Titan AE Distributed Digitally

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?

Wave of the future...

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?

Movie theater adoption

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.

hello

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

I saw a digital projection of Dinosaur

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.

Re:Not the first...

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.

Re:Measuring in at 50 gig

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!

Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

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.

Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

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?

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

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.

Re:Wave of the future...

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.

Re:Wonder if it's encrypted?

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.