Turning a hangar into a digital hub - quite easy!

It's been a while since I provided an update of my digital cinema activities here at Deluxe and frankly, its the routine of it all that keeps me from doing it more regularly. Every day is a variation of the routine formula of meetings with distributors and others, working on staffing and building issues, installing and testing technology, planning future feature releases and so on. Of course, we do have 'Alcazar' keeping us extremely busy at the moment, but that is so top secret that I cannot write anything about it. Sorry. But you WILL like it.

Instead I will share with you my first trip to the Deluxe ETS distribution facility in Perivale, at the western outskirts of London, out towards Heathrow airport. I had already visited the DFS (Deluxe Film Services) facility in Van Nuys in Los Angeles that handles both 35mm and digital, so I knew roughly what to expect. I did not bring a camera, so instead make do with a photo of the famous Hoover building (now a Tesco supermarket inside), which our facility is located behind.


The Deluxe ETS handles over 100,000 prints per year for almost every single UK & IE distributor. No wonder they are situated in an aircraft hangar size building with the equivalent of four floors of 35mm print on pallets stacked high. There's half a wall full of just one particular boy wizard's latest celluloid outing sitting in storage. The efficiency is breathtaking and anyone who thinks that simply because it is 35mm it is all analogue is wrong. They have an ingenious software Web tool for cataloguing and tracking every single film print anywhere in the UK. Pulling up an example at random, I can exclusively reveal that the 35mm copy of "Superman I" sat in storage between 2001 and 2006 and I even know which two cinemas had it in those years, the dates and more, though it's too confidential for me to reveal anything further.

This is the basis on which Deluxe Digital Cinema Europe's distribution services will be built. Why re-invent the wheel when there is a fully functioning film distribution service that nearly everyone is using already? My task is thus made that much easier thanks to the hard work and development that Nigel, Chris and everyone at ETS had already been doing for years.

Of course, substituting 35mm film prints for hard drive is not a complete one-for-one, which is where service and support (primarily the call centre) comes into play. But again, Perivale is already ready for this expansion, though I'd rather invite you over and show you around once it's all set up, rather than to bore you with the details here.

Ulimately this is the USP of DDCE. The people you have booked film copies replacation with before (Deluxe), who do the subtitles and versioning for you (Capital FX) and who make sure that it gets sent out and lets you track it in real time (Deluxe ETS) are the same people who will do it for you in digital. Not that we are complacent about it, far from it, we just want to make this a seamless transition rather than a new set of headaches.