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Titan AE Distributed Digitally 217

Posted by CmdrTaco from the but-can-they-beam-it-to-my-living-room? dept.
Jett sent us something interesting about Titans AE (a film that looks so cool, I just hope it doesn't suck). Apparently they are transmitting it digitally over the Internet from the studio to an early screening at a tradeshow. It will never touch film, and it'll mark the first time that a hollywood movie will be shown in a real theater, transmitted over the net, and never touching film. Not real time, tho -- it's getting downloaded first: 800x faster then a modem, 4 hour download time, so that's what, a terabyte?
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Titan AE Distributed Digitally More

Titan AE Distributed Digitally

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  • I mean, given the studio's thing, I betcha it will be, even though it's over a private line...
    ---
  • It's probably not compressed at all. I can't
    wait for more and more of this type thing.

    I'm sick of going to movies and seeing flecks on
    the screen from a poor print, which only gets worse the more it's played.
  • Maybe the first exclusively digital, but Disney's Dinosaur was also shown in digital at some theaters.

    ---------------------------------
  • if it never hits film, you can't snag it and run at the theater. hope their bandwidth is up to it.
  • When I first read this article I didn't see that it was actually going over the internet, although it does sound like a VPN. Somehow on first read I missed that. So please don't flame me to read the article :)
    ---
  • For the Atlanta screening, the 90-minute movie will be projected after it has been downloaded from Burbank rather than shown simultaneously with its transmission over the Internet. ''Real-time'' projection is effectively prevented by the sheer size of the computer file containing the movie -- 50 gigabytes, which is roughly 20,000 times larger than a typical MP3 music file, Schroeder said.

    Around 50 gig in less then 4 hours? Gotta love that.

  • Isn't this the same way George Lucas plans to distribute Star Wars II?
  • I wonder if they're pleased with this. "Look, full length movies CAN be downloaded over the net (though your honor, please disreguard the need for the specialized connection/equipment/etc)."
  • One of the major production costs of distributing a movie is making the copy of the movie. Say, $2K a copy for 2000 theatres and you start talking about real money. Digitally transmitting the film directly to the theatre saves this cost, as well as other benefits. Can you imagine a film with an offensive scene being instantly edited and redistributed for the next day's showings?
  • I live in Atlanta...hope my pr0n bandwitdh isn't affected.
  • Considering all the infrastructure needed to do this "transmission", and the fact that it will still be a four hour download, I can't help thinking that it might have just been easier to courier over a disk array or a server.

  • Movie theater adoption (Score:3)

    by Denor ( 89982 ) <denor@yahoo.com> on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @06:37AM (#1022422) Homepage
    The digital projector alone costs about $100,000, not to mention the added price of a special screen, sound system and computer equipment needed to download and show ``Titan A.E.'' in digital format.

    I read this same story from a different paper (I don't recall offhand, otherwise I'd add a link) and one thing that story mentioned was the above quote - and the fact that movie studios were balking at it.
    Essentially, what this does is shift cost from the movie studios (putting the movie to film and shipping it everywhere) to the ordinary theaters (cost of new projectors, maintainance on fancy new computers). The owners of the aforementioned ordinary theaters were not pleased about this.
    All said, I think it's a great thing to see distribution go digital, but - unfortunately - there's always a downside.
  • ...Jack Valenti doesn't get wind of this...He might file suit!
  • Any indication why they aren't trying realtime? Does the distributor know they can't do it, or are they just worried they might screw up?
  • Oh, great, wonderful...the MP3 file is now an industry standard for comparision.

    THAT IS JUST WRONG

    I mean really, their compearying a lossy audio
    scheme to a probably less lossy ( if at all )
    video scheme ( wonder what format it is in, no
    i haven't read the article )

    Ucky.
  • Of course it's a PR stunt. They pretty much say that right in the article:

    "We're showcasing tomorrow's technology today."

    Reminds me of the whole idea behind the EPCOT center...
  • Geez, I wish he had put this up in his story...

    Afterearth.com [afterearth.com]

    The imdb link is

    us.imdb.com/Title?0120913 [slashdot.org]

    Unfortunately the official site requires Flash AND Quicktime, so I can't see the darn site here at work (On my Sun Ultra60)

  • Its not that impressivwe, about 3.5 MB/s. It'd probably be far cheaper just to FedEx hard drives to the theatres.
  • I particularly like the part that states that Titan A.E. features the voice of "Matt Demon".
  • The article said its the first movie sent over the internet to a theater to be shown. Not that it was the first shown digitally and its definatly not going to be the first exclusively digital movie.

  • hello (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @06:40AM (#1022431)
    hello i cant wait to see this except i live in zaire. here we only have a 1200 baud uucp link to the itnernet so by my calculations i should see the film by early 2008. it will be good.

    sihg boaj
  • Wow, now even the posters aren't reading the articles.... The movie is about 50GB

  • I wonder how long it will take before some twelve year old posts the movie to a server in Sealand?

  • Interesting. Is there really any benefit from transmitting this rather that shipping cell? Security? Or is it just a PR gimmic?

    ...

    I have been anticipating this movie since my son and I saw the first trailers for it last year (think when we saw Iron Giant). Looks really cool, and I'm taking my son to see this the first weekend it comes out. (yah, I get burned once in a while seeing something before friends give me their recommendation, but usually it works out)

    On a side note, ever notice how the movie studios release different trailers and teasers that paint different pictures of the movie? The first 15-second teaser showed mostly space shots and had classical music. Then the next one I saw on TV showed the animated characters with a song by Creed. The latest one I saw in the theater seems to focus more on the evil aliens and has what sounds like the soundtrack from that James Spader, Kurt Russel, Egyptian-like Movie (uh... oh yeah -- Stargate).

    This seems to happen all the time. You see a trailer for a movie with a certain mood created by the clips and the music. Then you get to the theater and the soundtrack is all different from what you were expecting. I've had conversations with my wife about this -- do they plan this to set expectations based on how individuals associate with music they recognize? I can't remember any movies I've seen (maybe except some Disney flicks with Elton John tunes) where the trailers had any of the actual score.
  • So, now I can just tap into the lines and snag the data...wait, a terabyte? Whoa...that's going to take a lot of floppies!
  • A 50 megabyte file sent across Cisco's network in 4 hours works out to about 3.5 MegaBytes (Not MegaBits) per second. FYI
  • sod tv on demand how about movies on demand.

    get down the cinema and choose which film you want not what's showing.

    might have to book in advance and make it movie with the most votes get's shown this week or something like that but there's an opportunity there.

    I would go to the pictures if they were showing some films I never saw there.

    like, er Mad Max
    and well i'm sure I could think of some if there was a menu system!
    .oO0Oo.
  • One of the recent computer animation films (Toy Story 2, perhaps?) was shown entirely digitally at the Odeon in Leicster Square, London.

    It all went pear shaped and they had to revert to film, apparently.

    Anyone know what i'm talking about? Links?

    ...j
  • I may seem paranoid for saying this, but, no matter how cool it is to see movies distributed digitally, it brings up serious censorship problems. As is shown with home video editing, it is a lot easier to edit a digital video than one on film. Say some theater owner decided he didn't want any scenes of violence in his theater. There goes half the movie. This is a really cool concept, but the censorship considerations are very large.

  • I've done some network packet traces on this sort of thing for a company that was digitally transmitting commercials to it's sales offices on the other coast. The problem was that the bandwidth required to send it was pretty massive, which made sending it overseas near impossible.

    Of course, try telling that to the marketing people. "We're sorry, but to send your 1GB file over a 640Kbps link at 60% utilization would take 2 days."

    So, when's the hack on DVD to come out? 8^)

    dc


    --
  • I'm guessing the pic is made of the RGB color gamut, which means the range of colors they can reproduce is only about 1/10th of what you can do on traditional cellulite.

    I'm also shocked they can do this in a 4 hour download. When you consider the incredibly high resolution those frames have to be rendered at, (probably 1200-2400 dpi-totally a guess) I would estimate a film like that would be in the range of 7-10 tetrabytes.

    tcd004

    Have you been to wwink's BLOG? [lostbrain.com]

  • 50 megabytes over 4 hours = 3.5 megabytes a second. So what does it do after the 14 odd seconds for the transfer is over??? Or is it 3.5 MegaBytes every 16.6 seconds???
  • "Around 50 gig in less then 4 hours? Gotta love that."

    Ah. That's no big deal. Metallica fans download more bits than that over a four hour time frame. (300,000 kicked off for activities within a 48 hour span of time, if only one MP3 per user that's 25,000 downlods in a 4 hour period and 50 gig is only 20,000 times larger than the average MP3)

    Of course, all those bits aren't going into the same pipe, but if each Metallica fan were to download his/her share of this movie they could each watch .0045 minutes, get together and try to piece it together -- kinda like reading an interview with Lars.

    carlos

  • I heard that this is precisely how they plan on distributing the sequel to "Hackers". Except that some scenes will be encoded. And you have to be a blind crypto-expert to decode 'em. And the government is going to attempt to disrupt transmission. And, in spite of all the technology SURROUNDING the movie, it'll still be unrealistic and just plain bad. Some things never change, eh?

  • According to Cisco's press release [cisco.com] they're using Qwest's fiber backbone and a bunch of Cisco routers and VPN products, with a whole bunch of other industry-buzzword products involved in the projection:

    "Once the TITAN A.E. file reaches the Atlanta theater, it will be stored on a QuVIS Inc. server and projected using a Barco/Texas Instruments DLP Cinema digital projector. Sigma Designs Group has built a state-of-the-art Tørus Compound Curve Screen and Eastern AcousticWorks has provided a customized digital audio sound system for the event."

    Groovy, eh?

  • Actually, I think "Lucas, George" gets the prize for being "first"... Star Wars, Episode one was mastered digitally and shown digitally in some limited spots -- there just aren't many places with digital projection gear.
  • Can we say... Publicity stunt?
  • I cant wait to see this and sit there while they are rebooting the projector. "Windows has detected a GPF in module roll_the_film.dll. Please contact the manager of the theater".
  • It's a 90 minute movie... it takes four hours to download... figure it out yourself.


    Don't criticise someone who is attempting to use free software for not using enough free software.
  • Digitally transmitting the film directly to the theatre saves this cost, as well as other benefits.

    I agree it can save money, up until someone decides to spend the time and effort to start stealing or digitally borrowing the movies. Not every movie theatre is going to have there own private line. At least not now. Well it's going to be encrypted, well laudy frickin da! Everyone knows encryption, (much like rules) was meant to be broken, and think of the rewards you can receive if that were to happen. Probably some jail time for some teenager in Europe, but for the rest of us?

    Also don't forget about all the controversy about can information be copyrighted? Movies aren't exactly a trade secret since everyone has access to them in a movie theatre... So if someone happens to steal this cartoon (which looks better than a lot of recent sci-fi movies) although it may be 50 gigs, it might be worth the price of a $250 dollar hard drive to view the current releases in the theatre from the 'privacy' of your own home...

    --my Dime and a Nickel

    Be mindful of the future,

  • It's probably not compressed at all. I can't wait for more and more of this type thing. I'm sick of going to movies and seeing flecks on the screen from a poor print, which only gets worse the more it's played.

    While you won't get the scratches and spots on a digital projection, you also won't get the same color gamut and saturation. I'm hopeful in the long run, and I look forward to actually get a look at it for comparison, but it's hard to imagine it's superior to film already.

    Right now film has excellent color and saturation, but is hampered by fragile media and 24 fps / 72 hz refresh. If they can get the colors right, and increase the frame rate, that would be a real breakthrough.

  • Yeah, what do you want?


    Don't criticise someone who is attempting to use free software for not using enough free software.
  • They still need a long way to go. Right now the projectors needed are very expensive, and they project less light than conventional projectors.
    This means a smaller viewing area right now than what you would have with a regular release. Thus you have better images, but at a smaller size. Like listening to LP's on a great stereo system, or CD's on a boom box.
  • What would you rather have them compare it to? Almost all of today's image/audio/video popular formats are lossy compression, so I imagine they just picked a format that every dumbass was familiar with. Besides, the mp3 quality difference is almost negligible.

    If you want to have a problem with something, have a problem with the shitty .ASF format, where they have sacrificed every semblence of quality video for a small file format.

    _________________
    JavaScript Error: http://www.windows2000test.com/default.htm, line 91:
  • Can't wait to be sitting in the movie theater and have some 15 year old kid pop up and voice his plans for world domination. Prolly won't be long before that happens I mean given the MPAA's DVD fiasco. It's amazing how poorly they seem to impliment some of the greatest achievements in technology.

  • I saw a digital projection of Dinosaur (Score:3)

    by tgd ( 2822 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @06:58AM (#1022456)
    I hope they do the same with Titan AE in the theaters that today have digital projectors.

    I was totally and completely blown away by it. Digital projection is to film what CDs were to cassette tapes. Once you've seen it, seeing optical film is just so... flat.
  • I'm gonna download Metallica's 56+ MB "Napster Begone" MP3 first...
  • I don't know...maybe just say 50 gigs? How about
    something like...that's 5 times the size of most
    consumer HDs ( figure 10gig is standard right now )

    something, it's just....MP3 isn't the end all
    be all of everything. It's like...hrm...if i
    say MP3 i'll sound cool. *shrugs*

    I'm in a ranting mood today :)
  • Never underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of tape speeding down the highway.

    That's one of my favorites, even if I have forgotten who said it...
    --
  • Although they didn't say explicitly in the article, it looks like the movie will only be sent and shown digitally at this screening in Atlanta. Judging by the comments made in the article, the cost is prohibitive for digital distribution because it costs too much for the equipment to show it and for the connection to download it. However, I'm sure that this is where theaters will go in the future. Perhaps, though, the film will be distributed to the theaters on some physical media so that a download is not required.
  • If I recall digital projection of movies has been discussed here before and those who've personally seen the digital StarWars have reported that the artifacts become glaringly obvious when projected across a 50 foot screen.

    More than anything it's the studios wanting to (a) do anything for a little extra attention in differentiating their film (b) save lots of money on the very expensive celluloid film.

    Wanna pay $20 for a movie ticket because the theatres have to upgrade thier equipment every couple years while the technology evolves?
    Anyone else in favor of a boycott of this ridiculous PR stunt? If they lose money on the stunt a few times maybe they'll wait until the technology is ready before shoving it into theatres and at our wallets...

    Just my $0.02

    P.S.> CmdrTaco: It's not a Terabyte, they say the movie is 50 GB. If the movie is 2 hours long then the playback rate is on the order of 7MB/s - that video hardware is more impressive than the download time.
  • True there are technical and economic problems to solve. But when they are solved, this will be the way that mass entertainment (dare I say information) will be distributed. I would think that they would own their own networks for distributing the films, as the sheer bulk of them would necessitate this. The films themselves will most likely be encrypted vis-a-vis DVD, where only the theatres can descrypt them for showing. Man, what a way to shut a theatre down - just expire their decrypt codes!
  • Meanwhile, the movie screen is blue...


    Don't criticise someone who is attempting to use free software for not using enough free software.
  • can I get that for my living room, please? I got a credit card I could put around $8,000 on :)
    ---

  • Re:Not the first... (Score:3)

    by tgd ( 2822 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @07:03AM (#1022465)
    The Starwars showing sucked. The resolution was poor at best (1024x768 stretched wide-screen, from what I remember), it flickered and was full of motion artifacts. Think AVI circa 1995.

    I saw Dinosaur at the Arizona Mills theater in Arizona two weeks ago in a 100% digital screening. My jaw dropped when the green "this preview is approved for all audiences" screen popped up. Its that amazing. No hint of flicker, no hint of pixelation, no motion artfacts, perfect focus. It kept getting better and better (the previews were digital, as well as the movie). You don't appreciate how annoying a 24hz flicker is until you see a movie without it.

    I'm not sure the resolution on TI's projectors, but it was at least HDTV resolution (1920x1080), and it was clearly not interlaced. I couldn't see any pixels until the credits were rolling, and you could see them on the curves of the letters where it was bright white on black. Other than that the image was nearly perfect.

    Rumor has it Dinosaur is showing here in MA out in Framingham. I'd recommend anyone who can see it on a digital screen see it. The movie isn't half bad, and experiencing digital projection for the first time is like seeing an IMAX film for the first time.
  • Ok, and to send a 50+G movie to the theater in anything near usable speed, you'd need a VERY expensive connection. At 2k$ per physical print, it doesn't cost anything to Fedex it across the country -- plus, you can make the money back by selling the frames. [You'd need about 5Mbps to transfer a 50G movie in one day -- that's about 4 T1s.]

    Personally, I like the idea of digital movies. However, it'll be hard to match the image quality of film without having to own part of Seagate, Quantum, AND IBM.
  • One of my problems with DVD movies (anime in particular) is analog-to-DVD mastering. When a studio has lost all their original prints, or only has final development film available, they loose a lot of quality when they transfer that film to DVD. It's like watching a film in a theater, which isn't the best image quality one could hope for.

    One of the reasons why I liked the anime series "Lain" as much as I did was because it was mastered straight from studio digital to DVD, so the image was super crisp and beautifull.

    Hopefully we'll be seeing more of this in animation and film.

    ***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
    ***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***

  • Any projectionists in the audience?

    I'm curious as to the projection quality of digital movies over traditional silver emulsions. While I'm sure that no lossy compression would be applied to a commercially projected film, what sort of projection technology are we talking about here. Hopefully nothing like the LCD presentation boxes we're using here at work. I can't imagine the image quality being anything near 35 or 70mm film stock.

    The other question I have to consider is film processing. I know that Ronin used a lab process to get that wonderful slightly blue, dark and washed out look. How well can that really be duplicated digitally?

    Guess this won't be moderated "Informative."

    Ushers will eat latecomers.

  • I can't remember any movies I've seen (maybe except some Disney flicks with Elton John tunes) where the trailers had any of the actual score.

    To add to that, I'm getting increasingly annoyed with movies that use Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" to build a dramatic trailer. I only know of one movie (Excalibur) that's actually used the music in the movie, but I've seen several that used it in trailers. It's a great piece, and perfect for the medieval/gothic/dramatic mood...I just don't get why they'd use it in trailers and not in the movie. If it works for setting a mood in the trailer, you'd *hope* that they'd want the same mood in the movie. Clearly that's not the case.

    On a side note: if you know your classical music, the occasional commercial can be very funny...a few years ago there was a running shoe commercial that had this very dramatic music behind an image of a runner....I always wondered what they were thinking when they put Verdi's "Requim" (mass for the dead) in that ad....not exactly sending the message they had hoped for...(The discerning dead choose Fila!)

  • Re:Measuring in at 50 gig (Score:3)

    by hattig ( 47930 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @07:10AM (#1022474) Journal
    50gbytes over 90 minutes is around 550Mbytes a minute, which is about 9Mb a second of imagery. If the film is being shown at 30fps, then that is 300kbytes per frame, so the film is compressed.

    A 4096x3072 (I imagine this is the required resolution to make the film not look blocky on a large screen like that) slide in 24 bits takes up 36Mbytes of memory, so that compression ratio of over 100:1 is very impressive. Even if the resolution was on 2048x1536 that is a compression ratio of 25:1 for film quality imagery.

    The equipment to show this stuff must cost a huge amount! And I bet you could plug a good computer in and play Quake, Unreal Tournament etc on the best computer games system in the world!

  • Toy Story 2 was shown in Orlando at the Pleasure Island 24 cineplex in an all-digital theater. It was the first feature film that was digital from start (the computer) to finish (the screen display with a big DLP projector). It was also shown at some other places that had digital projection systems.

    I saw TS2 in both formats, and the digital version was much sharper, had better color saturation, and had *no* defects.

  • I saw Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in a digital theater. They set up two theaters with digital projectors to demo the technology. Essentially, it's a lot like watching a DVD on a projection TV. The difference is that the projector has many times the resolution, and the player has many times the amount of data. If you looked back at the projector, you saw the three separate RGB lights.

    So was it better than film? Not much. Jar Jar still sucked, but there were absolutely none of the glitches you see (or hear) with film. If you happen to be viewing a film with a new print, it's about the same, but if you're viewing a film that's been showing for a week, you'll notice a lot of wear on film.

    Oh, and they had some guy come out and talk about the technology before the movie. I believe he said it was on an 800GB raid system. So if they're putting Titan AE on a 50GB disk, they've done a lot more compression. Either that, or some of the numbers are wrong.
  • I'm working on a digital film right now.. It's low-rez -The frames are 1k images (roughly 2 megs a frame) this is far lower than standard film rez.. By my math:

    2 megs a frame x 24 = 48 megs a second/2,880 megs a minute

    - so unless this film is just over 17 minutes long, it must be compressed- I'm just wondering what kind of compression they are using, and what the hit to quality is like - Unless my math is way off..
    -

  • This is one of the few cases where copyright has a good effect. Only the copyright holder can permit the editing of their movie, and hopefully they will refuse to do so.

  • It's not going across the Internet, just across "a typical fiber-optic network."

    According to the C|Net News.com [cnet.com] article:
    "Qwest will use a private connection to send the file, alleviating the possibility that hackers could disrupt the transfer of the movie."
    -----
  • These aren't all firsts. I saw The Phantom Menace at the AMC Burbank 14 on June 19, 1999 projected digitally. It was a special presentation (I still have the badge with next strap I got for it) and used the Texas Instruments DLP Cinema technology.

    Here's an excerpt from the back of the badge:
    "Welcome to the future of Cinema
    Texas Instruments is proud to present the first all digital showing of Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace(tm). Digital projetion replaces film projection for the first time ever in movie theatres equipped with DLP Cinema(tm) technology."

    After the presentation, I got to look at an example of the heart of the projector, and it was about the size of a large CPU with thousands of small mirrored surfaces on it.

    The only thing this Titan AE presentation might be the first of is Internet delivery of the source, but the rest of it has been done before.
  • from the article:

    The movie, set a thousand years in the future, features the voices of Matt Demon and Drew Barrymore as a pair of teenagers on a quest to save mankind after Earth has been destroyed by alien attack.

    Matt Demon? Paging Dr. Freud!

  • Given that the costs of hard disk storage has gone literally straight down in the last seven years (you can get a 75 GB ATA-66 IDE hard drive for around US$550!), I think if they do the encryption right, the days of celluloid film may begin its slow decline in popularity.

    Remember, unlike film, digital has these advantages:

    1. No worries about dust, scratches or damaged prints due to projector problems.

    2. Color saturation that is more consistent than film.

    3. The ability to encode multilingual dialogue audio AND subtitling on the same copy easily. And the audio will be digitally clear, too.

    Indeed, because of eliminating the need to make actual physical prints of the movie (which cost a LOT of money per copy and weigh a lot for multiple reels that encompasses a single movie), the whole issue of "regional" releases of blockbuster movies could be rendered moot. Imagine by 2005 when Star Wars Episode Three is released, they could do a simultaneous release worldwide because there will no longer be a need to strike prints and ship them worldwide--the original will be sent to theaters worldwide in 256-bit encrypted digital format.

  • Re:Not the first... - corrections (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    First, film projection has a 48Hz or 72Hz flicker rate, not 24Hz, depending on whether the theatre owner installed two-bladed or three-bladed shutters on his projectors.

    Second, Dinosaur (and, next, Fantasia 2000) is showing in DLP in several theatres, including the GCC Framingham 14 in MA (screen 9, the largest house). I saw it in DLP and saw the Star Wars screenings in DLP last summer in Secaucus, NJ. I was significantly less impressed with Dino than SW--Dino had way too much video-style edge-enhancement applied to the image, which made the picture "look" sharper than it otherwise would, despite the fact that it made the picture look "wrong" and the resolution of the DLP matrix is substantially lower than 35mm film.

    And who is going to pay for all of this equipment? Many theatres are still using Simplex and Century 35mm projectors that were built 40 years ago and still work beautifully when used with new lenses and adequately-sized lamphouses. Why should they go out and spend $100-400k (depending on whom you talk to) for a new machine that doesn't let them do anything more than they are doing right now for a small fraction of the cost?

    I do believe that DLP (or some similar technology is the future of film exhibiton, but I'm quite confident that it's "not there yet" in terms of image quality or cost effectiveness.
  • I'm sick of looking at avi's and mpegs with blocky flecks of color from compression, when are movie theatres going to fix this? Oh, wait... :)
  • Read that again. It's being transmitted over _an_ IP network, not the Internet. They are aparently using a dedicated connection provided by Qwest and are encrypting the transmission to ensure that nobody with physical access to the connection makes a copy while in transit.
  • This is not impressive.

    Qwest has done far better, as talked about recently on slashdot in "Qwest Achieves 100-Mile IP Round-Trip At 40Gb/sec" [slashdot.org]

    My only question is why is it going to take 4 hours? If Qwest has been able to do so much better than that in field trials, why aren't they using this opportunity to show their technology in the Real World(tm)? Especially since they claimed in the press release [qwest.com]:

    More than 750 studio quality streaming video channels can be transported simultaneously

    So why can't they do just one in less than 4 hours?

    BTW, Qwest had another press relese [qwest.com] today about their record breaking speeds.

  • Re:Wonder if it's encrypted? (Score:5)

    by orpheus ( 14534 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @07:58AM (#1022520)
    To me the interesting question is why it's being *transmitted* at all -- except as a technology demonstration. I'm not sure that this will turn out to be the best transfer medium. (Certainly not in this case, where there will be Titan AE execs at the showing, and any one of them could have carried 50Gb of HDD in a jacket pocket)

    Currently, it costs about $2K to make each theatre quality film print. The package weighs over 100 pounds, IIRC). Meanwhile a pair of 25GB HDDs costs under $500 in 1000+ quantities, and weighs a few pounds fully shock-insulated. (I'm sure studios will demand return of the HDDs, and reuse them)

    Properly encrypted transmission over data lines permits a high degree of security, but shipping a special HDD unit with *hardware* protection may be more secure from certain attacks. This is the method preferred for transfer of government and high level financial secrets -- and a blockbuster film has comparable dollar value!

    Envision an HDD with the file stored in a secure encryption, and hardware verification of (for example) the encrypted serial number of authorized theatre equipment. Equipment verification is crucial, because the decrypted datastream can be copied. Your HDD shouldn't play on anything but a self-verifying secured player.

    Yes, all this can be done in software, but there are significant weaknesses to self-contained (on media) software-only access control when the media itself is under the total control of the attacker.

    Incidentally, under software *or* hardware control the studio can assure license compliance: number of showings, seating capacity (Projector 1111 is in a 500-seat room, 1112 is in a 200 seat room, etc.), and other things theatre are interested in controlling.

    Maybe internet traffic won't lag every release day, when 2000 copies of a 50GB film (100 Terabytes) go out over the Net. Maybe they'll build additional secure capacity specifically for teh 50+ major studio movie releases each year (bandwidth which can be used for other things between releases) On maybe not...

    Courier- or carrier-delivery of Hardware-secured HDDs may not be glamorous, but it makes sense. If bandwidth-mediated transmission takes place at all, it should be limited to emergency replacement of damaged media, 'updates' 9as described by another poster) etc.

    That would be kinder, smarter, more efficient.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Perhaps the film board in Zaire could arrange to have it shipped directly on disk (with the movie's legal distributor, of course). Since the computer in Ziare only has a 1200 bps modem, I'm guessing you have a floppy drive and no CD-ROM. It would only take 36,572 floppy disks to send the movie. Problem solved.

  • Re:Wonder if it's encrypted? (Score:3)

    by ucblockhead ( 63650 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @08:14AM (#1022536) Homepage Journal
    As they say, the largest bandwidth that can be achieved is a 747 with a cargohold full of DVDs.

  • Re:Wonder if it's encrypted? (Score:3)

    by x1r0k3wl ( 134155 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @08:29AM (#1022545) Homepage
    As they say, the largest bandwidth that can be achieved is a 747 with a cargohold full of DVDs.

    Yeah, but latency is a bitch.

  • Re:TS2 and DLP (Score:4)

    by Golias ( 176380 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @08:30AM (#1022546)
    I saw TS2 in both formats, and the digital version was much sharper, had better color saturation, and had *no* defects.

    Of course, you are playing to the strength of digital projection when all you are showing is digitally-generated cartoons.

    The notorious film critic (and technophile) Roger Ebert has been tracking this for some time. When it comes to photographic images on a massive screen, film still beats the pants off current digital offerings... and better film processes been pattented that will even leave emerging digital formats in the dust, using retrofits of current projectors instead of forcing theaters to sink huge bucks into state-of-the-art digital gear.

  • A lot of times when people think they are seeing "flicker", what they are actually seeing is the result of the frames not lining up correctly, or snapping back into place while being projected. I seem to remember reading about a firm in California that found a way to modify existing projectors to avoid this, making images easier on the eyes, and edges much more well-defined.

    Anyone happen to remember the name of this design?

  • >The biggest problem with MaxiVision, as far as I
    >can tell, is that anything digital is
    >automatically *better* in most peoples eyes,

    Well, I can't speak as to the quality of maxivision, having never seen it myself. What I *CAN* say for certian is that the digital projections we have NOW are far superior to analog celluloid NOW.

    The problem with Maxivision, though, is dreadfully sluggish development. Maxivision is a relatively recent innovation in the analog film industry. But just HOW LONG has celluloid stagnated at the same old 35mm, 24fps, jittery, easily out of focus, rapidly detiorating film stock, tech level??? Seventy YEARS? LONGER?

    Meanwhile digital projection can be expected to advance according to some variant of Moore's Law (ie, improvement will be exponential, but the interval might not necessarily be 18 months).

    So assume that Maxivision is twice as good as digital NOW (and therefore at least four times as good as standard celluloid NOW). Epidode 2 is due in summer 2002 IIRC. By then, Moore's law will have gone through one and a half iterations. The digital print will, by that time be only marginally better than a Maxivision print.

    So, to make the math easier, lets assume that Maxivision actually offers a little better than 2x digital NOW, so that digital will just have caught up by Episode 2. Episode 3 is due in 2005. That's time enough for TWO FULL ITERATIONS of Moore's Law. That makes a digital projection of Episode 3 FOUR TIMES BETTER than the equivelent Maxivision print!

    Now, I KNOW that Moore's law doesn't necessarily correspond directly to a doubling of actual *performance*. And video processing and decoding might not keep the same 18 month interval of microprocessors. But the point still stands. Digital image technology advances on a (very steep) exponential curve, while analog film technology has advanced only linearly (and with a VERY SHALLOW slope as well).

    For whatever advantages Maxivision might have NOW, it just can't keep up.

    john
  • It's also worth noting that the independent film The Last Broadcast (oft compared to Blair Witch) was also distributed digitally last year to about 10 theaters across the country. I saw it in one and it rocked. from their website (http://tebweb.com/lastbroadcast/): The Last Broadcast was one of the first feature films to be cut entirely on a consumer-desktop PC. Using Adobe Premiere (and other audio/video processing software when needed), the filmmakers were able to create a broadcast quality image at a low price. In October of 1998, it made history when it became the first feature film to be theatrically released digitally via satellite to theaters across the U.S. ... no celluloid!
  • To add to that, I'm getting increasingly annoyed with movies that use Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" to build a dramatic trailer. I only know of one movie (Excalibur) that's actually used the music in the movie, but I've seen several that used it in trailers.

    The Omen also used it.

    The reason movies seldom use their own soundtracks in promotions is because the trailers are often made while the film is still in post-production. That's also why you sometimes don't see scenes from the trailer in the movie... it was filmed, but taken out of the final cut after the trailer was made.

    There are three reasons why the Carmina Burana is used so often:

    1) The movement that they use, "O Fortuna", is short. It's the perfect length for a commercial.

    2) It is dramatic and kind of frantic-sounding. The Carmina Burana are a collection of old European pagan songs, mostly about springtime, sex, and drinking, and are set to an 20th Centry post-romanticism score.

    3) Carl Orff is dead. There are no copyright license issues to worry about.

    The public domain angle really saved some cash in Excalibur, because they used Wagner music (mainly from "The Ring" and "Tristan and Isolde") for most of the movie, and the Carmina Burana for one scene. Recycling opera music is really cool if done right, and much cheaper than hiring John Williams.

  • I've seen the difference WITH MY OWN EYES between an analog film print and a digital projection OF THE SAME MOVIE.

    Yes, I was fortunate enough to live near one of the theaters that was showing Toy Story 2 digitally. I saw it on a standard film projection screen first, and saw the digital version a week or so later...

    So, what you are saying is that digital projection is a better format for showing digital cartoons.

    Not a very compelling argument.

  • I know for a while when I was selling CD players, most of the audio guys really didn't like the sound. Not rich enough.

    To the true "golden ears", the 80's era CD players did sound pretty bad, and it was assumed at the time that this was because of the poorly chosen sample rate of 44.1.

    As it turns out, crappy D/A conversion was responsible for most of the problems with the "digital sound" of early CD players. (Although, yes, they did sound better than the mass-produced cassette tapes that kids were buying back then.)

    These days, you can buy a Rotel CD player for about $350 that even really picky audiophiles will be happy with... but don't tell them they have to let go of their turntable any time soon.

    Anyone who says records are inferior has not listened to a Scheffield Labs album on a good system. They are comparing their CD boom box to their old Mickey Mouse portable record player.

  • "Ok, for the last time, moron:"

    Really? Promise? You are correct though. I am so dumb. Should have checked the article again instead of just using the 300,000 number and assuming one download per account since the article [slashdot.org] was very clear it was downloads they were monitoring:

    "It's very very simple. One of the -- when we monitored Napster for 48 hours three weekends ago, we came up with the 1.4 million downloads of Metallica music, there was one, one downloading -- one! of an unsigned artist the whole time."

    I am clearly no match for your dizzying intellect.

    carlos

  • Star Wars TPM: Actual footage blended with digital FX at photographic quality.

    Toy Story 2: A cartoon that was originally intended to be produced for a strait-to-video release.

    _Of course_ TS2 looked perfect in digital! It was a perfect reproduction of a digital cartoon.

    In TPM, the grass on the battlefield had to look like grass, not cartoon grass, real grass. You noticed the digital artifacts because you were actually looking at what was supposed to be an image of something. When watching the Toy Story movies, you _know_ you are watching computer animation, so your expectations are lower. Sheesh!

  • We don't have Free Software (in either sense of the word) because people decided to "liberate" copies of the commercial stuff.

    We have Free Software because ordinary software users (who also happened to be coders) like Linus and Alan and RMS and ESR and the wonderful BSD folks (even Theo) and Larry and Tom and Rusty and many others put their code where their mouth was.

    That's really the only way Free Media will succeed, too.

    Media "by the audience, for the audience and of the audience" will only succeed if the audience makes its own art. Napster-style appropriation gets us nowhere.

    The one thing that we _will_ have to overcome is the idea that artists must either be paid for their hour of work continuously for the rest of their natural lives[1] as the resulting work is used, or not paid for it at all.

    Before I get shouted down, I will say that I speak as a visual artist, coder, musician, and writer.

    There is a middle ground.

    It is becoming increasingly feasible for us to be paid for the work we do itself, like any other profession, rather than having to stand as perpetual toll collectors to the fruits of our labor.

    We're not there yet, but self-publication things like the (ill-named, IMO) "Street Performer's Protocol"[2], group comissions, certain types of subscription arrangements, and other systems that do not trample on the freedoms of the audience are becoming increasingly feasible.

    The requisite payment/micropayment and audience-gathering systems are are beginning to fall into place.

    We ought not to treat the audience like the enemy, and I think it is possible that we may not have to anymore.

    I, for one, plan on putting my art where my mouth is.

    ---

    [1] Copyrights on works published today run 96 years for publications by corporations or those published under a pseudonym, or 120 years for individuals otherwise. If the legislative decisions of the last four decades are any indicator, they will be retroactively extended even further.

    [2] http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_6/kelsey/i ndex.html - I highly recommend reading at least the first part of this essay; it addresses the very real implications of the current "malicious until proven innocent" approach that we have been obligated to take with copyright protection.
  • I love Apple. My G3 probably sees more use than all my other systems combines (especially now that I have a Linux dual boot on it). I also really enjoyed the Toy Story movie.

    I'm just baffled why people think that a digital cartoon is a good litmus of whether digital film projection can replace film.

    Show me something along the lines of "Lawrence of Arabia" on a digital prjector, and we will have something to discuss. Until then, all you are saying is that computers are good at rendering computer-generated images. Do you follow what I'm trying to get across here?

  • Re:Wave of the future... (Score:4)

    by aphrael ( 20058 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @09:53AM (#1022579) Homepage
    Can you imagine a film with an offensive scene being instantly edited and redistributed for the next day's showings?

    I'm *really* not certain that should qualify as a benefit. Sounds more like a nightmare to me --- both from the perspective of the director (who would have to watch his work being altered against his will) and from the perspective of an audience that likes thought-provoking films.

    More bland movies that say nothing interesting would be a depressing effect of digital transmission.
  • The area for the CSS keys is already burned out on any DVD-R blanks you could buy on the open market, meaning the resulting discs would not play on most (all?) DVD players.
  • I hope you are right, but in the mean-time, the hype of "pushing the envelope" could end up forcing a lot of small-town theaters out of business, if "digital only" becomes a reality before the hardware is cheap enough.
  • The industry is divided over this. Theater owners don't want to buy the equipment. One startup proposes to put in all the equipment and fibre at no charge to theaters, then collect a fee for each showing. Theater owners are terrified of being under the thumb of that distributor.

    Arguments continue over encryption, billing, standards, resolution, etc. A big question is whether the movie industry wants to go higher than HDTV 1080p x 24fps. (Some of the stuff shown so far isn't even 1080i). Nobody is happy about compressing video for theatrical presentation. There's also the worry that in a few years, after all the theater gear is installed, the technology will be obsolete.

    Anyway, Dinosaur is showing in digital projection using the TI moving mirror array projectors at a few major theaters. It looks good compared to 35mm 24FPS. But IMAX is far better.

  • As I see it, it has nothing to do with the particular movie involved - it's the TECHNOLOGY. Saying that a digital cartoon looks better on a digital projector is fine, however that in and of itself is not a valid basis for comparison. A statistical universe of 1 is insufficent. You need to see several different movies, of different cinematic types, in order to make an accurate, critical assessment.

    Perhaps we could devise a test suite of ~5 films (or clips) that would really test the capibilities of any given playback medium. TS2 plays to the strengts of digital projection, to be fair you'd have to include somthing that shows it's weaknesses, as well as clips that show the strengths & weaknesses of film
    "The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

  • Actually the audio system of film *IS* digital and very very good quality. It would be fairly trivial to add multilanguage audio tracks and ditally encoded subtitles onto film as-is; however, it would be incompatible with the current audio systems in theaters.

    In fact; about the subtitles at least; a lot of movies already DO have them encoded on the film. Some theaters offer small portable devices (like the trivia machines in bars) for deaf people to carry into the films to read the dialogue.

    ~GoRK
  • I'd be willing to bet my firstborn that they will also truck a copy of the movie over there on HDD's just in case the download craps.

    ~GoRK
  • ...it's getting downloaded first: 800x faster then a modem, 4 hour download time, so that's what, a terabyte?

    No, they said it was 50 Gbytes. 50 Gbytes * 8 bits/byte = 400 Gbits
    400 Gbits / 4 hr = 100 Gbits/hr
    100 Gbits/hr / 3600 secs/hr = 1/36 Gbits/sec
    1/36 Gbits/sec ~= 28Mbits/sec

    Hmm...somewhere between a T1 and a T3...

  • Re:Wonder if it's encrypted? (Score:3)

    by orpheus ( 14534 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @12:25PM (#1022603)
    I have worked in a secure government environment, and this is simply not the case. Dedicated encrypted network links are preferred for data transmissions. Courier service is a failover solution, and rarely uses anything other than paper.

    I was referring to genuinely sensitive material -- e,g, SAP, SCI, or my favorite, ORCON-designated. ORCON is exactly what the studios are tryng to do

    A 'secure facility' is a generic term meaning that it's hard for data walk out the door. It doesn't mean that the material you handle is particularly sensitive. If you were responsible for transfer of highly sensitive material, you would not blandly suggest transmitting 50GB to an unsecured facility like a theater! Ask your site AIS officer if s/he'd certify transmission of 50GB of SCI ORCON.

    Transfer of an entire 50GB database to a newly built or unsecured site (theater) is rarely, if ever, done by transmission. You can't use the common crypto algorithms (I had this same argument with a contractor who though triple DES was good enough -- even though DES variants have been specifically disallowed for classified material since 1975, when DES was released!

    For the *most* sensitive data 'hardware (which includes human) plus software security' is preferred over software-only access control. Even the most secure software-only one-time pad crypto requires that the OTP encrypting data (equal in length to the data encrypted) be transported by independent channels (never transmitted over any segment used by the later encrypted file). This is often done by courier-transported HDD or media.

    I nominate *you* for the job of generating 100 to 150Tb of OTP and delivering it in 50GB chunks by (independent) secure channels to 2000-3000 movie theaters, so that the ecryption can be SCI ORCON secure. But be quick about it! You have to do it for every film at the local 20-plex!

    If the theaters have one iota of intelligence they are leasing dedicated lines for this and not just trying to use VPNs over the Internet. Dedicated lines can be encrypted at either end. Your comment about the traffic and how it relates to the Internet is fairly irrevelant.

    If you had any idea how much it costs to lease and maintain a T-1 line and the local end equipment (which would take 12 hours to download 50GB under real-world coditions), you'd realize that few theaters would bother to do so. It would eliminate the cost-benefits of electronic distribution.

    Maybe you're thinking of DSL -- well, check www.dslreports.com and you'll find out why business still lease T-1 (reliability/service) Theaters don't have sysadmins -- even part-time -- Margins are thin in the Cinema business -- they really make money on the refreshments. They don't want to pay for extras that don't boost revenues.

    Dedicated line encryption does not perform the degree of access control that hardware access does. There are too many minimum wage teenage assistant managers. How much do you think the black market would pay a projectionist to copy the decrypted transmission onto a HDD?

    -- and BTW, wiretapping DSL is only marginally more difficult that wiretapping a phone line. I built a trivial 2-transistor phone tap when I was 10.

  • The other problem being, of course, that a digital signal can be corrected when it degrades while an analog signal cannot. That's most of what "CD quality" really means. With a phonograph, the needle slowly destroys the record.
    You're talking about non-contact media v's contact media, not digital v's analog. That's the main reason that I believe VHS tapes suck. It's not that they're analog, it's that the wear out. DVDs resolve that problem and go digital. It's not joined at the hip. Laserdiscs are analog and non-contact. I've seen new tapes made from old laserdiscs and the quality is surperb, while an original tape of the same vintage is unwatchable.
  • I am an InfoSec consultant IRL; and in the course of my job, I've occasionally stumbled across some interesting tidbits (which credit-card companies use repeated-XOR encryption, which HMOs keep medical information secure with DES, etc). I have heard reports, but have not been able to verify their accuracy, that at one time Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces were using 3DES (with three independent keys) to secure their nuclear-launch codes.

    If true, that suggests a very high degree of confidence in 3DES.

    I've got to say that 3DES isn't my favorite algorithm, but properly implemented, it's an extremely secure algorithm. Unfortunately, many software DES implementations manage to screw up the DES spec (probably, I think, due to the infernal complexity of DES).
  • There's a lot of discussion over whether digital or analog is the better medium to use. I want to point out a few things most people are missing.

    It is true that, in theory and all other things being equal, analog gives you better reproduction. Digital (by definition) requires you to sample a signal periodically. Changes occur in discrete steps. Analog gives you smooth transitions, as it isn't limited to a particular rate of sampling.

    However, digital has other advantages that, IMNSHO, outweigh the advantages of analog in practical use.

    First, digital can be reproduced, stored and retransmitted, without limit, without experiencing any signal degradation. Digital signals can also be encoded with redundant data for error correction. Digital media is also generally more resistant to physical degradation from repeated use then analog media (although that is more by accident then through conscious design).

    The end result is that while, in theory, an analog signal offers better reproduction, a digital signal will often have better quality, because analog media tends to get worn out quicker and more easily then digital. This is why I like CD over vinyl records; CDs don't pop and hiss like my records used to. This is why I like DVD over VHS; DVDs do not degrade with multiple viewings.

    With proper care, you can generally prevent analog systems from degrading in this manner, but neither I, nor your average movie theater teenage projector jocky, treat media that well.

    One other thing: The analog purists argue that digital is inferior because digital is sampled. It is interesting to note that motion video of any type is already sampled: What we perceive as motion is really a series of still frames. If a sampled signal is automatically disqualified, then all motion video is disqualified.

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