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…
Comments on “The Possibilities For Digital Theaters”
Smoothness
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.
Re: Smoothness
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.
What's so great about it?
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
Re: What's so great about it?
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.