From the monthly archives:

May 2010

Executive Summary

May 2010

  • IMAX vs Everyone Else
  • Fox Brings Security Key Management into the 21st Century
  • Media Blocks and the Evolving Digital Cinema System
  • SMPTE Update
  • Toy Story and the Future of Sound
  • DCI and FIPS:  The Continuing Saga
  • Nancy Fares leaves TI
  • XDC and Cinedigm announce off-balance-sheet funding
  • European cinemas prepare for World Cup…in 3-D
  • Sony will broadcast World Cup in 3-D to shop owners
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IMAX vs Everyone Else

May 2010

IMAX is an enigma to investors.  Its brand was established with the 15-perf 70mm film format, without doubt the finest image ever put on screen.  But quality can be expensive and therefore unpopular.  The cost to distribute first release movies in the IMAX film format was simply too expensive to sustain.  IMAX explored digital options [...]

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Fox and Security Key Management

May 2010

Surprise!  Fox has entered the 21st century in more than just name.  Its latest effort in security key management for digital cinema represents a huge shift from prior doings.  “Gone” is the modem, and “in” is the network.  Mike Radford of Fox, in ISDCF, introduced his “FLM-x” method for communicating FLMs on a B2B basis.  [...]

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Media Blocks and the Evolving Digital Cinema System

May 2010

In terms of business operations, the shift to digital distribution has been much better handled by studios than exhibitors.  Studios, having already embraced digital content preparation and distribution architectures for consumer content, welcome the opportunity to bring first release movies into this fold.
Exhibitors, on the other hand, are not in the content distribution business.  They [...]

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SMPTE

May 2010

SMPTE Working Groups and Ad Hoc Groups meet June 2 in Los Angeles.  Following the last round of meetings in February, several document ballots closed:

428-5 TIFF Mapping for DCDM
428-19 Additional Frame Rates for the SDI interface
428-x Archive Frame Rates
430-6 Auditorium Security Message (ASM) (Revision)

A brief explanation of these documents follows:
In the [...]

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Toy Story 3’s New Sound Format, and the Future of Sound

May 2010

With the release of Disney’s Toy Story 3 comes the introduction of the 7.1DS sound format.  This is a different 7.1 format than that introduced by Sony in the mid-90’s.  The new format brings to light some problems that lie ahead for digital cinema sound.
First, an explanation of the oddity of sound format terminology.  The [...]

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DCI and NIST: The Continuing Saga

May 2010

DCI has a serious problem on hand, the most serious it has encountered since the discussion of implementing 6 different security systems took place prior to 2004.  Just as DCI members were uneducated then as to how sophisticated digital security actually works, it remains uneducated today as to the shortcoming of FIPS 140-2.  This was [...]

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Other News

May 2010

Nancy Fares, Manager for TI’s DLP Cinema™ division, departed from TI in May, accepting the CEO position for Micralyne in Edmonton, Canada, a manufacturer of MEMS devices.  (MEMS stands for Micro Electro Mechanical Systems - the core semiconductor technology behind DLP.) Micralyne develops MEMS for several applications, including biomedical and optical networks. This [...]

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