The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - European consultants roll out D-Cinema proposals

I was unable to attend the recent Europa Cinemas conference in Paris, where I was due to talk about the NORDIC project, due to family reasons. This is a shame, as it turned out to be a very interesting conference with a lot of important things said. Mike Gubbins did a terrific job of summarising the even in Screen International's November 24th issue, though sadly, Screen Daily does not appear to have that article available in electronic format. For one thing, the conference seems to have decided once and for all that different European digital cinema standards would not be a good idea and that the DCI specs/SMPTE standards are our best hope of having a unifying standard.

As the UK Film Council's Peter Buckingham was quoted in the article:

"For the smaller players [multiple standards] would be a nightmare and I cannot see how on God's earth that would benefit diversity."

Well put. Sadly, not everything else that got said and presented there was equally well informed or level headed. Two consultants reports dominated discussions; the previosuly published Daniel Goudineau's "FAREWELL TO FILM? What is at Stake in Digital Projection? and a specially commissioned report by Thomas Pintzke and Kim Ludolf Koch of Rinke Medien Consult. From what I can tell these overshadowed a presentation from the European Investment Bank by Patrick van Houdt.

The first of these (Goudineau) accepts DCI/SMPTE but wants additional capabilities for digital cinema systems (i.e. MPEG-2) and proposes that vulnerable cinemas be helped by nationalising the KDM (security key) handling, making it the responsibility (nay, exclusive legal obligation) of a government body, at least in France. If these are the 'ugly' years for digital cinema, then this proposal would in my personal opinion make it the downright unwatchable digital cinema years. Litterally. Because the screen would all too often be black.

The second is written in very bad English and I'm not convinced by the thinking behind it. On page 18 it assumes a fixed VPF of €800 per DCP. That's just over $1,047 at today's exchange rate. The author's are obviously assuming that the Hollywood distributors are goin to be exceptionally generous when it comes to help fund digital cinema in Europe. I'm also not convinced about their thinkingg about how digital cinema equipment will wear out.

This just leaves the EIB report. Whoever works it out (and it's not rocket science) has the best chance of dominating digital cinema deployment in Europe. It won't be Deluxe, because we've always said that we will not get involved in deployment. It makes life easier for us and means that we have no hidden agenda or gate keeper aspirations. Lastly, David Hancock of Screen Digesr did his usual brilliant job of providing the best overview of the digital cinema situation out there in the market today. Why didn't they hire him to write a report, I wonder. Though like I said, I wasn't there, so all I have is the Screen Adrticle and the reports on-line.