#Cinema grade film projector movie#
#Cinema grade film projector update#

''It still takes from 4 to 10 hours to prepare and test the digital print prior to its first screening,'' he said. Pokorski of Pacific Theaters says he does not believe that eliminating the film-preparation tasks will necessarily translate into lower labor costs. Beyond the price of the projector would be the cost of the satellite dishes or high-speed transmission lines needed to receive the digital file, as well as an investment in the automated theater management systems to connect and control the entire operation.īut Mr.

And because it is a new technology, its effective life is unknown. But a feature-film-grade digital projector is expected to cost as much as $150,000, at least initially. A typical 35-millimeter projector, they say, costs $30,000 and lasts up to 30 years. The way the theater owners see it, the costs would not offset any benefits.

#Cinema grade film projector movie#

At that rate, a 2,000-print domestic release, common for a typical feature film, costs about $2.4 million in duplication costs, according to Screen Digest, a British research firm, which estimated that the movie studios spend a total of $1.36 billion a year to produce and distribute prints worldwide. Throughout the world, fewer than 200 cinemas in some two dozen countries are using digital projectors to show movies - with most of the machines paid for by the manufacturers for test-marketing purposes.Īesthetics aside, the exhibitors say that the cost-benefit analysis comes down too much in favor of the studios, which could save a couple of million dollars on each movie they release if they could send it to theaters as digital files - whether by satellite, or high-speed network lines, or on hard drives - rather than shipping film copies that can cost $1,200 each. In all, fewer than 80 cinemas in the United States have movie-quality digital projectors - some of the others having been installed experimentally by another emerging competitor, Boeing Digital Systems, and the rest by theater owners. So far, the Galleria's digital system is one of only 39 that the supplier, Technicolor Digital Cinema, has installed around the country as an experiment, at no charge to the theater owners.

#Cinema grade film projector update#

A big sticking point is the standoff between theater owners and Hollywood studios over who will pay to update the nation's 35,000 projection booths. But economics and industry politics, as well as continued disagreements over technical formats, have delayed the long-predicted digital revolution in movie theaters. One might think that a crowded theater and higher ticket sales are all the evidence a multiplex owner would need to be persuaded that digital projectors are worth adopting. The theater's newspaper ads note when a film is showing in the digital format, and ''our grosses are as much as 40 percent higher when we screen a film digitally,'' Mr. ''Given a choice between watching a 35-millimeter print or a digital file of the film, customers prefer the digital version,'' said Jerry Pokorski, executive vice president and head film buyer for Pacific Theaters, which operates the 16-screen movie complex in Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley. That is because the film was projected digitally, the images fed not from a five-foot-diameter reel of 35-millimeter film, but from a computer hard drive, and beamed onto the screen using a projector without any moving parts.įilmgoers evidently like what they see. Instead of the traces of dust and scratches, and the slight shaking of the image that is perceptible at many screenings, they were looking at a picture that is pristine, sharp and steady. Moviegoers who recently saw the Johnny Depp film ''Once Upon a Time in Mexico'' at the Pacific Sherman Oaks Galleria 16 cinema here may have noticed that something was different.