Ugh... Raindance... I just got a chance to read that article - everyone else seems pleased with the idea of theatres going digital. I'm not.
Digital audio - I'm all for... the bandwidth requirements for that we've been able to provide for years (~1.4 Mb/s for stereo) but video still has to be seriously compressed, both for player/pipe bandwidth and for media capacity. Uncompressed video (completely uncompressed, though Betacam gets around this by running the color info at half the video subcarrier - see also:
4:2:2) at standard TV video resolution requires ~31.0Mb/s (video only), and I would sincerely hope that they would use a much higher video resolution (I'd rather not be looking at pixels the size of my torso!)... and IMAX? Fuggedaboutit, to carry their 65mm negs at their rated resolution, you'd need something that could pump out 4320Mb/s, which would fill up your huge home hard drive in a minute and a half, and require it to spin at ~216000 RPM.
So in the end, we'll end up with more MPEG-looking compression, which is fine for adult web sites but terrible for theatre/home theatre viewing. More
macroblocks and
group of pictures creepy crawlies - oh joy!
About the only benefits of digital delivery of new movies are lowered costs to the studio (more money for Universal and Touchstone!) and for the viewer - no jump or weave (vertical and horizontal image shake, respectively) but at the cost of a pixelated image with crawling blacks and blocks of colour.
Bren R.
