Rick Spilman
June 19th, 2003, 06:41 AM
From this morning's NY Times:
"Behind cast-iron gates lies the Hollywood Pacific Theater, an Italianate palace originally built (but finished too late) for the 1927 premiere of "The Jazz Singer," the first sound film with some spoken dialogue. It has been closed for years, but recently reopened as a test bed for the motion picture industry's next great technical revolution: digital projection.
Where thousands once congregated in ornate halls, today a handful of film executives and technicians use cellphones to communicate across the dark, ghostly space, awaiting the next screening of test images in the otherwise empty theater. On any given day, Shrek and his friends might be gamboling across the screen or Obi-Wan Kenobi might be dueling with his light saber as experts work to devise standards for the movie theater of the future.
The tests are being conducted by the Digital Cinema Laboratory, an organization set up by the University of Southern California's Entertainment Technology Center. A consortium of seven Hollywood studios have contracted with the laboratory to choose the specifications for the equipment and software with which the industry will one day distribute and project feature films without any film at all."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/19/technology/circuits/19cine.html
"Behind cast-iron gates lies the Hollywood Pacific Theater, an Italianate palace originally built (but finished too late) for the 1927 premiere of "The Jazz Singer," the first sound film with some spoken dialogue. It has been closed for years, but recently reopened as a test bed for the motion picture industry's next great technical revolution: digital projection.
Where thousands once congregated in ornate halls, today a handful of film executives and technicians use cellphones to communicate across the dark, ghostly space, awaiting the next screening of test images in the otherwise empty theater. On any given day, Shrek and his friends might be gamboling across the screen or Obi-Wan Kenobi might be dueling with his light saber as experts work to devise standards for the movie theater of the future.
The tests are being conducted by the Digital Cinema Laboratory, an organization set up by the University of Southern California's Entertainment Technology Center. A consortium of seven Hollywood studios have contracted with the laboratory to choose the specifications for the equipment and software with which the industry will one day distribute and project feature films without any film at all."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/19/technology/circuits/19cine.html