USC to conduct digital cinema tests
DCI supported by all seven major studios
The initiative is backed by all seven major studios, and will operate through March 2004, when the deal with the ETC also expires.
Originally called Newco, the initiative is charged with creating tech specifications the seven studios can back worldwide for digital projection of their movies. Blessed systems will have a huge advantage in the marketplace, including likely studio financing to install their technologies in thousands of theaters as the industry tries to jumpstart the long transition to wide-spread digital projection.
Initial testing will begin in January at the ETC Digital Cinema Lab in a former Pacific Theater building on Hollywood Boulevard.
"To me, this is a huge step," said Charles Swartz, the ETC's exec director and CEO. "After the formation of the consortium itself, this is the next most important step. Up to this point, there's been a whole bunch of technology providers just proposing standards. We need to figure out where is it appropriate to have multiple, even competing standards, and where might it be appropriate to just have one."
Specialists with the studios and other interested companies are expected to participate in judging the head-to-head comparisons of different technologies that would be used at each step in the process of getting a digital picture from a studio onto a screen.
While digital projector quality is one area of comparison, numerous other issues need to be worked out, such as what file format should be used when encoding and mastering movies for digital presentation.
The consortium likely will need to find a format that can "scale," or work at several levels of resolution, Swartz said. But such questions must be worked out in planning and running the testing.
