In simple terms digital cinema works by bringing together traditional IT networks and then delivering the binary information into a modified projector.
Many films are being ‘captured’ (filmed) using digital cameras and then edited digitally on computer. With digital cinema, instead of these digital files being transferred back to film, they are delivered as encrypted files to cinemas. At the moment delivery of digital cinema content is via a hard drive which is then copied on to a server before it gets played out into the auditorium. Eventually it is likely that the delivery of a weeks film to a cinema will be sent out either via satellite or via telephone cables (variations on the internet) and the content will sit on a central cinema server.
Now if this all sounds a little bit complex, hopefully the links below should start to help make more sense of it. Dolby’s Digital Cinema Demonstration on the Dolby website has a very good example of how digital cinema works. Wikipedia’s pages on Digital Cinema are very comprehensive and include some great external links, along with some description of the ecnomics involved. Other examples and descriptions can be found on these sites, which are worth having a look at:
- Kodak Digital Cinema — An Overview
- How Stuff Work’s desription on Digital Cinema
- DLP has a very good video explaing how it all works including the chip.
Digital Cinema Initiatives
The Digital Cinema Initiative LLC (DCI) “was created in March, 2002, and is a joint venture of Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros. Studios. DCI’s primary purpose is to establish and document voluntary specifications for an open architecture for digital cinema that ensures a uniform and high level of technical performance, reliability and quality control”.
Wikipedia: Digital Cinema Initiatives