Deja Vu all over again as Kinepolis rolls out digital opening night red carpet

It's been a while since I heard from my friends at Kinepolis, maybe because they are still trying to resolve with Technicolor and Dolby how to manage to circuit-wide switch-over to digital.

In the meatime, Kinepolis is hosting a real-time screening of celebrities walking down the red carpet for the opening of the Tony Scott thriller Deja Vu to cinemas in belgium and France. This is what the Hollywood Reporter article French filmgoers to get taste of red carpet had to say about it:

Footage of cast members arriving at the Kinepolis Le Chateau du Cinema in Lomme next Wednesday, will be beamed to more than 5,000 filmgoers in Mulhouse, Thionville, Metz, Nancy, Nimes, Brussels, Liege and Antwerp.
...
Next Wednesday's gala event will be introduced by a journalist from popular Gallic cinema magazine STUDIO and a bilingual hostess will interview the stars in English with a concurrent French broadcast via direct video transmission on Kinepolis' various screens, the company said.

It will only cost you eight euro to see this event in France and Belgium. For those of you getting a feeling of deja vu about it, yes, this has been done before.

Four years and two days earlier to the day (8 December 2002 to be precise) Regal CineMedia hosted a red carpet digital projection of the opening of Maid in Mahattan. You can cast your mind back with this article Regal CineMedia to feature 'Maid' premiere and this letter from Kurt Hall to someone complaining about adverts in cinemas.

For those of you looking for a more refined experience, the unstoppable Marc John has secured the live transmission of the Magic Flute from the New York Metropolitan Opera House to City Screens all across the UK. Read about it in the newsletter from the York Picturehouse.

The event was made possible bacuase Met Reaches Groundbreaking Agreements with Unions and Develops Range of Media Partnerships, a press release tells us. Would you know, National CineMedia (nee Regal CineMedia)and its Canadian partner, Cineplex Entertainmen, are also doing it (“Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD” Now Playing at a Theater Near You”). Tickets went on sale on Nov 18th in the States and I'm sure your local City Screen is also touting them now.

I know it will be great because not only has Julie Taymore directed it, but the wizard in the control booth is my friend the great Mark Schubin, who is now also available as a podcast. I look forward to his take on this.

Sweden falls for Unique's digital charms

My old colleagues at Unique Digital have done good, very good in fact, to have won the contract to digitise Swedish cinemas in what amounts to the largest digital screen advertising network in the world outside of the US. You can read the full press release on DCinemaToday.com (Unique Digital selected to digitise Swedish cinemas for advertising network):

Unique Digital Ltd. has won the contract to build and operate the digital screen advertising network for Sweden's SF Media, the largest cinema advertising company in the Nordic region. The deal was announced after an 18-month long evaluation of different digital advertising solution systems and providers, which was aimed at selecting the most advanced technical solution available. Unique's system will replace 35mm advertising in the cinemas that are part of SF Media's country-wide exhibitor partnership, with the entire digital network in operation by early 2007. Unique Digital is installing digital advertising in a total of 426 cinema screens. Together with its other installations across Europe the new deployment will make Unique Digital the world's largest independent digital screen advertising operator.

The number of screens may have grown to more than the 426 mentioned above, due to the near collapse of Sweden's second largest exhibitor (Astoria), where SF stepped in and bought/rescued many of the at-risk cinemas.

And a little bird tells me there is yet more news to come from Unique.

Night of the Long Knives at QuVis

News reaches me that there has been a major "reorganisation" at QuVis; the euphemism for a lot of good people getting the sack, in this case. It seems like some of my oldest and dearest colleagues, such as Jim Graham and Joel Schiffman, are no longer part of the new QuVis (www.quvis.com). This is sad because QuVis was a great pioneering company that did a lot of good, particularly in the early years of digital cinema. Obviously there is no press release heralding this change, so I go on the word of people with good contacts, though I have not spoken to anyone at QuVis.

Such a change will obviously have major impact on the UK Film Council's Digital Screen Network, now more than half way through its deployment. Does this make the upgrade to USB 2.0 interface more or less likely to come soon? If anything, I would think that Fiona et al at Arts Alliance would be digging around for Patrick Zuchetta's business card to see if he would be prepared to cut them a deal for 100 Doremi units, with a possible swap out of the old QuVis units down the line. I am not saying that this is what they should do. I am simply speculating about what they might want to do.

It is too soon to write off QuVis. The company still has a strong foothold in Korea, Japan and the UK, but they lost out in the early race in the USA to Doremi when AccessIT selected the French server maker for it's Christie/AIX network. Not upgrading fast enough to USB 2.0, lateness in implamenting watermarking and other issues meant that there many of Deluxe's clients were in no rush to supply content to their servers. It was common knowledge that there were too many server makers pushing into the small digital cinema market, but I had not anticipated that QuVis would the first to stumble. I do wish both QuVis and the ex-QuVis guys good luck.

Tis the season...for not much happening

Actually, the headline is not quite true, at least not for Deluxe Digital Cinema Europe (DDCE). We are currently what I would describe as out 'swan' mode, which is that we appear to glide along slowly and effortlessly on the surface, while below, there is furious paddling going on.

Right now I'm sitting in between two stacks of boxes (hard drives from WD and casings from Addonics) and I have even screwed together a few myself. They will either be the founding cornerstone of DDCE, or the ones that fall aprt first as we realise that my strength was never electronic assembly. But I do like to get stuck in.

Congratulations to our friends at Sony Pictures Entertainment as Casino Royale has its royal gala opening tonight in London and will then be screening in hundreds of US cinemas later this week. Having seen bits of it as we've done some work on it, I strongly urge you all to see it. It looks absolutely terrific.

And if it comes down to a fight between Borat and Bond at the box office this weekend, who will win? Why, it's Deluxe, as our US colleagues distributed both. I'm looking forwards to when we will shortly be doing it too.

But now back to furious paddling.