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TOP HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS AGREE ON STANDARDS FOR DIGITAL FILMS:
NEW YORK — Digital cinema, the long-awaited technology to make movies in the theater more vivid and versatile, took a big step from fantasy to reality Wednesday.
All of Hollywood's top studios endorsed a set of technical specifications defining how sharp digital films must be and creating mechanisms to fight piracy. They vowed to begin using them to offer digital versions of their new productions to theater owners as early as this year in some cases.
"It's a giant leap forward for those of us who create movies and ... for everyone who sees them," Star Wars director George Lucas, a longtime digital cinema advocate, said in a statement. "Digital cinema will increasingly become the standard and will change the way movies are made, seen and experienced around the world."
Unlike celluloid, movies in digital form won't scratch or smudge. They can include multiple soundtracks in different languages, and can easily project 3-D images.
And if that wasn't big enough news:
The new specifications, from studio-backed consortium Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), require digital movies to have at least twice as many lines of resolution as a high-definition television — and clear the way for an alternative that's four times as sharp.
HDTVs "give most of the colors of the rainbow, but not all of them," says DCI Chief Technology Officer Walt Ordway. "There is no color that appears in the spectrum that cannot be digitally represented" in the files studios will use.
That means that within a few years after everyone who wants to, upgrades their home systems to HDTV, they will then have the opportunity to upgrade yet again to this new standard. And what a standard -- four times as sharp as HDTV.
