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Technology has changed the way films look,sound and feel. And many of
Hollywood and bollywood blockbusters are utilizing Indian talent to create their magic !

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Sure enough, today’s movies epitomize this adage more than anything else. The aura and
grandeur of movies facilitated by stunning and advanced state-of- the art special effects
technology have rendered this impossible possible.
Most discussions of cinema in the digital age have focused on the possibilities
of interactive narrative. It is not hard to understand why??..since the majority of viewers
and critics equate cinema with story telling.Digital media is understood as something which
will let cinema tell its stories in a new way.
Digital movies is the process of capturing motion pictures on digital video in
place of (or as a substitute for) traditional film.Today, in the age of computer simulation
and digital compositing, invoking this characteristic becomes crucial in defining the
specificity of twentieth century cinema. Digital cinema encompasses every aspect of the
movie making process, from production and post-production to distribution and projection.
A digitally produced or digitally converted movie can be distributed to theaters via
satellite, physical media, or fiber optic networks

What exactly is digital cinema?

Principles and benefits

Is digital movie really better than film?

How does DLP cinema® technology work?

Where can I see a movie digitally?
Technical challenges ..
Conclusion..

Technology has seamlessly and

subtly permeated into movie making and story
telling. India, with a film industry known for being

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the largest in the world with highest no of film releases every year, has demonstrated its
taste for visual effects in several of its recent commercial releases. The idea behind this is
not just to meet pratical needs of cost cutting vis-à-vis saving time, but a desire to paint the
film with a creative brush and realize the visions of grand storytelling.
In past 10 years, the capability of the tools both hardware and software has
expanded manifold. So much had developed so that today it is possible to create award
winning animations and visual effects on systems that are no longer the mainstay of high
end production houses.. Today, virtually every film produced uses some form of special
effects or touching up, all of which translates into true magic when in hands of a skilled
visualizer.

Digital movies is the process of capturing motion pictures on digital video in place
of (or as a substitute for) traditional film. Although this
subject has received a good deal of publicity in recent years, it
is hardly a new concept: before it was reintroduced as
"Digital cinematography" in the late 1990s it was known for
many years as "Electronic cinematography". There are
frequent disputes regarding what actually constitutes "cinematography", since in its normal
sense the word implies something that exhibitors think worth displaying on a giant screen
in a cinema, usually with the goal of attracting paying customers. (Although originally the
term was simply a means of distinguishing motion picture photographers from still
photographers.)
At the moment, most of the "film" projects shot using electronic cameras do not
face commercial markets. Public airings (if any) are generally at non-profit film festivals,
and are frequently projected as video rather than film. If such projects are ever released for
sale, it is nearly always on DVD or videotape, so they might be more accurately called
"non-broadcast television productions".

The basic concept of digital filmmaking is relatively simple: to use digital video
cameras to capture and store motion images and synchronized digital audio as Digital data
in i.e a process analogous to digital photography.

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Thereafter, the images and sound are edited via a computer-based non-linear editing system
and finally released for projection in either a theater with digital projectors, (Digital
Cinema) or released direct to video on DVD or VHS.
Many think digital filmmaking will democratize the world of DIGITAL CAMERA
film and point out how inexpensive shooting digitally can be considering the cost of film,
especially if the output is on video as a movie can be edited on a home computer and
burned to DVD. Others characterize this as wishful idealism, as film and laboratory work
are only about 1% of the cost of a Hollywood or even "Bollywood" style production, but it
is part of the "cultural" background of the issue.
Given the constant year to year improvements in digital cinema technology, it
appears that the future of cinema is likely to be digital within the next 10 to 20 years.
However, digital cinema still has some way to go before it can completely replace
film.Some purists would argue that digital does not have the same "feel" as a movie shot on
film. While this may be a matter of personal preference more than anything, digital cameras
have been evolving quickly and quality is improving dramatically from each generation of
hardware to the next. Also many counter-argue that because most films are developed back
to film when distributed to theatres the film's 'feel' returns to the audience. This traditional
method of distribution requires huge amounts of money for a finished film to reach the
thousands of theatres across the country, therefore becoming one of the final steps for a
film to be able to make money.

Digital cinema encompasses every aspect of the movie making process, from
production and post-production to distribution and projection.
While digital cameras are nothing new, and post-production
houses have been using digital equipment to edit and master
movies and animation for some time, the all-digital distribution
and projection of movies has only recently arrived to complete the chain.
A digitally produced or digitally converted movie can be distributed to theaters via satellite,
physical media, or fiber optic networks. The digitized movie is stored by a computer/server
which "serves" it to a digital projector for each screening of the movie. Projectors based on
DLP Cinema® technology are currently installed in over 1,195 theaters in 30 countries
worldwide - and remain the first and only commercially available digital cinema projectors.

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Digital movie files on the internet enable you to hear sounds,

music, voice and view computer graphics and animation just like
watching a movie on TV. Digital movie files can sometimes be quite
large files and take a while to download but with some of the latest
streaming technology you can watch movies as they are
downloading.
Movie files are distinguished from each other and from earlier and later versions by
their file extension. A file extension is the last part of the name of the file - for example
kong.mpg is telling you that the type of movie is it- an mpg or mpeg movie and we will
need to have a mpeg player/viewer to watch that movie.
Two technologies have come to the fore for digital cinema: Digital Light
Processing (DLP) developed by Texas Instruments and Direct Image Light
Amplifier (D-ILA) by JVC. (Currently two versions of DLP technology exist: D-
Cinema and its scaled down version of e-Cinema)

1. Rather than filming physical reality it is now possible to generate film-like scenes
directly in a computer with the help of 3-D computer animation. Therefore, live action
footage is displaced from its role as the only possible material from which the finished film
is constructed.

2. Once live action footage is digitized (or directly recorded in a

digital format), it loses its privileged indexical relationship to pro-filmic
reality. The computer does not distinguish between an image obtained
through the photographic lens, an image created in a paint program or an
image synthesized in a 3-D graphics package, since they are made from
the same material -- pixels. And pixels, regardless of their origin, can be Digital movie creator
easily altered, substituted one for another, and so on. Live action
footage is reduced to be just another graphic, no different than images which were created
manually.

3. If live action footage was left intact in traditional filmmaking, now it functions as
raw material for further compositing, animating and morphing. As a result, while retaining
visual realism unique to the photographic process, film obtains the plasticity which was
previously only possible in painting or animation. To use the suggestive title of a popular

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morphing software, digital filmmakers work with elastic reality. The result: a new kind of
realism, which can be described as "something which looks is intended to look exactly as
if it could have happened, although it really could not."

4. Previously, editing and special effects were strictly separate activities. An editor
worked on ordering sequences of images together; any intervention within an image was
handled by special effects specialists. The computer collapses this distinction. The
manipulation of individual images via a paint program or algorithmic image processing
becomes as easy as arranging sequences of images in time. Both simply involve "cut and
paste." As this basic computer command exemplifies, modification of digital images (or
other digitized data) is not sensitive to distinctions of time and space or of differences of
scale. So, re-ordering sequences of images in time, compositing them together in space,
modifying parts of an individual image, and changing individual pixels become the same
operation, conceptually and practically.

5. Given the preceding principles, we can define digital film in this way: ]

Digital Movie = Live action material + Painting +Image processing +

compositing + 2-D computer animation + 3-D computer animation

For millions of movie goes worldwide and leading

directors including George Lucas and Steven Soderbergh, the
answer is an unqualified "yes."

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When you see a movie digitally, you see that movie the way its creators intended you
to see it: with incredible clarity and detail. In a range of up to 35 trillion colors. And
whether you're catching that movie on opening night or months after, it will always look its
best, because digital movies are immune to the scratches, fading, pops and jitter that film is
prone to with repeated screenings. That's why directors love digital cinema: it ensures that
their creation will be reproduced with total fidelity at every screening.
Since 1999, DLP Cinema® has projected over 200,000 shows to more than 25
million people worldwide. The results have been overwhelmingly positive: 85 percent of
viewers described the image quality they experienced as "excellent," and no fewer than 80
percent of audiences decided that, given the choice, they would prefer to see a movie
digitally rather than on film.

• Digital cinema allows for films to be shot

faster, and for less money than film.
• Digital cinema, unlike film, does not need to
be developed and can be played back and edited
immediately after shooting. This can help in avoiding
continuity errors.
• Digital video can record image and audio on
the same media.
• Digital video cameras are smaller and lighter
than film cameras.
• Digital cinema is recorded on cassettes or hard
disk drives, which can hold considerably more
footage and are cheaper than a ten or twenty minute
film stock.
• Digital video is more sensitive than film, and
usually requires less supplemental lighting.

1. A digital projector based on DLP Cinema® technology transfers

the digitized image file onto three optical semiconductors known as

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DLP cinema technology

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Digital Micromirror Devices, or DMDs. Each of these chips is dedicated to one primary
color-red, green, or blue. A DMD chip contains a rectangular array of over one million
microscopic mirrors.
2. Light from the projector's lamp is reflected off the mirrors and is combined in different
proportions of red, green and blue, as controlled by the image file, to create an array of
different colored pixels that make up the projected image. Think of the DMD mirrors as the
colored cards held up by an audience in a sports arena to create a giant image. Each person
holds up a single colored card, yet when combined, these thousands of cards create a
picture. If the card colors are changed, the picture changes too.

3. The DMD mirrors tilt either toward or away from the light source thousands of times per
second to reflect the movie onto the screen. These images are sequentially projected onto
the screen, recreating the movie in front of you with perfect clarity and a range of more
than 35 trillion colors.

The Software used to play movie files are normally called movie players or movie
viewers, some movie players will run several of these different movie formats but as yet not
one will run all of them. Movie files usually come in one of the following
formats::Quicktime, Mpeg, Avi, Shockwave, Animated Gif Images, Flic movies, and a
new devleopment Real Video.

Quicktime movies were originally made for Macintosh computers but Apple
Computers have enabled the movie file format to be used on IBM compatible
computers as well. In some Quicktime movies you are able to navigate around objects
or even in a Virtual world. The Quicktime movie player also allows the creation and
viewing of panoramic scences. Quicktime Virtual Reality (QTVR) tracks can also
have objects embedded in them which perform certain actions when the user selects
them.

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Avi/Video is the "standard" in video format for Microsoft

Windows. Avi's contain video and sound which can be viewed
from your computer. Normally you can use your Media Player
that comes with Windows 95/98/2000 to play these files. Avi files
can be played within your browser window or from a specialist
AVI PLAYER
package like Nettoob.

MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group) movies are very popular on the web because
the actual movie files can be compressed much smaller than Quicktime and AVI formats
making them much quicker to download.

Shockwave is a technology developed by Macromedia for delivering full

multimedia capabilities inside Netscape Navigator 2.0 or higher, Internet Explorer and
other popular browsers with reductions in file size and transmission time. Shockwave lets
you take advantage of Macromedia's powerful authoring tools to create multimedia,
graphics and CD-quality audio that are faster to download, interactive, dynamic, quickly
and easily updated and responsive to changing events.

Real Video/Audio is a technology that enables you to watch movies or listen to

sounds in real time. That is you can watch or listen as the file is
downloading as opposed to waiting for the file to download to your
own computer and then playing it like Avi files or the old Quicktime
movie files.. This technology is called streaming audio or
streaming video. However, accurate calibration techniques are REALONE PLAYER
being developed which eliminate this as a practical problem, and the possibility of
inexpensive post-production color grading can make digital cinematography more flexible
than film in achieving artistic color effects.

More seriously, most digital cameras have an insufficient exposure latitude when
compared to film, increasing the difficulties of filming in a high contrast situation, such as
direct sunlight. Exposure latitude is also known as dynamic range and the problems of the
insufficient dynamic range are addressed by the high dynamic range imaging. This is a

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much greater problem, because if highlight or shadow information is not present in the
recorded image, it is lost forever, and cannot be re-created by any form of exposure curve
compensation. Cinematographers can learn how to adjust for this type of response using
techniques garnered from shooting on Reversal film that has a similar lack of latitude in the
highlights. Digital video is also more sensitive than film stocks in low light conditions,
allowing smaller, more efficient and natural lighting to be used for shooting. Some directors
have tried the "best for the job" route, using digital video for indoor or night shoots, but
traditional film for daylight work outdoors.

This paper addresses the meaning of the changes in the filmmaking process from the
point of view of the larger cultural history of the moving image. Seen in this paper, the
manual construction of images in digital cinema represents a return to nineteenth century
pre-cinematic practices, when images were hand-painted and hand-animated. At the turn
of the twentieth century, cinema was to delegate these manual techniques to animation and
define itself as a recording medium. As cinema enters the digital age, these techniques are
again becoming the common place in the filmmaking process. Consequently, cinema can
no longer be clearly distinguished from animation.

It is now possible to generate photorealistic scenes entirely in a computer using 3-D

computer animation; to modify individual frames or whole scenes with the help a digital
paint program; to cut, bend, stretch and stitch digitized film images into something which
has perfect photographic credibility, although it was never actually filmed. The essential
characteristic of digital information is that it can be manipulated easily and very rapidly by
computer. It is simply a matter of substituting new digits for old... Computational tools for
transforming, combining, altering, and analyzing images are as essential to the digital
artist as brushes and pigments to a painter.The manipulation of images through hand-
painting and image processing, hidden in Hollywood cinema, is brought into the open on a
television screen.

Thus,. digital cinema has the better image quality. In spite of the number of
screenings, the quality remains the same. In the beginning, there was scepticism that digital
files would never be able to match the depth and quality of resolution that celluloid offers.
However, proponents of digital cinema claim that today technology makes it possible to
calibrate colours to the choice of the moviemaker.

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