India rips into Hollywood's d-cinema standards

It's not often that you get an out-and-out assult on Hollywood standard-setting efforts for digital cinema. Mostly it is low key grumblings, punctured by the occasional inane idea of a 'French' or 'European' digital cinema standard. But it seems like the Indians, who have as much if not more experience in distributing films digitally to cinemas as Hollywood, have had it up to here according to this article in Variety:

Rajaa Kanwar, vice chairman of UFO Moviez and chairman of the Ficci (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry) digital entertainment forum, described standards put together by the Digital Cinema Initiative's committee of Hollywood studios and vendors as "rigid, unrealistic" and "not appropriate" to many territories, including India.

Kanwar described a series of myths he ascribed to DCI and d-cinema systems that claim to be DCI compliant.

He said that theater chains do not generally invest in technology; that distributors are fragmented and not able to manage technology themselves; that interoperability is not a reality; and that the human eye is largely unable to detect the higher image quality delivered by DCI standards.

Kanwar said that the cost of a DCI -compliant d-cinema system is about $125,000; his company charges theaters as little as $4.60 per screening for 2K projection equipment.

UFO Moviez provides turnkey digital cinema systems that are typically leased or rented by multiplex operators. Antipiracy protection comes from satellite delivery of movies that requires no human intervention.

Company has e-cinema installations in 625 theaters in India and is selling its system in Singapore, Malaysia and Europe.

Bill Jasper Jr., prexy, director and CEO of Dolby Laboratories, admitted that he had not understood the DCI's decision to switch from MPEG to JPEG2000 standards for video compression. (JPEG2000 is a standard derived from technology for still images.)

He suggested problems ahead for the DCI as studios want to do away with the virtual print fee, which may be as high as $1,000, in a few years. But he said that 3-D cinema, made more possible by 4K DCI-compliant technology, was popular with auds and is an "effective antipiracy tool."

As Walt Ordway is always at pains to stress, a) DCI is not a 'standard' but a set of specifications, and b) it describes a baseline, but is open to expansions and extensions. Before you knock the Indians, remember that they are the only ones to have made e-cinema possible on a big scale without needing Hollywoods virtual print fee (VPF) solution. I'm also surprised that Jasper should not have understood the switch from MPEG to JPEG (even though he worked for an audio company at the time) and I'm sure that he is misquoted in linking digital 3D and 4K.