A few months ago, Grand Traverse and Horizon cinemas in Traverse City ditched most of their traditional film projectors and switched over to digital projectors. The switch meant good-bye to celluloid movie film and hello to hard drives. Unlike a movie reel that must be carefully unpacked and spliced together, the projectionist simply plugs the hard drive into a projector, punches in the movie times and appropriate trailers, and voila! It’s show time! Watching a digital movie almost feels like getting a new pair of glasses. The pictures are so unbelievably crisp, you can’t believe what you were missing before. The lines are clear and precise—so precise, in fact, it’s difficult, at first, for some people to stop admiring the clarity and fall headlong into the movie. Both Horizon and Grand Traverse cinemas have switched most of their screens from film to digital projection. The audiences have taken the new look in stride, perhaps without realizing the digital transition marks a profound change in the 100-year history of the movie industry.
BY THE NUMBERS To understand how cutting edge all this is, consider that only about five percent of the nation’s 36,000 movie auditoriums have converted to digital projection. Most of those screens are owned by Carmike Cinemas, owner of Traverse City’s two theatres. It hopes to convert all of its 2,300 screens nationwide by year’s end. Before Carmike jumped in, only about 100 screens featured digital projection systems. The deal was valued at more than $150 million and involved software company Access IT and the projector maker, Christy Digital Systems, Inc. “This is huge in the industry, and it’s a huge difference for the audience, especially in picture clarity. It’s very nice,” said Bob Parsons, Grand Traverse Cinema manager. “In animation, you have a better, brighter, very clear picture, and in non-animated films, you can pick up some pretty detailed text. On a window glass, you can see the etching of the manufacturer’s name. Before that, it would be indistinguishable. “… What’s nice is the movie quality is exactly the same in every auditorium. From week one to week 20, the audience will see the same quality. You won’t have any of the scratching, any damage from splicing, and the sound won’t deteriorate.” Hard drives are also much easier on the landfills than film reels, he said.
FIRST IN LINE Interestingly, Carmike was the first major theatre chain to take this dramatic step to digital. Carmike owns about 311 theaters in mostly rural and suburban areas, where they pretty much enjoy a monopoly. (Observers predict that will change here once the Meijer complex gets built in Acme—a new movie theatre may arrive, along with lots of other new retail.) But what does digital movie projection mean for the movie-goer? For one, digital cinema could bring a wider breadth of movies to “small town America” because making and mailing a digital hard drive is so much cheaper than film, said Carmike President Michael Patrick in a Los Angeles Times article. So far that hasn’t happened here, but GT Cinema Manager Bob Parsons is taking a wait and see attitude. The theatre only went digital a few months ago and the focus has been on resolving technical glitches and learning the new routine. The corporate office in Columbus, Georgia makes the decisions on which movies they show. Other changes might include 3-D movies, which may be another big deal of the future. The New York Times wrote an enthusiastic article about 3-D movies, reporting that the technology is light years ahead of the eye-straining 3D movies of the past, although viewers still have to wear goofy-looking 3-D eyewear. Horizon and Grand Traverse cinemas will install the silver screens that are required to show 3-D movies within the next few years. Last, but not least, the theatres could show major events beamed from satellite. Think of a high school play-off, rock concert, or pay-per-view boxing. But that will depend on achieving another goal—and that’s getting the movies transmitted via satellite. Until then, the movies will be transported in hard drives.
THE COSTS Bob Bahle, owner of The Bay Theatre in Suttons Bay, says that he—like the vast majority of single-screen theatre owners—won’t convert to digital cinema until the technology shakes out and the studios commit some sort of financial support. After all, the seven major studios have the most to gain from digital cinema. Indeed, movie theatres don’t save that much with digital cinema, certainly not enough to cover the conversion costs of $85,000 per screen. The movie theatre’s savings are basically confined to mailing: it costs $30 to $60 to ship a large reel of film versus less than $10 for a hard drive. The cost of a projectionist is also less because it’s possible to program the digital projector to play the movie at multiple times. Studios, on the other hand, have every incentive to switch to digital cinema. According to an Internet article by Tom Harris, it costs far less to make a movie with digital video than film. He writes: “The Star Wars crew can definitely back this up. Rick McCallum, one of the producers on Attack of the Clones, said they spent $16,000 on 220 hours of digital tape, and they would have spent about $1.8 million on 220 hours of film.” Digital filming is also easier because a director can immediately see what he has—much the same as a 35 mm camera compared to a digital camera. This whole thing gets confusing because some movies are filmed on 35 mm, converted into digital media for editing, and then put back on film again. The future trend is to dispense with film altogether. After the film is produced, it’s then distributed. And the distributors also save big with digital media. Film distribution companies now spend about $1 billion a year to make and ship reels of film back and forth to thousands of theatres. “Because the distribution costs are so high, production companies have to be extremely cautious about where they play their movies,” wrote Tom Harris. “Unless they have a sure-fire hit, they take a pretty big risk sending a film to a lot of theatres. If it bombs, they might not make their money back. … If you take the physical film out of the equation, things get a lot cheaper.” It costs as much as $85,000 to convert a single screen to digital technology. That sounds like an astronomical amount—especially in light of the fact that Carmike filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001 and closed many of its struggling theatres. So, how were they able to afford converting 1,000 screens? The Times reported that the theatres pay about $10,000 toward the conversion. The balance will be paid by the makers of the digital cinema equipment, which in turn will be subsidized by the studios that will pay them about $1,000 for each copy of a digital movie delivered to a theatre. Kind of messy—unlike the very clear picture you’ll see at the show.
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