India's Bollywood Opts for Low-Cost Digital Cinema

Makarand writes "While Hollywood is yet to figure out who will pay for the costly $100,000 digital projectors required for the digital roll-out of films, the Mumbai (India) based film Industry (called Bollywood) is settling for cheaper projectors of a bit lesser quality available at one-third the price, to proceed with their digital roll-out. Industry officials call this cheaper version of the digital cinema the 'E-Cinema', in contrast to the 'D-Cinema' which Hollywood is waiting for. Over 1000 films are made each year in India and just 1 film in 12 makes a profit. Transporting conventional celluloid prints to remote towns gives video pirates plenty of time to copy and make prints. Digital cinema will cut down on piracy and help the industry to increase its profits."

only 1 in 12 makes a profit?

[Russ Nelson]

Only 1 film in 12 makes a profit? Perhaps the films are not intended to make a profit, but instead are money laundering?
-russ

reason for less piracy

[vasanth]

The reason the digital system will reduce piracy is, in India movies are usually copied while moving the film tape (reel) from one place to another.. For example a movie released in a particular city might just have one reel and it has to be shared between cinemas and are exchanged on a show to show basis...

Lagaan

[Cybertect]

Awesome. I loved it.

And it's about cricket. :)

I've seen several.

[CyricZ]

I have seen Bollywood films such as Mashooka, Saathiya, and Yeh Dil, amongst others. While I'm not a fan of American cinema, I think I am even less of a fan of Indian cinema. I found their films less than entertaining. The plots often lacked originality, and the filmmanship was subpar. They're often billed as being professional-quality, but the editing, audio and the general direction was often quite bad.

They are lacking overall, especially when compared to the masterpieces that regularly come from mainland Europe. Not that I'm suggesting every European movie is better. But if you pick one at random, the European one will most likely be far better done, the quality of the acting will be much greater, and it will be far more coherent.

If there's one good thing about the Bollywood films, especially compared to Hollywood ones, is that they're far less commercialized. That is, they're not plastered with ads for Coke, for instance.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:only 1 in 12 makes a profit?

[erikharrison]

It's also notable that a 1 in 12 statistic is not as far off of american cinema as you would like to believe.

Re:Decrease Piracy?

[shawb]

I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of watermarking showed up in DVD's soon.

This is actually pretty unlikely for the near future. Commercial DVDs are generally stamped on a die rather than burned like a CD-R; I'm not quite sure, but I assume burning a DVD would take at least ten minutes on home equpment and this could probably be cut down a little, but one minute or even thirty seconds would probably be too much time on industrial presses. And the machinery required for burning high volumes would be much more complex and error prone than stamping. Stamping greatly reduces the cost and increases the durability of high volume runs, but pretty much ensures that every copy is identical, so watermarking would not be realistic, AFAIK. As for the small volumes sent out for promo copies and advance screeners, those could realistically be burned, and so watermarking those makes some sense and that is where you hear about this being done.

Re:Do you have any proof?

[sonamchauhan]

Here's a better article:
http://www.bollywhat.com/darkside.html [bollywhat.com]

(As we Indians say: "Google zindabad" [google.com] long live google) :-P

Missing the Point

[AppleFever]

Everybody is missing the point here. The point is not that they are fighting piracy, but changing the way feature films have always been made and shown. If anybody has even taken a film history class, you would realize the effect film has on the audience, compared to ordinary digital. If you are going for a certain effect, you will use film. Film is far superior to watch than digital.

The real issue here is the industry is cutting costs, while making us think it is better. We will all remember the days when we used to use real 35mm prints and how much better it was. A film projector projects nothing more then it projects a picture. Most of the time, black is on the screen rather than a picture. Digital projectors don't do this.

Film is expensive, it is hard to work with, and it becomes costly to edit and reproduce and distribute. But we don't care about that. We should be concerned with the inferior replacement of film by digital. That's the difference between going to a theater and popping in a DVD at home. The film experience.

Major stars? Try Amitabh Bachchan

[felila]

The U.S. isn't the whole world. Bollywood movies regularly crack the top ten lists in the UK, are extremely popular in the Arab world, and have many devoted fans in Russia. In a recent UK poll, Amitabh Bachchan showed up as THE top movie star. Bollywood is developing much more of a following in the US as well. Even if you don't have an Indian cinema or an Indian grocery-spice-video shop in your area, you can sample the films through Netflix. After a while ... they kinda grow on you.

Re:hollywood + bombay

[Anonymous Coward]

Mollywood is already in use for Malayalam films made in the South (usually Madras); Tollywood for Bengali films (from Tollygunge, a neighbourhood in Calcutta); Kollywood for Tamil films made in Madras (from Kodambakkam, a locality where most of the studios were originally located); and Gollywood for Telugu films (Golt + Kollywood - it's a little complicated to explain).

They're giving what their audience wants.

[TheLink]

"Their target audience doesn't want to see realism, or even something down to earth. They want to see love stories where a poor person is escalated into another caste because their lover (not in the literal sense) is wealthy. They want to see 20 exotic locations that they will never get to physically visit, all compressed into a single movie, even though there is no reason whatsoever within the plot or storyline to visit 20 different locations"

Y'know, I'm not a impoverished Indian villager, but I don't want pay money to see day to day stuff either.

Why should I pay money to see dark movies about the bad guy winning, or stupid violence when I could just turn on the TV and watch the news.

And if I wanted cynicism, there's plenty of it nowadays for free.

Say all you like about movies like "Finding Nemo" but those do make money, it makes me wonder why Hollywood makes the usual movies they do - if they're really interested in profit. Do they have some sort of agenda or something?

At least Bollywood is making what their target audience wants (or will at least settle for). Whereas just look at this year's lack lustre stuff from Hollywood.

Movies made by heartless accountants or executives or committees?

Seems almost like either there has to be some Emperor's New Clothes syndrome somewhere (Yes sir, the movie will be a hit), or they are intentionally doing this.

Re:Major stars? Try Amitabh Bachchan

[arun_kyahoo.com]

Please, if you actually believe the accuracy+validity of those polls, then I have a bridge I can sell you in Brooklyn. They steal movie story lines left and right, and make them so ridiculous, it not even funny or they are "inspired". At least acknowledge that they are based on a previously released movie instead of claiming it was your own idea. Why can't they simply get rid of the stupid songs and shit have the movie only. You can easily do that with a DVD nowadays. Its ridiculous having to skip through 50-60% of the movie.