Forward Thinking:

The Future of Theatrical Motion Pictures and Home Video

by Carl Bennett

ny discussion of the validity of commercial home video among motion picture enthusiasts will eventually lead to a battleline drawn between those who feel that motion pictures are best experienced by an audience in a large theater with images projected from 35mm film prints and those who feel that video-based home theater systems offer as good and possibly a better entertainment-viewing experience. A discussion of this issue will usually boil down to film puritanism vs. video technology geekism. But lost in such a debate will be that the impending blurring of differences between theater systems and home video systems make such distinctions pointless.

What is a motion picture anyway? Since the beginning of film history the principal intent of motion pictures has been to entertain. The motion picture has evolved from raw technology to a sometimes sublime art form, but above all the intent has remained to entertain the viewer. There are the filmmakers who want to tell a story and there is the audience that wants to experience the story. And in between them is this necessary technology, a means of telling that story. A motion picture is neither wholly the storytelling experience nor the technology employed.

et's take stock of the state-of-the-art in theatrical systems in the late 1990s. The greatest step forward this decade has been the implementation of digital sound. It's amusing that with all the time it took to synchronize sound to moving pictures during their first 30 years, sound quality has finally surpassed picture quality. The theatrical audio experience today is all digital sound clarity and dynamics, without the hiss and pops of yesterday's analog magnetic and optical systems. But the moving image remains almost totally 35mm film based, with all the shortcomings. Processing defects, scratches, and platter projector damage are the visual equivalent to hiss and pops.

In today's bottomline corporate mentality, rarely does a theater chain maintain and operate its projection systems at peak capability. Most theatrical audiences today experience out-of-focus and under-lit images, and this from release prints marred by processing speckling and overuse on tortuous platter-fed, endless-loop projectors. Today's moving picture quality has fallen behind the advances in theatrical sound.

What is the future of theatrical motion pictures? Just like sound, it's in the digital realm. This year, THX announced the establishment of baseline specifications for THX-approved digitally-based theatrical projection systems. Texas Instruments and Hughes-JVC Technology both publicly introduced demonstration digital projector prototypes in 1999. These new digital projectors are intended to replace film-based systems, with image capabilities to match or surpass 35mm film quality. The projection technology will probably be of a three color RGB variety, based on improved home theater projection systems, or may in some way be a reflective high-definition system deriving from computer presentation technologies. Theatrical film distribution methods are thought to eventually settle on RAID-disc-array based, optical-disc based or satellite-to-theater-server systems.

What does that mean? Your favorite film theater just became a big home-video theater. The only differences between future theatrical systems and future home-video systems will be greater image detail in the theatrical system to accommodate the much-larger viewing screen. Early development of these systems will be directed at resolving the problems of image detail, image geometry, color saturation, and image contrast.

However, even if these seemingly insurmountable problems are resolved, I feel that digital projection systems are only a stop gap leading to huge plasma-based digital screens, not unlike screens in laptop computers or today's flatscreen plasma television monitors. With future advancements in the number of colors these systems can render, increasing capabilities from tens-of-thousands of colors to millions of colors, such a screen could display a totally digital picture image, altogether eliminating the analog loss-of-quality inherent in auditorium projection. Motion pictures will still be shot on film, preferably on 65mm camera negative (since release prints would be a thing of the past -- studio executives take note!), transferred to an ultrahigh digital video system, with print flaws cleaned up and then distributed to theaters on totally digital discs.

ow film purists, before you get your panties in a bunch, check your skepticism. Let's take a small detour here and consider the future of film preservation. If we continue to rely on film-based copies of motion pictures (even from original camera negatives) for preservation purposes, with each duplicate we introduce further degradation of the visual and analog sound elements. There exists already the technology to create digital video copies of film-based motion pictures that exceed the resolution capabilities of 35mm filmstock. From high-resolution archival digital copies, fresh 35mm release prints can be struck that look as good as the original print used for mastering. I would say that with today's technology, driven by the increasing market for entertainment programming, a systematic preservation of our film heritage is not only possible but economically viable using digital technologies. Any archival digital copies, and certainly any new motion picture productions transferred to the digital realm, should always strive to exceed the requirements of current display technologies with an eye to the requirements of future image technology advances.

With the upcoming improvements in theater presentation technologies, borrowing somewhat from ideas already present in consumer electronics, the differences between theater systems and home-video systems will be negligible apart from the technological requirements of the big screen. Like it or not, theaters utilizing film-based projectors will disappear about as fast as silent film theaters did in the late 1920s. Today's rapid acceptance of the DVD home video format and the impending HDTV revolution only serves to prepare the public for wide acceptance of new theater technologies.

Since the lines between the theater experience and the home viewing experience are already blurred in the minds of the general public (that is, they find renting a video version of a motion picture just as acceptable as going to a theater), increased acceptance of home viewing systems is merely dependent on cost and the amount of compromise acceptable to the consumer between the sophistication of theater systems and of the home system (i.e., size of screen, number of sound speakers, etc.). We will see higher demand from consumers for quality in the home video market and considerable affordable advances in bringing the home theater closer to theater quality.

hat does this mean for the future of theaters? Not much. Certainly a vast change in the systems utilized in theaters will take place in a short period of time, but the viewing experience will remain pretty much the same -- right down to the sticky floors. No one can deny that a viewing experience is heightened by the presence of an audience, so a market for large screen theaters that provide an experience of motion pictures will remain , especially when the viewer does not want to wait six months for the home video release.

What does this mean for the future of home video? Probably not much, either. All we are doing currently is improving the quality of the home viewing experience. The coming HDTV revolution will vastly improve picture quality in the home. Home video purchasing and rental habits should remain the same, with the level of home video purchases rising as consumers repurchase high-definition copies of their favorite films. The delivery format of high-definition video is uncertain at this writing, although I would still expect the HD home video format to resemble the DVD format. Companies are already at work to squeeze onto a DVD four times more the amount of information than the format can currently hold.

It doesn't take a genius to conclude that the DVD isn't the final format of home entertainment technologies, but it is the bridge between NTSC television systems and digital high-definition television. Is is also a format that, in your lifetime, will become a hopelessly outdated technology. Get over it. All technology ages and dies.

However, very soon DVD will be the preferred home video format quickly eclipsing the inferior VHS videotape format the same way it has already killed the laserdisc video format. VHS video recorders are increasingly becoming the landfill junk they were destined to be. Indeed, it was recently announced that The Matrix would would be made available for sale on DVD only and that VHS video versions of the film would be rental store copies exclusively.

The DVD format should carry us through the next five years of consumer gluttony for home video firmware, with future HDTV home recording and time-shifting being handled by digital removable-hard-drive based computer systems. Anyone can see that consumer demand for a recordable home video format will not come from a high-definition recordable DVD, but will instead be met by a further marriage of home theater and home computer systems.

o, with all this postulating about future motion picture technologies, the question remains: How should a film be viewed? Should motion pictures remain largely a theater experience? Or should the home theater experience be acknowledged and legitimized? Debates of this sort are boring and resemble the conflicts between supporters of 8-track tapes vs. cassettes, LP records vs. CDs, and VHS videotape vs. laserdiscs. Who the hell cares? Technology marches forward despite the heel-dragging of smug purists -- after all, they were right about CDs being a fad, weren't they?

I would say that motion pictures should be viewed by any means acceptable to the viewer. If a motion picture viewer sees a sharper image on their screen at home than from 35mm film prints in a theater, then by all means let them see the film at home. At home, the popcorn is cheaper and the floors aren't sticky.

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