Hollywood Confronts the Digital Revolution --McIlroy

There's a wonderful article in the August 11 edition of The Wall Street Journal called "Engineering Blue Skies" (you need an online subscription to grab this from The Wall Street Journal Website, but if you do a Google search, you'll often find articles posted on secondary Websites without charge.)

The article covers a new trend in Hollywood—that of converting feature films from silver halide to digital, in order to use digital tools to improve the images, and then converting them back to film for theater viewing. For anyone in the printing industry who has lived through the shift to digital imaging, the article is a touch of nostalgia.

As they say, it's déjà vu all over again. We've lived through all of the challenges of the move from analog to digital. Why is it that Hollywood, with its infinitely greater financial resources, wouldn't have called upon a few printers and prepress experts to learn exactly what it could expect? I don't know whether to laugh or cry over the ignorance and naiveté expressed by those interviewed in the article (so I'm doing both!).

The process discussed in the article creates a "digital intermediate," reflecting that fact that there's good old film on both ends of the process ("the medium still generally considered to provide the most reliable quality"). Needless to say, Eastman Kodak plays in this part of the business too, trying to protect its film market while semi-embracing the future. A Kodak subsidiary, Cinesite, is a leading vendor in the digital intermediate market.

Digital intermediates, the article explains, "allows movie makers to reap the benefits of digital technology without using digital cameras, which are still resisted by many makers of big-budget movies."

As was the case for printers and prepress shops a decade ago, Hollywood's problem starts with digital video itself. Hollywood has the same paranoia we used to have about digital photography—it can't possibly be as good as film! The article points out that "not only are directors and cinematographers used to working with film and, in some cases, reluctant to give it up, but the technology for distributing and projecting films digitally is still being developed. Movie distributors and exhibitors haven't yet finalized technology standards. . ."