The Reel Is Gone

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Two men stand by a shimmering lake. One is a journalist intent on exposing a government scandal, the other a source nervously feeding him a scoop. It's a remarkable scene from the Danish political thriller King's Game — not for what happens, but for how it looks. The lake is such a cool, vivid blue, you feel you could reach out and dip your hand in it. The image is so sharp, the colors so clear, you can make out the subtle pinstripes on the journalist's suit. By the time it ended its run at the Curzon cinema in London's Soho in October, the film had played every day for more than a month — but not once did it shudder, skip or pop out of focus.

This picture-perfect vision comes courtesy of a brand-new digital cinema system, a combination of high-tech projector and computer server that could one day kick celluloid out of the projection booth for good. The old mechanism ran 3,600 m of delicate 35-mm film through a series of giant reels. Every screening added another layer of blips and blotches to the film. The new system plays the movie from the server at the touch of a button. And because the film is not on film — it's stored as a digital data file instead of being printed on strips of celluloid — the quality never degrades. Shown by a digital projector, every movie, whether it's a grainy, black-and-white indie drama or a blockbuster killer-thriller, looks exactly as the filmmaker intended. Every time.

The digital system at the Curzon is one of 238 being installed in movie theaters across Britain and Northern Ireland over the next two years by the government-backed U.K. Film Council (ukfc). It's the start of the world's first large-scale rollout of digital cinema systems, and leads the way for similar changeovers in the rest of Europe, Asia and the U.S. The goal: to bring the moviegoing experience into the digital age. Computer technology was the biggest thing to happen to the movies since color, and it has already permeated most of the filmmaking process. Special effects, editing and post-production are often done digitally, while more and more films are being shot on digital equipment. So why are we still watching movies the way we did 100 years ago?

The movie-house revolution was supposed to start in 1999, when George Lucas released Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace and set up special screenings to show how much better the film looked playing on a digital system. But few in the industry followed his lead, fearing that fast-advancing technology would make the equipment obsolete the moment it was taken out of the box. Nor could anyone decide who should pay for it — cinemas, studios or distributors. Six years later, just over 400 of the world's 120,000 projection booths use digital.

That could soon change. The kick-start came in July, when seven major Hollywood studios published a 176-page document that sets out the minimum acceptable technical standards for everything from playback speed and color contrast to audio quality and security encryption. It was a call for the industry to go forth and digitize, safe in the knowledge that any equipment that meets the specs will stay relevant longer than most actors' careers.

As for who ultimately foots the bill, the ukfc has side-stepped the issue for now by pouring $20 million from national lottery receipts into its trial digital systems, which cost around $100,000 each, compared with $30,000 for a conventional system. "The ukfc broke the mold in terms of actually doing something, as opposed to just talking about it," says Richard Nye of Canada-based projector manufacturing firm Christie, which will provide almost 200 of Britain's new projectors.

But paying for ongoing costs, such as transferring films from 35-mm to digital, encoding them and getting them to movie theaters, calls for more creative solutions. Avica, which makes servers, wants to digitize all 500-odd screens in Ireland using private funding. In its bid to convert 500 screens across Europe by 2007, Belgian firm XDC will charge theater owners a small monthly fee and make up the difference itself. And at Disney, which recently installed 84 digital projectors in the U.S. to show a 3-D version of its big-buzz animation Chicken Little, senior vice president of technology Chris Carey says compromise is key: "Exhibitors, distributors and technology providers can all make some contribution to the cost of the infrastructure and advance the art."