I’ve just started working at Screenvision Europe as Technical Director. Specifically, I will be coordinating the Belgian migration towards digital cinema advertising: that is, digital distribution and digital projection. An ambitious project with a nice mix of technology, media and cinema – and a great bunch of colleagues. (Yes, Screenvision is indeed the fireworks logo you see before the commercials in the cinema and, no, I can’t change that logo) So don’t be surprised to see acronyms like MPEG2, JPEG2000, S/PDIF, 2K and 1080i pop up in my posts and/or links from now on.

I now have an even better excuse to see more movies (as if I needed that).

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Thanks to the widespread digitalisation of Kinepolis cinemas, Kinepolis is developing further ‘alternative content’ in conjunction with Barco and Technicolor. In addition to digital full-length films, cinema-goers can now also experience more and more alternative content in digital format, such as prestigious events, television series, live concerts and sports competitions – and now XL Gaming, too.

Imagine you could rent a movie theatre and show whatever you want, without the necessity of 35mm film, to a public of, let’s say, 20 to 50 people. What would you project?

• movie DVD: classic movies that never get to the screen anymore, like “Spinal Tap”, “The Party”
• music DVD: stuff like “Woodstock”, “Sade – Lovers Live”
• series DVD: 3 seasons of “Friends” in a row, or series that never made it to Europe like “Curb Your Enthusiasm”
• comedy DVD: a night full of Eddy Murphy, George Burns or Da Ali-G Show
• documentary DVD: Carl Sagan or the BBC’s “A Brief History of Infinity”
• Powerpoint presentations: if they add a crane, you can even do an “Al Gore” (cf “An Inconvenient Truth”)
• software demos: e.g. Final Cut Pro, Second Life
• live Skype session: with the webcam in that little top right 10m² block
• …

What would you want to see on a huge screen like that?

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Add one more superlative to Paramount’s “Mission: Impossible: III”: it is the largest digital release ever, playing on more than 170 digital cinema screens throughout North America. And all digital preparation and distribution to those screens was handled by Kodak Digital Cinema.
from http://www.dcinematoday.com/dc/pr.aspx?newsID=487

(Digital cinema is obviously of much better quality than this pixelized image – this just says “digital”, doesn’t it?)

Paramount set high standards for the digital release of “Mission: Impossible: III.” The studio insisted it only be shown in theatres with 2K cinema grade projectors and DCI-level security (…).
“Mission: Impossible III” is eight reels long, with soundtracks in multiple languages. In its digital release, it needed to be encoded in two different compression formats, packaged for four different server brands, and distributed via hard drive and satellite. The movie was encrypted to prevent piracy, so a unique pair of ‘keys’ – software codes – for each screen had to be created and sent separately. (…)
Beginning in April, Paramount began delivering the digital masters to Kodak’s Laser Pacific facility in Hollywood. Kodak technicians compressed and encrypted each reel and packaged them to play on the different screens. Kodak and Paramount collaborated on final quality control.

StarWars Episode III (2005) also needed to be prepared in 4 different formats. The promise of the DCI specification is of course that in the future, a movie can be packaged in only 1 format and work on all brands of cinema servers/projectors. Kodak would get a DCDM (Digital Cinema Ditribution Master) from Paramount, and prepare a single encrypted DCP (Digital Cinema Package) to ship to all theatres. It would then also distribute 170 keys for decrypting. Encryption key size is measured in bits, a 2048-bit RSA key for public key encryption is rather big, for symmetric encryption, an 128-bit AES key is already considered quite strong. This just to point out that secure delivery of a key file < 10KB is a lot easier than that of the 300GB movie file. I might write an article about that soon.

Digital cinema in Belgium
In Belgium, Kinepolis also shows the movie in digital version: in Brussels, Antwerp, Gent, Leuven, Hasselt, Kortrijk and Braine L’Alleud.
A lot of those digital projections worldwide will be played on Barco projectors, since they are one of the market leaders and have a close relationship with Kodak. One of the formats Kodak had to convert to, is “MXF Interop” (MPEG2) for XDCinema’s Cinestore line of Digital Cinema servers.
Kinepolis started in Harelbeke (1970) and is now an international group with 21 digital cinema theatres. Barco started in Poperinge (1934) and is now one of the world leaders in digital projection with a very optimistic CEO. EVS started in Liege (1994) and created its digital cinema subsiduary XDCinema in 2000. XDCinema and Barco are partnering to provide the digital cinema screenings at the Festival of Cannes this year.

With so many large players based here, Belgium will be an interesting playground for digital cinema.

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FILESIZE OF A MOVIE

The movie’s video signal is compressed and encrypted into a bitrate of max 250 Mbps, which translates in 31.25 MB/second or 112.50 GB/hour footage. So a ’short’ 90-minute movie is something like 170GB, and a 2h30 movie, with some audio thrown in, is more like 300 GB. The estimates from the DCI specification are even higher: around 140 GB per hour running length (video, audio and subtitles together) or around 38 MB/s.

DIGITAL TRANSPORT

Kinepolis currently has 21 theatres that are equiped for digital cinema. So if a new movie comes out they need to transport 21 copies of 300GB to each of those. Imagine somewhere in the future a large distributor has to distribute 500 copies, preferably in less than a day. What are the options?
Start situation: 1 compressed file in DCDM format (compressed and encrypted – so safe to send)

External hard disk

Low-budget: send a LaCie Big Disk drive (500 euro/600GB – 1,5kg). Although, they are not exactly 100% reliable.

Mid-budget: send 2 drives in RAID-1 configuration (mirrored), such as the Lacie Two Big (1000 euro/500GB mirrored S-ATA – 2,5kg) or the Netgear/Zetera Storage Central SC101 (700 euro/400GB mirrored ATA)

These disks are USB2.0 (max 216 GB/h), Firewire (max 160 or 320 GB/h) or Gigabit Ethernet (max 450GB/h). Actual throughput speeds will be 25 to 75% of these theoretical values. So copying the whole data onto the local movie theatre network will take 1 to 2 hours, and then it’s ready for projection.

Backup tape

DLT tape: Super DLTape II can store 300GB onto a 0,225kg tape, with speeds up to 32MB/s

LTO tape: LTO 3 can store 400GB and has speeds up to 80 Mbps.

Reading speed can go up to 32 MB/s (115 GB/h), so a bit slower than the hard disks.

HD-DVD/BluRay

HD-DVD has a capacity of 15GB/disk, BluRay 25GB/disk. This means a 200GB movie translates 8 to 14 disks. Might be a way to distibute the content, but I’m not too convinced it’s a handy one.

Broadband (Cable/ADSL)

Imagine transport via network instead of magnetic carrier. Every theatre has a broadband connection. Max speeds in Belgium are around 10Mbps download (4,5GB/h). So downloading a 200GB movie file would take 2 full days. That’s too slow.

Fast Ethernet

If every theatre had 100Mbps download speed, would that make network download feasible? That adds up to 45GB/h, download a full movie in 5 hours, or -let’s be realistic- 8 hours. That’s OK. Actually, if there was only 1 theatre, that would be OK. But if 21 deliveries have to be made at the same time, and they all download from one location, that adds up to 21 x 100 Mbps or 2,1 Gbps. That’s more bandwidth than most hosts can handle. Let alone 500 simultaneous downloads.

Fast Ethernet + BitTorrent

But if the source host only serves as a BitTorrent seeder, and the other downloaders can serve as peers for each other, it should be possible to deliver the same content to each theatre within 8 hours. Looking at how close Hollywood is looking at BitTorrent, this should be an evident choice.

Since current movie distribution (printing on 35mm film) costs between $1500 and $3000 per copy, any of the above methods is way cheaper.

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“Shooting on 35-mm film costs about a dollar a foot,” Bob Harvey, Panavision senior vice president of sales, told Wired News. “A thousand feet for a thousand dollars adds up to about 11 minutes of footage. But about an hour of footage on a Genesis 24P HD, for instance, costs under a hundred dollars.”
from Wired

Kwon estimated that shooting digitally shaved about $150K off the production’s up-front costs such as film stock, dailies, and film-to-tape transfer for off-line, non-linear editing.
from digitalmedia.oreilly.com

And then there’s this movie, shot with the same prosumer camcorder that I have, the Canon XL1s, and blown up to 35mm film from miniDV (720 x 480):
28 Days Later…
Budget: 9 million* Gross (USA): 43.5 million (8/24)
from oreillynet.com

Technorati: digital cinema – media – movies

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(Hollywood, CA – July 27, 2005) Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC (DCI) has completed the final overall system requirements and specifications to help theatrical projector and equipment manufacturers create uniform and compatible digital cinema (…)
(from dcimovies.com)

The specification is available at dcimovies.com (1MB – PDF).

OVERVIEW

These are the stages in the flowchart of digital cinema:

DSM (Digital Source Master)

the end-product of the ‘feature postproduction’.

FORMAT: Defined by producer (color space and bit depth, resolution, fps, …)

SECURITY: Defined by the producer

DCDM (Digital Cinema Distribution Master)

this is the version ready to play on a digital cinema projector.

CONTENT: combines video, audio and subtitle data, based on SMPTE standards, the equivalent of an (unencrypted) DVD

FORMAT:

RESOLUTION: 2K (2048 x 1080), 4K (4096 x 2160 pixels)

FRAMES PER SECOND: 24 fps or 48 fps (only possible for 2K)

COLOR DEPTH: 12bit/color = 36 bit total for RGB (68 billion colors)

IMAGE FORMAT: MXF (Material eXchange Format)

IMAGE BANDWIDTH: maximum 250 Mbps which is 112 GB/hour

AUDIO FORMAT: up to 16 channels of 20-bit 48 KHz or 96 KHz WAV

SUBTITLE FORMAT: PNG files or Timed Text

TOTAL MOVIE SIZE: between 45 and 140 GB/hour

SECURITY: not encrypted – should be ready to play

DCP (Digital Cinema Package)

FORMAT: compressed, split up in ‘reels’

SECURITY: encrypted using 128-bit AES

MASTERING

The Digital Source Master (DSM) is created in post-production and can be used to convert into a Digital Cinema Distribution Master (DCDM). The DSM can also be used to convert to a film duplication master, a home video master, and/or a master for archival purposes.

TRANSFER

A DCDM is created from the DSM, and then prepared for shipment in a DCP. The DCP is shipped to the actual cinema venue, where the content is decrypted and decompressed into the DCDM format again, ready to be projected. Since an uncompressed movie will be something like 100GB to 500GB of data, the compressed version maybe 5 to 10 times smaller, the shipping of the remaining 10-100GB could be done with a Blu-Ray disc, a DLT tape or a simple portable hard-disk. Even an iPod might do the trick. Jim Rygiel used those for shipping draft versions of Lord Of The Rings, as he mentioned on IT Conversations.

PROJECTION

Most systems work with the Texas Instruments DLP (Digital Light Processing) technology: a chip with thousands of little mirrors that can be flipped electronically at very high speeds. They enable 1024 levels of gray for each of the RGB colours, which would amount to 30-bit – or 1 billion – colours, were it not that all documentation talks about ‘more than 35 trillion colours’.

1. A digital projector based on DLP Cinema^TM technology transfers the digitized image file onto three optical semiconductors known as Digital Micromirror Devices, or DMDs. Each of these chips is dedicated to one primary color-red, green, or blue. A DMD chip contains a rectangular array of over one million microscopic mirrors.
2. Light from the projector’s lamp is reflected off the mirrors and is combined in different proportions of red, green and blue, as controlled by the image file, to create an array of different colored pixels that make up the projected image. (…)
3. The DMD mirrors tilt either toward or away from the light source thousands of times per second to reflect the movie onto the screen. These images are sequentially projected onto the screen, recreating the movie in front of you with perfect clarity and a range of more than 35 trillion colors.
(from: Digital Cinema 101 – Texas Instruments)

These projectors – like the ones from Digital Projection and Barco – get their input through a DVI-D, SMPTE 292M or BNC connector. (Overview of video connectors on utram.com)

OBSERVATIONS

• The 2K standard translates into 2.2 megapixel images and the 4K standard into 8.8 megapixel. So 4K Digital Cinema uses a resolution most commerical ’still’ camera’s don’t have yet.
• If you project a 2K image on a screen 15m (50 feet) wide, each pixel is 15000/2048 = 7.3 mm wide. At 4K: 3.6mm wide. If you would project a DVD (720×480 pixels), a pixel would be 2cm wide.
• Texas Instruments already has a 2K DLP (DC 2K DMD) chip, but there is no 4K chip yet. Sony, however, announced their first 4K projectors.
• The Sony SXRD technology has a 16:9 aspect ratio (1920/1080), the JVC DLA-QX1G projector has a 4:3 aspect ratio, but the new standard has a very unusual 19:10 ratio. No idea why that is.
• The DCI announcement was also covered on cinematech.blogspot.com, docbug.com, ofview.com and blogs.mercurynews.com. Some good articles on DLP: whatsonhdtv.blogspot.com.

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