The EDCF Guide to ALTERNATIVE CONTENT in Digital Cinema

Early Alternative Content
Production and transmission vehicles at the Metropolitan
Opera occupy every legal parking space on three city blocks
with seven stagehands hurriedly coiling cable out of sight. A
long portion of any of the intermissions is always a wide shot
of the opera-house auditorium with a countdown clock.
Cinema audiences need longer breaks between programming
than do home audiences.
International Considerations
Televising an opera is expensive, so the larger the audience
the better. From the start, therefore, the Met sent the modern
transmissions to cinemas outside the United States. That has
posed two major issues: standards and subtitling.
Due to available equipment and broadcasting
agreements with U.S. public broadcasters, the Met's operas
are acquired at the U.S. standard of 59.94 images per second.
Unfortunately, some of the receivers used by cinemas
outside North America do not support that rate. Rather than
change all of the receivers, the Met uses motion-compensating
HD frame-rate conversion.
The first live television subtitles appeared on the Live
from Lincoln Center broadcast of New York City Opera's
Barber of Seville in 1976. All Met television shows have been
subtitled since 1977, and a system of individual displays with
restricted-angle filtering allows each audience member in the
opera house to opt to see titles or not. The first cinema transmissions
were sent with
English-language subtitles
to cinemas in the U.S.,
Canada, and the UK and
with no subtitles to Japan,
where Japanese-language
subtitles were added prior
to projection. In the middle
of the first season of
Met cinema transmissions,
German-language subtitles were added on short notice.
A second character generator, with a second operator
(bilingual in German and English) was added, along with
a second subtitlist, a second video keyer, a second motioncompensating
HD frame-rate converter, another encoder, and
more transmission paths, including another across the
Atlantic Ocean. When more languages were required, it was
clear that a different system would be needed. The Met has
worked with Screen Subtitling on the development of a live,
multi-language, high-definition DVB Subtitle system. The system
allows last-moment changes in all languages, multi-language
proofreading, title skipping, direct video keying for the
English-language North American feed, and more, including
the ability simultaneously to send test subtitles with language
identifications to the cinemas, rehearse subtitles with the
director, and proofread and correlate the multiple languages.
It is still being optimized as this is being written to improve its
capabilities. Until HD DVB Subtitle receivers are generally
available (and have been installed in all cinemas taking the
DVB Subtitle signals), the Met inserts the subtitles into the pictures
within the compressed domain to avoid additional
decode-encode stages with associated image degradation.
ASI signals are distributed to each language's subtitle inserter.
Individual Cinema Considerations
The Met cinema transmissions are seen in hundreds of cinemas
and arts centers and even on 19 cruise ships in international
waters. Different reception, projection, and sound systems
are used. More significantly, there are different settings.
For pre-show advertising, for example, auditorium
lighting is usually on, so projector brightness might be boosted
to compensate. Sound, conversely, might be reduced in
level. Those settings need to be changed for the operas.
Before each opera, therefore, the Met transmits extensive test
material including lip-sync identification, portions of different
operas with both bright and dark scenes, and subtitles identifying
languages. The test transmissions allow projectionists to
verify reception and settings before the start of the opera
"walk-in" period (the sights and sounds of the opera house
filling up as the cinema auditorium fills up).
Mark Schubin
SMPTE Fellow and multiple-Emmy-award winner Mark
Schubin first worked on cinema television in 1967 and
is engineer-in-charge of the media department of the
Metropolitan Opera.
Thanks to the Metropolitan Opera for permission to use
their historic photo material.
10