If you’ve gone to the local Cineplex lately to see a movie,
you’ve no doubt noticed a card at the beginning of the feature “Digital
Projection by…”
Studios and distributors finally made the decision to phase out
distributing film prints. This has impacted the theatre owners, and they’ve
converted over screaming and kicking, as the investment to convert a theater
over to digital projection can cost between $50,000.00 to $100,000.00, although
the norm is about $80,000.00.
Now, it’s not as if this technology is new. In 1999, “Star
Wars Episode 1” was digitally projected. My sister and I were among the first
100 people to see this at the AMC in Burbank. What impressed me the most was
how clear everything was. The stars in the sky shots were solid points of
light, the colors too were much brighter. Unlike when you’d see a film
projected at 24 frames a second, you get gate flutter, the slight difference of
each frame shifting when it locks in the projector, it makes the image slightly
blurry and the colors more muted.
So why did it take 14 years for the theaters and the studios
to finally convert to digital?
It actually was a slow process. In 2008 Disney released its first
3D digital feature ”Bolt” and ushered in a whole new movie going experience.
And if you wanted to see this feature in 3D you had to pay a premium - that is
still in practice today.
But getting back to good ole 35 MM film. A film print is
expensive, about $1,500.00 to $2,000. It is shipped heavy film containers, and
the modern way of projecting a print is very hard on the film and if it becomes
damaged the distributor has to FedEx out a new one to the theater. So if a
studio is showing it’s movie in 1,000 theaters, it costs $2,000,000.00 just to
get in on a screen. When studio cuts a
deal with a distributor (providing it does not own their own) a big part of the
negation is what are they going to pay for P&A (prints and advertising).
Sometimes the studio will make that a line item in their total production
budget. No deal is exactly the same.
One of many different 33 MM projectors.
In 2001, Eastman Kodak, seeing the writing on the wall,
offered a digital projection system (as I recall, using Texas Interments
projectors), whereas Kodak would lease the equipment to the theater owners,
transfer the film to the digital format and distribute the digital information
as well.
Unfortunately for Kodak, the theatre owners didn’t like the
idea of leasing equipment from them and the distributors didn’t like the idea
that someone else had control over their content.
But one day, some savvy exec at the studio (or more likely
some bright up and comer) did the math.
A 200 gigabyte hard drive (the amount of storage you need
for a feature) costs about $250.00. That’s $250,000.00 to distribute a 1000
copies, not $2,000,000.00 and you don’t have to worry about the “print” getting
scratched or damaged.
Now the Kodak model wanted the distributors to pick up the
cost of converting the theaters over to digital as it would be a huge savings
for them in the long run. But none of them could even sit down in the same room
together, yet alone agree on something like that!
I’m not sure who joined hands and told the theaters that
they would no longer be distributing their films on film, but the theaters are
converting over very quickly and as of the end of the year, film, as we know
it, will pretty much be a thing of the past.
This is troubling to me as more and more features are being
shot on digital cameras, it’s edited digitally, conformed digitally and
distributed digitally.
How stable is that medium?
We see motion pictures that are over 100 years old as they
were able to restore, or just pull a print from the original inter-negative.
What happens if we have a huge solar flare and it wipes all
the digital storage devices clean?
Ok, so you can store it on a Blu-Ray DVD. But what’s the
shelf life on that? I don’t know.
If I were making a film, sorry a motion picture, I’d shoot
it digitally, that saves a ton of dough right there as you don’t need film
stock, you don’t need to develop that stock, nor do you have to pull a work
print so you can watch dailies the next day, you don’t need the audio transferred
over to mag stock so you can sync your work print. A whole lot of $$ are saved
below the line, not just in distribution.
But what I would do is have the conformed, color corrected
motion picture scanned back to film for good measure, because you know it will
keep for another 100 years as long as it’s kept in a cool dry place.
But I’ll miss the old way on set… “Sound ready, Ready!
Camera ready, Ready! Roll sound… Speed, roll camera, Speed, mark it… Scene one,
take one, clap… and ACTION!”
Those were the days…
