Hollywood Premiers Future of Cinema Exhibition at IBC

A new era of hyper-vivid large format cinema exhibition came closer to reality last week as Hollywood studio Fox and pioneering filmmaker Douglas Trumbull flew into IBC to present groundbreaking industry firsts.

Presentations of Life of Pi and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes courtesy of 20th Century Fox, marked the first time a full length feature has been screened with Christie 6P Laser Projection, a technology which promises to lift light levels of 3D movies to a par with that enjoyed in 2D.

20th Century Fox, which sent four executives to the IBC Big Screen Experience for the occasion, has vowed to master all of its future 3D releases at 14 foot-lamberts / fL, the same light levels as 2D and a substantial improvement on the 4 or 6 fL possible with existing 3D digital projectors.

This is a massively important European showcase, said Richard Nye, Director of Cinema for Christie EMEA. We had international customers attending the event to see this world first screening of 6P laser with Dolby Atmos sound. Were trying to raise the bar for 3D presentation across the industry.

Arjun Ramamurthy, Fox VP of Technology said: What concerned us was that we were showing 3D content at sub-optimal light levels. We believe we can achieve proper light levels with laser.

Outfitted with the Christie technology and Dolby Atmos sound system, the IBC Big Screen Experience is, to date, the only one of its kind in Europe, and one of only a handful in the world, to demonstrate this technology.

Exhibitors who are enjoying the 3D ticket premium need to step up and install equipment that's going to allow them to present 3D in the proper brightness, urged Don Shaw, Senior Director, Product Management, Christie. One of the main complaints by studios is that exhibitors are playing 3D at light levels which are too low only 10-30 percent of light levels of 2D films. Simply put, the movies are too dark, and the lacklustre quality also means that we see colours differently, leaving audiences struggling to discern critical details that make up the image in front of them. We can correct this using laser.

The Christie 6P projector was also used for the first time anywhere at IBC2014 and for the first time anywhere to screen Douglas Trumbulls experimental short UFOTOG, shot in 3D at 4K and at 120 frames a second.

In his keynote, the visual effects legend, whose credits include 2001: A Space Odyssey, urged directors James Cameron, J.J Abrams and Peter Jackson to adopt his super high frame rate high resolution 3D process, dubbed MAGI, to revitalise the cinema-going experience.

Right now the technical standards of cinema are almost identical to the technology standard of TV, he said. There is very little difference between those two mediums and young people in particular are migrating away from movies because of the convenience of watching movies on a tablet.

But if we can make an immersive motion picture spectacle of such power that it becomes a destination attraction it will last much longer in a theatrical run before it ever gets to TV.

Trumbull failed to get the industry to accept his 70mm 60 fps presentation system Showscan in the early '80s and believes that studio inertia to change is still inhibiting adoption of advanced cinema technologies like higher frame rates.

The studios think that they can sell the same movies with a commonality of format to theatres and TV, he said. I personally don't feel we should limit the creativity of filmmakers just for studios to milk the market downstream to Blu Ray, VOD or TV.

He advocates the aesthetic use of different frame rates within a movie and claims a patent on the process to do this. In the same way we can choose black and white or colour or alter colour saturation or brightness or anything else the filmmaker has in their toolset, so the ability to change frame rates on virtually any pixel as desired will become part of cinemas future, he said.

Cinema hasnt changed 24 fps for 100 years and on modestly sized screens it is still fabulous, he stressed. Im not trying to change that or threaten it. I see MAGI as a niche, a different art form. But if we get high brightness, high colour depth, high frame rate and high resolution we can get back to making spectacular immersive experiences that TV will find impossible to replicate.

For decades it seems he has made a solo effort to push cinema to new technical frontiers. The history of the motion picture industry is that it is slow to adopt new technologies. Yet when a single movie Avatar can compel the industry to adopt stereo 3D projection this tells you all you need to know about what the audience wants.

If James Cameron selects MAGI' to shoot his Avatar sequels then the face of cinema-going will be changed forever.

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