Hopefully you had a chance to witness one of the historic digital screenings of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace during its experimental month-long run in Los Angeles and New York in June, 1999. We got not only a look at this cinema of the future, but also a peek behind the scenes ...

A new century of digital cinema is upon us, and its inaugural took place on four screens nationwide, orchestrated by Lucasfilm's THX division and CineComm Digital Cinema. All told, two competing projection systems were demonstrated — a high-quality, though more conventional, analog system from Hughes/JVC; and Texas Instruments’ "DLP" (Digital Light Processing) system, which we were fortunate enough to see during its showing in Burbank.

So how did it look?

Well, the "film" — the word increasingly an anachronism — looked good. The picture was bright and clear, and eerily rock-solid on the screen. There were no distracting dirt or scratches to be seen. There was, however, a certain amount of noise in the image, which varied widely from scene to scene ... but since that was random and not "blockies" or "jaggies," we were plainly seeing the grain in the original film used for the transfer, rather than a digital or compression artifact (random noise being the most difficult signal for a compression scheme to faithfully reproduce). And with that realization, I had a sudden deja vu back to the debut of the Compact Disc — the theatre is now able, as the old disclaimer went, to reveal the deficiencies in the source material itself.

After the screening, one of the engineers from TI’s DLP projector development team showed a sample of the "digital micro-mirror device" (DMD) chips that were the product of twenty years of research. A bona-fide work of nanotechnology, it looked somewhat like a microprocessor in a 2x2" metallic package.

Front view of the TI projector prototype.

On the front of the DMD was a 3/4" x 1" window that revealed a shiny silvery mirror of sorts — though under a microscope, you’d see an array of roughly 1.3 million individual microscopic mirrors. (It was the tiny gap between these mirrors, combined with the projector’s anamorphic lens, that had been the cause of one of the only visible artifacts: a vertical banding occasionally visible in the picture’s highlight areas, such as the credits and the white subtitles.) Each mirror is aimed back & forth thousands of times per second, reflecting light either through the single projector lens and onto the screen, or away towards nothing. By varying the percentage of time each of the tiny mirrors is pointed at the screen, it’s possible to create a luminance contrast ratio of 1000 to 1. Three of the chips in tandem (for red, green & blue) meant roughly four million infinitesimal mirrors working feverishly in concert to bring us the vivid picture we'd witnessed.

But the big surprise was finding out that the resolution of these prototype chips was merely 1280 by 1024 pixels. Thus, the picture we’d witnessed was actually inferior to HDTV, much to everyone’s surprise! (One engineer opined that because of the technology’s continued development, this experimental screening was therefore "the ‘worst’ digital cinema you’re ever likely to see.")

"The Rack Behind the Curtain"

The signal source for the projector. Note the anamorphic "squeezed" image on the high-definition monitor.

But what was the mysterious signal source feeding the projector’s voracious 1.5 gigabit per second appetite ... tape, optical disc, satellite feed, or what? The answer: hard disk. A peek inside the booth revealed a surprisingly modest half-rack of gear put together for this technology demonstration — containing an off-the-shelf Pluto Technologies HyperSpace RAID-3 array, with twenty 18GB drives; a Panasonic AJ-HDP500 HD-to-D5 hardware codec, capable of compressing a high-definition video signal down to about 360Mbps, a factor of roughly 4 to 1; and finally, a Tascam MMR-8 multitrack audio hard disk recorder, which supplied the six discrete channels of sound.

The picture had been telecine'd from an interpositive answer print at Modern Videofilm in Glendale, California, with a DLP projector specially set up in the bay so that the colorist could see the resulting image projected in real time during the transfer. The output of the Spirit Datacine was recorded onto a hi-def D5 tape, whose data was ultimately transferred to the disk array here in the booth — which was kept under special security, of course. This modest little rack of gear, after all, comprised a theatrical master-quality digital "print" of Star Wars: Episode I.

~~~

Leaving the theatre, and as an afterthought, I asked the woman behind the ticket counter whether there would be any other films shown digitally following Star Wars (actually knowing better, but hoping nonetheless). Not for now, came the reply — "the whole thing's really kind of new, you know?"

Of course, I knew. But now, I also knew that the future of cinema looked bright indeed.

For more information:
CineComm Digital Cinema
Lucasfilm THX
Texas Instruments DLP

Ron Diamond is a Los Angeles-based freelance editor, contributing author to Nonlinear4 (the book), and co-creator of Nonlinear4 (the website). He can be contacted via the Feedback page.

© Copyright 1999-2001, Playground Productions.

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