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Culture

by Mike Masnick

Thu, May 23rd 2002 10:44am





The Possibilities For Digital Theaters

from the going-beyond-film dept

I finally made it out to see Attack of the Clones on a digital screen last night, and as expected, it looks quite amazing. As more and more theaters go digital, not only will they get to show such clean movies, but they're more likely to start offering alternative programming as well. Apparently, theaters with digital projectors are trying out things such as broadcasting sporting events and music concerts. In Canada, apparently, movie theaters showing wrestling events on their screens have been selling out seats. Of course, if you look at the sports bar experience, I would imagine that movie theaters that sell beer to go along with their sporting events would be an even bigger draw...

4 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    Smoothness

    identicon
    Phillip, May 23rd, 2002 @ 5:29pm

    I've always found the 24fps of the cinema very jerky when it pans around. Does the digital filming make this far smoother? As for sporting events, hopefully in 4 years there will be plenty of digital cinemas in the UK to watch the next World Cup. Some pubs in London are creeping towards cinema size screens but with limited PAL resolution colours tend to smudge and if any of the beams are out of line you get %2tennsting'.

    Phillip.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Re: Smoothness

    identicon
    Ed, May 23rd, 2002 @ 6:44pm

    In my limited viewing experience, the 24fps motion artifacts are actually worse when projected digitally. A horizontal camera pan interacts badly with the order in which the pixels are refreshed from frame to frame. It gets worse for smaller DLP projectors which multiplex the RGB using one mirror array -- color fringes appear on the edges of moving objects.

    Showing alternative content is probably just something to make the transition to digital more palatable to the theaters. Relatively few movies today are distributed in digital form, so a theater has a large potential to sit idle if one of the few digital releases is a dud. Once most movies are released in both film and digital, this won't be an issue.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    What's so great about it?

    identicon
    Alan Braverman, May 23rd, 2002 @ 11:01pm

    I saw Attack of the Clones on a digital screen, too, and the audio and video were out of sync the whole time. What's so great about it?

    - Alan

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  4.  

    Re: What's so great about it?

    icon
    Mike (profile), May 24th, 2002 @ 1:20am

    I didn't notice any sync problems between the audio and video - could that have been just the particular showing you went to?

    What I liked about the digital screen was how clean and crisp the picture was. Compared to a regular film-based movie, there was a huge, noticeable difference.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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