EU project ushers in new cinematic age
The future of digital cinema was unravelled at the Berlinale film festival where audiences were treated to the results of an EU funded project looking into improving the process of digital cinema production. As films in the future will be shown in cinemas at a resolution of 4 K, equivalent to 4096 x 2160 active pixels, the transformation from analogue to digital technology presents many challenges for the film industry. For this reason, the WorldScreen project aimed at finding ways of handling the enormous volume of data involved. 'The shooting of a single scene generates somewhere between 200 and 500 gigabytes of data. A 90-minute film thus generates several dozens terabytes' worth of data,' explains project coordinator Siegfried Foessel of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS. He added: 'It takes a lot of time and effort to save, process, distribute and archive these data.' The WorldScreen project aimed to optimise the entire digital cinema production workflow with the help of scalable data compression using the JPEG2000 image compression file format. The process involved encoding the movie, image by image, thus enabling it to be edited at precisely the right point. To ensure that the workflow in digital cinemas would be easily manageable, the researchers then integrated JPEG2000 into various storage and post-production systems. They then developed a portable memory device and various systems for the encoding and decoding of moving images. When finished, digital films will be delivered to cinemas via satellite, and the quality of the moving images will be the best possible. According to the project partners, these systems will soon be available commercially.