Star Wars and the Phantom Celluloid by Ron Diamond A new century of digital cinema is upon us, and the most celebrated part of the inaugural took place in June on only four screens nationwide, orchestrated by Lucasfilm's THX division and CineComm Digital Cinema. Two competing systems were enlisted to show off "Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace" - a high-quality analog video projector from Hughes/JVC, and Texas Instruments' DLP (Digital Light Processing) system, which I was 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 was no distracting dirt or scratches to be seen. There was, however, a certain amount of noise in the image that varied widely from scene to scene; but since it was random and not "blockies" or "jaggies," I was 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 déja vu back to the debut of the Compact Disc. Like the old marketing line delivered during the transition from vinyl to optical media, the theater is now able to reveal the deficiencies in the source material itself. Texas Instruments' DMD chip, used in the DLP projector After the screening, one of the engineers from Texas Instruments' DLP projector development team showed a sample of the system's digital micro-mirror device (DMD) chips, the product of 20 years of research. A bona-fide work of nanotechnology, the chip looked somewhat like a microprocessor in a 2" x 2" metallic package. 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 recognizable primarily in the picture's highlight areas, such as the credits and white subtitles.) Each mirror is aimed back and 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 1,000 to 1. Three of the chips in tandem (for red, green and blue) meant roughly four million infinitesimal mirrors working feverishly in concert to create the vivid picture I'd just seen. The DLP projector But the big surprise was finding out that the resolution of these prototype chips was merely 1280 by 1024 pixels. Thus, the picture was actually inferior to HDTV. (One engineer opined that because of the technology's continuing development, this experimental screening was therefore "the worst digital cinema you're ever likely to see.") The Rack Behind the Curtain 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 projection booth revealed a surprisingly modest half rack of gear put together expressly for this technology demonstration. It contained an off-the-shelf Pluto Technologies HyperSpace RAID-3 array, with 20 18-GB drives; a Panasonic AJ-HDP500 HD-to-D5 hardware codec, capable of compressing a high-definition video signal down to about 360 Mbps, a factor of roughly 4 to 1; and finally, a Tascam MMR-8 multitrack audio hard disk recorder, which supplied six discrete channels of sound. The picture had been transferred on a Philips Spirit DataCine from an interpositive print at Modern Videofilm in Glendale, California, with a DLP projector especially set up in the bay for monitoring. The output of the Spirit was recorded onto hi-def D5 tape, whose data was ultimately transferred to the disk array here in the booth, which was then 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 theater, and as an afterthought, I asked the woman behind the ticket counter whether there would be any other films shown digitally. "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.   Guild member Ron Diamond is a Los Angeles-based freelance editor. He can be contacted on the web   Reprinted from The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter Vol. 20, No. 6 - Sep/Oct 1999   Guild Home | Newsletter Home | Top of Page   Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved by The Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 700