On the weekend before the NAB show floor opened, a well-organized, two-day Digital Cinema Summit guided attendees further up the mountain than last year's much smaller event, which lasted a mere 90 minutes. Sponsored by NAB, SMPTE and Digital Cinema magazine, the conference was meant to provide motion picture professionals with information about the industry's transition to shooting, editing, distributing and projecting digital images. Last year's meeting revealed just how far off the future was; this year it seemed a little closer, and the event gave attendees a better idea of what it will take to get there.

Saturday was dedicated to SMPTE standards committee status reports and surrounding issues. Sunday featured discussion on digital processes from both a technical and business perspective: digital cinema mastering, compression, conditional access and encryption, audio, theatrical projection systems, and economic issues.

A tremendous amount of effort has now been expended to determine just how digital cinema can work from a business perspective. Studios hope some of the benefits will be lower lab bills, lower production, print and distribution costs, and the ability to do real-time ad insertions in theaters. There was nearly universal agreement on some points: Content must be protected with scaleable security; existing businesses should be leveraged; and a methodology and format for archiving digital prints needs to be established.

Keynote speaker Scott Billups, producer, director and effects supervisor, presented a witty video history of digital cinema in which he plotted three parallel paths: The Traditional, using James Cameron as the model -- well funded, well integrated with existing business; The Isolationist, with George Lucas as a model, building his own process while remaining profitable; and the Wacky Independent, which is how Billups characterized his own efforts. Among the first to do pre-visualization on computers, he currently writes for numerous magazines and recently directed a high definition feature, Mid Century. "The question is no longer if digital stuff works, but 'Does it work for you?'" Billups concluded.

For much of the rest of the day, speakers outlined how it does and doesn't work for them. Steven Poster, president of ASC, was part of a panel called Digital Cinematography. He complained about sharing the dais with manufacturers, saying "there is no such thing as a digital cinematographer. We are all cinematographers, and some of us shoot digitally. This panel should be my peers telling you their experiences. There are plenty of forums for sales pitches, and we shouldn't have to sit through them here." Poster said the manufacturers have always promised a lot, "and it is the artists who have to figure out whether or not these claims are valid." He pointedly criticized manufacturers for suggesting that better labor contracts were available for producers using digital cinema tools.

Manufacturers of digital cinema equipment carefully limited their claims of cost savings to stock and processing. The consensus was that a production could save money, but that this depended on the same kind of planning and discipline used to save money on film productions. Overall, the conclusions to be drawn were well summarized by Chris Cookson, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Warner Brothers. The primary barriers to digital cinema are in "maintaining control of the quality of the presentation to the audience. The promise is to the filmmaker to keep this control." He encouraged vendors to come to the table with something ready, not in development, and cost effective.

Digital cinema started as an alternative to film production but is growing into a complex web of possibilities which producers and production personnel must now navigate. Key questions have not been answered: How much picture quality is sufficient? Can a single format be agreed upon? Can digital distribution and exhibition be implemented without bankrupting the companies involved?

The summit proved the old saw that the more you know, the more there is to know. But, as Panasonic's director of strategic business development Michael Brinkman put it, "What we don't have is less, and what we don't know is less." Much as it must have been for the storybook Alice, producers in the digital wonderland have to figure out just what size they are, and just what part of the digital cinema pill works to their benefit. In the meantime, knowledgeable and experienced problem solvers within our membership might find themselves more valuable than ever.

NAB 2002 Video | Audio