JVC, which makes digital projectors,
plans to screen The Phantom Menace in digital video at a London cinema
later this month.
Previous attempts at replacing film have failed because the picture quality
was poor and the price of the hardware was too high. In 1971, Frank Zappa used
television cameras and analogue videotape to shoot his movie Two Hundred
Motels. It was transferred to film for projection but showed a coarse line
structure.
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Ten years later, Sony developed the High-Definition Video System (HDVS),
which captured 1125 picture lines on analogue tape. Sony loaned the equipment to
director Francis Ford Coppola in an unsuccessful effort to persuade the
Hollywood studios to switch from film to tape. Last year, British Telecom
demonstrated an electronic cinema system in London but industry
experts鈥攁nd even some of the engineers involved鈥攚ere unimpressed
(This Week, 28 March 1998, p 6).
In the trial screenings in the US, two cinemas, in Los Angeles and New
Jersey, are using a Digital Light Processing projector made by Texas
Instruments. Two other cinemas in the same areas are using the rival Image Light
Amplifier invented by Hughes Aircraft and commercialised by JVC.
The Texas Instruments projector has an array of millions of tiny mirrors,
which form a picture directly as the angle of each mirror is changed. The
Hughes-JVC system first creates an analogue picture on a layer of liquid
crystals sandwiched between special plates. Light is bounced off this image to
form the final picture. The audiences鈥� reactions will show which system works
best.
However, even if the trial screenings of The Phantom Menace are a
success, the electronics companies will still have to convince cinemas to buy
expensive digital projectors. 鈥淭he biggest problem is the size of the door into
the projection room,鈥� says a JVC spokesperson. 鈥淭he equipment is often too big
to go through.鈥�
At last month鈥檚 TV Symposium in Montreux, Switzerland, Panasonic鈥攚hich
owns a large slice of JVC鈥攕igned a deal with Sony and Quantel, a British
special effects company, to offer Hollywood a new alternative to film. Their
system will display 24 pictures each second to match the rate used by film. It
will also capture 1080 lines for each picture. With so many lines for each
picture, the quality is close to that of film.
It also builds a bridge between film, digital TV and computers, making it
easier for studios to mix film and video production with computer editing. 鈥淚t
is this single master concept that has captured everyone鈥檚 interest here in the
US,鈥� says Michael Brinkman, Panasonic鈥檚 director of strategic development.