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While making films in the digital format has its pros and cons , Hyderabad has gone digital in production and distribution.
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BINARY STREAM: `Attack of the Clones' was the first movie to be shot and projected digitally
AUGUSTE LUMIERE, who with his brother Louis, patented the Cinematographe, a camera and projector and held the first ever public film show in the basement of the Grand Café in Paris on December 28, 1895 famously said about the cinematographe, "It can be exploited for a certain time as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that it has no commercial value whatsoever."
We all know the Lumiere brothers have been proved spectacularly wrong and the wonderful world of movie making is pushing envelopes on every front. From silent films to the talkies, black and white to Eastman Colour and technicolour, 35 mm to 70 mm, wide-screen and cinemascope, movies have been moving ever onward and the newest kid on the cinematic horizon is digital technology.
Filmmaker Mani Shankar (16 December, Rudraksh) is of the opinion that shooting on a digital format "is still a compromise. One has to shoot on a `High Definition' (HD) camera, which is delicate and there are too many risks involved in using it on outdoor shoots. Apart from that, technically, the resolution is at least six times less."
George Lucas who is forever dashing off where no man has gone before made cinematic history once again (the first time was with Star Wars which became a phenomenon, a cult and all that) when he shot the Attack of the Clones entirely on Digital Video. The film was also projected digitally video on 19 screens in the US.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world had to see the movie transferred to film and had to suffer through fuzzy images because of the image transfer. Digital images contain less information than 35mm film images, and the more you test their limits, the more you see that.
While Shankar believes digital technology has a long way to go before it would be the preferred choice of filmmakers, there have been Telugu films shot in the digital format. Siva, who has directed and animated the ready-for-release Savvdi, said he chose the digital format as "digital cameras can adjust light settings automatically to give better quality of pictures. It is very cost effective as you save on exposing film. Editing is also easier and quicker." The other pro for digital films, according to Siva, is the "high graphics support. Graphics are designed in the digital format - so mixing becomes easier."
Ramana, cameraman and editor for Vendi Mabbulu, which was shot on digital format, also is of the opinion that "graphics-heavy films like Devi and Ammoru benefit from the digital format."
Shankar's Rudraksh is special effects heavy and the technique he has used is "high resolution scanning wherein the image is converted to a digital image of a high resolution and then dumped on the computer as a file. The effects are then done on the digital image."
Shankar does not hold with the cost-effectiveness angle when he comments, "when you are looking at a budget of Rs 14 crore, saving Rs 30 - 40 lakhs is hardly noteworthy. One might as well ask the artistes to take a salary cut!"
The bottom line as far as Shankar is concerned is "the high definition camera is not good enough for cinema as of now. Better technology is around the corner and we are waiting for the day when the hardware would stabilise."
On the distribution side, the recent launch of Qube Cinema by Real Image Technologies spells a revolution in projection. It offers a cost effective, high-end technology solution to minimise the costs of film prints. Feature films are first converted to a digital format using a high-definition telecine. This High Definition media is then compressed and encrypted before duplication for delivery to theatres. Feature films can be delivered to cinema halls on physical media such as DVD-ROM discs or small Hard Disc drives. Satellite delivery and fibre optic delivery of the media is also possible and might be ideal for the Indian market.
Digital Rights Management and other security features make Qube a very secure platform for movie screening. The system allows only authorised players to decode content and in this way, the start date and time, the end date and time and number of plays allowed can be set and monitored thus resulting in accurate reporting. The system will also watermark content to indicate the player's serial number and the play dates and times. This information can even be decoded from a videotaped copy of the film.
All of these features are aimed at reducing piracy. The system also provides six-channel digital surround sound and has subtitling capability in multiple languages. Scheduled Play lists allow for hands-free operation and this also enables different versions of a film for different audiences being played in different theatres and for different shows.
Ramesh Prasad of Prasad labs, who is setting up a lab in Hyderabad to convert movies from film to the digital format says, "The digital format ensures consistency in projection. From the first to the last screening, the quality of film would be the same. We are looking at the B and C centres where films reach four to six months late. This gives chance for piracy. Digital films on the other hand can be released in many theatres simultaneously."
Akshat Misra of Sangeet theatre is "cautiously optimistic" about the digital revolution. "We will wait and watch. These advances will take time - it is not like, say, computers where every day new technology is changing. We will look at the output - two Telugu movies do not make a digital summer. The initial investment is massive - a digital projector costs around Rs 60 lakhs - and this is a bad time for films."
The word is out - while digitisation would ensure better technically quality, the technology needs to stabilise before we can make that leap into the binary stream.
MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER
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