New office space, plus lots of news and statistics.

"Blog well and blog often." That was the advice from my colleague Sheigh Crabtree at the Hollywood Reporter. I can't hope to match her award-winning quality of writing, but I will follow her advise. My excuse for not writing yesterday is that Monday was a Bank Holiday in the UK.

New week in the office and George politely kicks me out of his office, but into a much nicer corner office (!) on the second floor, which may become my permanent office when the music ends and the game of musical chairs here at Capital FX/EFILM London/Deluxe Digital Europe is over. It's spacious, bright and one where you expect to find people who do IMPORTANT WORK, though in fairness, most of the people here at CFX are slaving away much harder than I. (Currently putting the finishing touches on "Children of Men", which I'm not violating any official Secrets Act. I'm sure, by revealing that it's has been the big DI project here.) With an office like this you're not expected to just do a 9:30 to 5:30 shift, unless we're talking 5:30AM, but that's OK because I've got plenty enough on my plate.

Based on the number of news and announcements it also seems like we are coming out of the quiet summer lull. The big announcement has been Technicolor signing a major deal with National Amusements to deploy digital installations in some major US cities as of this autumn, though there are no details on whose projectors or servers they will use, other than that they will be in line with DCI-specifications. Elsewhere, there is also an article about the digital plans of the Cinema Buyers Group in the US and how AccessIT's Brooklyn cinema has been used to test the digital waters for the company, both from the Film Journal. QuVis' servers will be used in the Venice Film Festival, making an inroad into the Italian market largely dominated by Dolby. There is a press release celebrating XDC's distribution of 25 digital features in Sweden in its first 12 months. One of the interesting things about XDC, other than their insistence that MPEG is a perfectly acceptable distribution format for Europe, is how they distribute they prepare and distribute the content and the key:

XDC processing includes the preparation of the content for physical distribution based on encrypted files, the quality control and the archiving, as well as the dubbed Swedish version for some films where the Original Version is not a Swedish one. Regis Raway continues "XDC is the only digital cinema operator to offer a generic media, this disk is particularly well suited for the Swedish market, because it can travel from one screen to another and play successively. In this case, the key is placed on the disk, which means that the movie can move from one site to another, but that the movie can only play if the disk is plugged into the server." As a consequence, the number of producers and distributors who entrust digital distribution logistical services to XDC are continuously increasing.

I know that on the past XDC used tapes, but I can't quite work out from this whether that is still the case or whether hard drives have replaced this. Given that LAN-connected HDD, which is what DCI has specified, aren't going into widespread use just yet, we will see a lot of different physical distribution solutions for a while.

To finish off, my old employer Screen Digest published an interesting two-page mini report in their July issue, which was re-printed in the SAWA newsletter sent out today. True to their data-centric and heavily analytical roots, they have worked out a Digital Cinema Conversion Suitability Index, by which they compare and contrast different European territories. They have come up with "10 wholly quantitative measures, attributes ranking points to 18 European territories and the US so that the most suitable territories can be identified, with the US acting as a benchmark."

UK comes out top, perhaps not surprisingly, closely followed by Ireland. The bottom though is, however, perhaps not equally obvious. "At the bottom end of the DCS Index is Finland with a suitability measure of 33.9 per cent. The bottom territories also include Greece(35.6), Sweden(36.7), Italy(37.2) and Norway(38.9)." I'm not disputing this, on the contrary, but take note that it is perhaps because they have more of a digital mountain to climb that we have projects such as NORDIC going on in Norway and some Swedish cinemas are pressing ahead agressively with XDC. In time, there is no escaping Deluxe having to also service these most difficult of all the European territories. I just don't see us setting up a Finnish or Greek call centre this year.