21-09-2008, 11:25 AM
Definition
Digital cinema encompasses every aspect of the movie making process, from production and post-production to distribution and projection. A digitally produced or digitally converted movie can be distributed to theaters via satellite, physical media, or fiber optic networks. The digitized movie is stored by a computer/server which "serves" it to a digital projector for each screening of the movie. Projectors based on DLP Cinema? technology are currently installed in over 1,195 theaters in 30 countries worldwide - and remain the first and only commercially available digital cinema projectors.
When you see a movie digitally, you see that movie the way its creators intended you to see it: with incredible clarity and detail. In a range of up to 35 trillion colors. And whether you're catching that movie on opening night or months after, it will always look its best, because digital movies are immune to the scratches, fading, pops and jitter that film is prone to with repeated screenings.Main advantage of digital movies are that, expensive film rolls and postprocessing expenses could be done away. Movie would be transmitted to computers in movie theatres, hence the movie could be released in a larger number of theatres.
Digital technology has already taken over much of the home entertainment market. It seems strange, then, that the vast majority of theatrical motion pictures are shot and distributed on celluloid film,just like they were more than a century ago. Of course, the technology has improved over the years, but it's still based on the same basic principles. The
reason is simple: Up until recently, nothing could come close to the image quality of projected film. Digital cinema is simply a new approach to making and showing movies. The basic idea is to use bits and bytes (strings of 1s and 0s) to record, transmit and replay images, rather than using chemicals on film.
The main advantage of digital technology (such as a HYPERLINK "http://entertainment.howstuffworkscd.htm" CD ) is that it can store, transmit and retrieve a huge amount of information exactly as it was originally recorded. Analog technology (such as an audio tape) loses information in transmission, and generally degrades with each viewing. Digital information is also a lot more flexible than analog information. A computer can manipulate bytes of data very easily, but it can't do much with a streaming analog signal. It's a completely different language.
Digital cinema affects three major areas of movie-making:
" Production - how the movie is actually made
" Distribution - how the movie gets from the production company
" to movie theaters
" Projection - how the theater presents the movie
. Production
With an $800 consumer digital camcorder, a stack of tapes, a computer and some video-editing software, you could make a digital movie. But there are a couple of problems with this approach. First, your image resolution won't be that great on a big movie screen. Second, your movie will look like news footage, not a normal theatrical film. onventional video has a completely different look from film, and just about anybody can tell the difference in a second. Film and video differ a lot in image clarity, depth of focus and color range, but the biggest contrast is frame rate. Film cameras normally shoot at 24 frames per second, while most U.S. television video cameras shoot at 30 frames per second (29.97 per second, to be exact).
