Digital Cinema
By Nathan Williams

For the cinema, 2005 is a year of impending crisis. To the casual observer this statement might seem foolish. Big-budget films rake in tens of millions of dollars, DVDs fly off shelves (usually paid for), and film schools are flooded with an ever-increasing number of gifted young auteurs. Yet on every level imaginable—financial, artistic, technological—the medium is sailing into dangerous waters.

Between 1980 and 2002, the theatrical film market experienced consistently strong growth (apologies in advance for all figures being US domestic as total North American figures are difficult to track down). Despite ticket prices rising far in excess of general inflation, attendance rose on average 2.7% annually. In 2003, however, attendance dropped 4.3%. This was first perceived to be the inevitable consequence of a massively successful 2002, but in 2004 attendance dropped another 1.7%.  And 2005 has thus far been a disaster, with attendance down 8.4% from this point last year. And though exhibitors cling to the hope of some high profile hits (Star Wars, Harry Potter, King Kong), another overall attendance decline is almost guaranteed.

Meanwhile, DVD shipments have grown by over 50% per year since the invention of the format in 1997, and DVD sales overtook theatrical box office in total revenue two years ago. Video rental numbers have grown even faster. Increasingly, audiences are finding it not worth their time and dollar to experience a film in the theatre. With ticket prices almost as high as DVD retail prices, inconsistent projection, small multiplex screens, and the threat of disruptive audience members, it is hard to blame them. It is easy to foresee the day when theatrical distribution is merely part of the promotional campaign for the DVD sales.

The major studios really couldn’t care less where their revenue comes from, whether it is tickets sales, DVDs, or anything else. Unlike their forefathers, today’s studios don’t really make movies, and studio heads would just as soon be CEOs of banks if only they could still get invited to parties with Nicole Kidman. But there is a significant core of film artists (actors, directors, cinematographers, etc.), who care very deeply about theatrical cinema. For some, it is the main reason they do what they do. And the movement of the medium to video, and their own work to glorified television, is of striking concern.

These concerns echo those of cinema’s first great disaster, when, in the early 50s, the movies were forced to cede their place as America’s primary cultural medium to television. In response, the cinema rushed to innovate: widescreen processes were invented, 3-strip Technicolor gave way to cheaper and faster Eastmancolor, stereophonic sound was pushed aggressively, and large-format film (70mm, VistaVision) gained a brief heyday. While still losing massive ground to television, the movies successfully defined themselves as an experience and thwarted, perhaps, the retreat to elitist irrelevance that has befallen opera and serious theatre.

In response to the current threat of high resolution, high fidelity home video, a small but growing number of filmmakers and technicians are championing an innovation for our age, an entirely digital cinema. At first, this sounds like a necessary and inevitable step—we all know that we live in a digital world. Digital music, electronic mail, and HDTV are all great technological leaps forwards from their predecessors. It seems a matter of course that movies ought to join the 21^st century.

But what does digital cinema mean? What are its variants? What are its implications? What is gained and what is lost? This article can hopefully shed some light on what is often a vague and tortuous topic. 

The difference between digital and analog is a fascinating one, and one worth the reader’s exploration, but must be eschewed for the briefness necessary for this topic. For simplicity’s sake, it can be understood that cinema is historically an analog medium. The image was recorded chemically, along long strips of light-sensitive emulsion that were exposed, in individual rectangular frames at 24 frames per second in the gate of a film camera. The film was almost always negative film (a reverse image of what appeared before the camera), so positive prints could be made and exhibited in multiple locations. Sound was recorded in various methods, first on phonographic discs and later on magnetic tape, each transferred to an optical sound track on the film print. Until the 1980s, every piece of film exhibited was the result of a purely analog process.

Since the dawn of the microchip (or whatever your preferred Jobsian phrase), the digital world has slowly encroached on cinema. Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas promoted the use of video dailies and computer programs for editing. Resistance to editing on a computer was worn down only very slowly, but today even stalwarts like Thelma Schoonmaker have relented and only a handful of American feature filmmakers do not edit their work digitally (Spielberg and Gus Van Sant are notable holdouts). It is worth noting, however, that this digital editing does not necessarily add anything digital to the final image. A video copy of the film negative is made and used to make editing decisions, but when such decisions are made the negative itself is cut and printed in traditional optical/chemical methods.

The world of effects, however, started to provide motivation to change this. The earliest computer generated images were more explicitly animation than anything resembling photo-realism. Effects in Westworld, Star Wars (’77), Alien, and Tron offered showy computer graphic images. And though these effects were created electronically, they were printed to film using established optical methods. As effects became more complicated and physically integrated into the photographic world, optical printing of effects became more and more of a hassle. In 1991, Terminator 2’s extensive computer effects motivated a different technique. Using scanners designed to transfer film to video for home video and television release, all shots requiring effects were transferred to digital video, effects were added, and the final composition was burned back to film.

This intermediate video step became increasingly common in films based around special effects, though was always limited to shots that required specific effects. The rest of the footage of, say, Jeff Goldblum waxing philosophic on Laura Dern’s palm, was filmed, cut, and printed in an entirely traditional manner. However, 1997’s Pleasantville had unique requirements. The film itself was a bad metaphor for social liberty, using black-and-white to indicate conservatism and color to indicate open-mindedness (or something). In a majority of the film’s shots, some parts of the image, including characters, would need to be black-and-white, others color. In the past, the only way to accomplish this would be painstaking frame-by-frame colorization in post-production (films like High and Low, The Big Red One, and Schindler’s List employed this technique on a very limited scale), or filming the elements separately (likely blue-screened) and optically printing them together. Instead, the filmmakers opted to film everything in color and then digitally scan the entire negative in order to digitally desaturate the portions of the image that required it.

Cinematographer Roger Deakins repeated the technique on O Brother, Where Are Thou?, this time for aesthetic rather than special effect purposes. Deakins envisioned a surreally mythic Depression-era South, in which the greens of the natural world were replaced with gold. No camera filter or printing process could get him precisely what he wanted, so a full digital scan of the negative was undertaken, colors tweaked on a computer, and the video image burned back to film again for printing. Today, the use of a digital intermediate is becoming the norm even for films that do not require any special image manipulation.

A more recent development is the advent of digital photography. Various formats from extremely high resolution (Star Wars, Sin City) to low (Pieces of April, The Fast Runner) have been used for narrative feature films. These films are shot on video, edited electronically, and then burned to film for distribution. However, a handful of theatres in the United States and about 300 in the world have installed digital projection in their theatres allowing Lucas and Rodriguez films (as well as digitally animated Pixar films) to be presented without the need for a film print. In these rare instances, the audience experiences the result of an entirely digital process.

In short, since digital editing has become almost entirely universal, there are, at the current time, three areas of conflict: image capture, image manipulation, and image presentation. What are the benefits and drawback of each?

Digital projection has perhaps the most obvious advantages. Currently, we experience films from a fleet of aging 35mm projectors maintained and operated by minimum-wage-earning teenagers. Films are presented with dim projector bulbs, misaligned gates, poorly threaded film, and just plain bad focus. Advocates claim that digital projection would be standardized and eliminate most sorts of pilot error that lead to your typical multiplex experience. Also, digital copies would be safe from the wear and scratching that even the best maintained film prints inevitable experience. Economically, the cost of film prints could be avoided, saving studios millions of dollars per title.

So why isn’t it already the standard? For one, the cost of installing a new digital projector in each of the US’s forty thousand theatres is astronomical at this point (the lower end units run for a little under $100,000). For another, there is no established standard of digital projection or in what file format the film would be delivered. High definition tapes are not robust enough for repeated play. Internet or satellite downloads are not nearly fast enough (yet). Any existing disc format requires significant image compression that results in noticeable image fidelity loss when blown up. Also, there is little realistic likelihood that many of the same problems with print projection wouldn’t extend to digital projection. Bad focus is bad focus, regardless of the source material.

Two recent developments have made digital projection seem more like the inevitability its supports bill it as. First, wacky billionaire, Mark Cuban, owner of the Landmark Theatres chain, is dropping a giant pile of cash to convert his 209 screens to 4K digital projectors. Also, Disney, Sony, and Warner have announced plans to raise funds for an exclusive distribution chain and $80,000 per screen for distributors who make the switch. Still, these funds don’t actually exist yet, and even with $80,000 in hand, theatre owners would have to find a good reason to spend the additional $40,000 for conversion. Don’t expect full saturation for at least a decade.

Digital intermediate has perhaps the fewest obvious advantages, yet it is the area of most widespread success (apart from editing and sound). Directors of photography are permitted to tweak the image long after shooting has ended (though they risk ceding control over the image to the director and producers and anyone else who feels like grabbing the mouse). A digital master removes the need for repeated handling of the original film negative. And any effects that might be incorporated (few Hollywood films have no effects whatsoever these days) can be integrated with much greater ease. Recent examples of films using the digital intermediate process include films with significant image manipulation (The Aviator), films with numerous effects like (Kingdom of Heaven), and films with neither (The Interpreter).

Why would someone resist this convenient technology? For one, it adds massive expense and considerable time to a film that ordinarily would be printed without effects. For another, many complain that films that have been through a digital intermediate are aesthetically inferior to optical/chemical methods. The greater the changes wrought in the digital realm, the more digital-looking of an image (with distinctive cross-hatching and loss of highlight and shadow detail) you are left with. And nearly all digital intermediates currently conducted are scanned at two thousands lines, a noticeable loss in resolution from traditionally printed 35mm. The inevitable move to four-thousand-line scanning, however, may permanently seal the fate of purely chemical post-production.

Perhaps the most hotly debated innovation is digital image capture. The established aesthetic is one of photo-reactive chemical emulsion, a look that cannot (and almost certainly will not) be fully imitated by an electronic chip. Despite what some advocates claim, digital video may one day look sharper or even “better” than film, but it will never look the same as film. It can, however, come close, and the vast majority of viewers who watch recent digitally photographed movies like Star Wars and Sin City on televisions almost certainly perceive no aesthetic difference between digital and chemical photography. However, is not the point to resuscitate the theatrical experience?

In a film that does not employ heavy and consistent computer animation, why would a filmmaker embrace the aesthetics of digital video? On a low-budget scale, cost is certainly a factor. A high definition camera is about as expensive to rent as a 35mm camera, but its tapes are about 10% as expensive as film stock. Also, film processing costs and (potentially) digital transfer costs are saved; the digital tape has a ready-to-edit image already recorded. Other potential benefit stems from this “real-time” nature of image capture. A monitor attached to the camera can show the director (and actors and producers and caterer) exactly what the recorded image will look like; when shooting film only the cinematographer knows how the lit set will translate to final product. This allows greater visual input, but it also can be a source of substantial delay (same pot, more cooks).

Yet, these conveniences hardly matter to a major film production. Most directors hire the best cinematographers precisely because they trust them to provide the best image. Film stock costs are extremely minor in a large film budget—a hundred million dollar film might save two or three million by recording to tape. So at least as the technology currently stands, there is no reason to expect a dramatic shift in this direction. Rodriguez, Lucas, Coppola, Cameron, and Jackson held a prominent press conference touting the future of 3-D digital filmmaking, but even if it matches their accolades, Lucas is applying the (allegedly) revolutionary process to the very first Star Wars movie, implying that digital image capture is not, in fact, necessary for the 3-D magic they herald.

So, if you’ve made it this far: the future of digital intermediate has arrived, that of digital projection is generally desired by economically improbable, and that of digital video recording the biggest question mark. But it’s clear that if cinema is to be saved, it will take more than ones and zeros.