The Digital Fact Book - Quantel

Digital BetacamSee: BetacamDDigital CinemaRefers to the digital distribution and projection of cinema material. With nearly all films nowusing the DI process, the next step is to distribute and replay digital material. Thanks tothe DCI’s Digital Cinema System Specification (July 2005), a set of standards is in placeand many thousands of cinemas have already been converted to digital. Installationsstarted in the USA and Europe is following.The digital cinema chain includes DCI-compliant equipment for mastering which includesJPEG 2000 encoding and encryption, and players and digital film projectors using usuallyusing DLP, D-ILA and other technologies at the cinemas. These allow high quality viewingon large screens. The lack of all-too-familiar defects such as scratches and film weave –even after a few showings – has its appeal. Besides quality issues, D-cinema introducespotential new digital methods of duplication, security and distribution as well as moreflexibility in screening. In addition, stereo cinema (a.k.a. 3D) is easy to set up and presentusing just one ‘film’ projector (not two), along with a left and right eye selective viewingsystem. This is having further implications with trials of live 3D events screened in cinemascreating new business models in the media industry.See also: DCI, DLP-cinema, D-ILA, SXRDDigital cinematographyShooting movies with digital cameras – not film. This growing practice generally makes useof cameras designed specifically for the purpose. These differ from the television applicationin that the full range of brightness captured by the image sensors is offered at the outputas raw data, allowing color grading, format changes, etc. to be executed as a part of thedigital intermediate process.Television cameras are designed to worklive, and so they includefront-end processing for gamma correction, set-up for the required color look and clippingto suit home viewing conditions.The first digital cinematography cameras were adapted from HDTVequipment with maximumimage size of 1920 x 1080 and run at 24P. The new generation is built for the cinematographymarket offering raw data output of wide exposure range images currently up to 4K size orslightly bigger e.g. 4520 x 2540 for the Red One camera.See also: VFRWebsites: www.panasonic.com/pbdswww.thomsongrassvalley.com/products/cameras/viperwww.red.comwww.arri.com60