Hands up anyone who’s ever been to a movie where the image was out of focus, scratched or had lots of visible ‘pops’? That’s everyone then. The days of movies arriving on film reels and played on dodgy old projectors could be coming to an end in the coming years as Hollywood agrees to go digital. For the first time the major studios have agreed on something through the industry consortium, Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), and will start distributing movies digitally. Movies will be encrypted and sent via the Net to each cinema where it would be decrypted onsite. The reason for the shift is money, of course. Studios are hoping to save almost $1bn – the cost of sending out film reels across the world. After three years, version 1.0 of the requirements and specifications for digital cinema have arrived in a mammoth 176-page document. Directors including James Cameron, George Lucas and Robert Rodriguez are already jumping for joy at the news and singing the praises of digital movies. Cameron’s Battle Angel Alita (pictured) will be a live/CGI digital version of the popular Manga comic and anime series. We should be jumping for joy too since it means no more movies in ‘FuzzyVision’. However, cinemas will need to upgrade to servers and digital projectors which will cost from £30,000-£70,000 per screen. As you can imagine, neither the studios nor the cinema owners have agreed on who should foot the bill. Good articles in Wired and the LA Times about what it will all mean.
  Movies