It took an hour to drive from LA to the dusty Tustin Industrial Park, a primary proving ground for CineComm Digital Cinema, the outfit that would conceivably have the cineplex swapping celluloid for bits. I was there for a test drive of the system now showing The Phantom Menace at digitally equipped theaters in New York and Los Angeles.
I entered a bright white building that had more air-conditioning than character, and before my eyes could adjust, I was led into a pitch-black screening room, where I was debriefed on how the system works. A finished film is digitized, compressed, encrypted, and shot up to a geosynchronous-orbit satellite, where it resides in 55-Gbyte glory. Theaters pull down the film and stream it to Hughes-JVC digital projectors. Details? Proprietary.
Then they showed me the goods. First, a compilation of pulse-raising scenes from various films like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. The projection is so sharp that the flaws of the original prints - some of them more than 20 years old - pop out in perfect detail. Then comes a Koyaanisqatsi-esque montage of sand dunes and close-ups of lizards with such incredible texture that even as I stood inches from the screen the resolution held up. The show ended with a Tomorrow Never Dies sequence: a lot of stuff blowing up in crisp, vivid hues. The clarity of the image surprised me, given that the digital projector uses the same three-lens RGB process as a standard CRT video projector, but without the trademark scan lines and bleeding colors.
Digital projection is beautiful - like Imax without the motion sickness - but a few elements are lacking. I missed the magic beam of white light above my head, the comforting hum of film sprockets threading through the projector, even the fact that we'll never again get to yell "Focus!" at a projectionist who, most likely, isn't there anyway. Cinema Paradiso this is not, purists will say, but when digital filmmaking catches up, nostalgia will be replaced by a deeper realism.
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, at digitally equipped theaters, including the Pacific Theater, Chatsworth, California. CineComm: +1 (310) 248 6163, www.cinedc.com.
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