Industry News :: New 3-D films drive the switch to digital

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By David M. Halbfinger The New York Times

LOS ANGELES Last March, executives from Walt Disney Studios approached the visual effects wizards at George Lucas's company, Industrial Light & Magic, with an audacious request. Could they convert the coming Disney animated film "Chicken Little" into 3-D?
 
In less than four months?
 
"We gave it serious consideration, and we decided they were out of their minds," said Colum Slevin, senior director of computer graphics at Industrial Light. "'Fourteen hundred shots in 14 weeks? You're dreaming."'
 
But Disney persisted. And Slevin's team came through, as audiences will be able to see beginning Nov. 4, when "Chicken Little" opens across the United States - and in at least 85 movie theaters equipped with costly new three-dimensional projection equipment, silver screens and the latest in goofy-looking 3-D eyewear.
 
The 3-D technology is more advanced than anything audiences will remember from the 1950s or even from recent hits like "Spy Kids" - no red-and-green lenses, no eyestrain, no headaches. And no bulky electronic glasses like those at Imax theaters.
 
"You've not seen anything quite like this," Disney's studio chairman, Richard Cook, assured hundreds of exhibitors and others before showing them a sample last week.
 
All but lost in their excitement over the technology is a huge milestone for Hollywood: The 3-D release of "Chicken Little" first requires the conversion of those 85 theaters to digital projection technology.
 
For years, the movie industry has been struggling to replace its expensive film distribution system with digital technology. For the studios, the change promised huge savings: About $1 billion a year is spent making film prints and shipping them to thousands of theaters.
 
For theater owners, it meant smaller savings but improved quality. A movie could run for weeks - or indefinitely - without the scratches and other defects that become noticeable after as few as 10 screenings of a celluloid print.
 
Last month, the Hollywood studios finally settled on a set of technical standards for the digital cinema introduction. Also recently, the studios, theater owners and equipment vendors have reached a consensus on the framework to pay for the change to digital, which costs about $85,000 an auditorium.
 
All that was missing was a catalyst for making the investment.
 
Proponents of digital cinema are hoping that it will be provided by 3-D movies like "Chicken Little" and "Monster House," from Columbia Pictures and the director Robert Zemeckis, to be released next summer.
 
Given that Zemeckis's movie "Polar Express," from Warner Brothers, earned roughly 10 times as much in Imax 3-D as it did in its two-dimensional version, that is a big catalyst, executives say.
 
"3-D, at the moment, is driving the bus on this digital rollout," said Michael Lewis, chairman of Real D, a four-year-old optics company in Beverly Hills, California, that developed the equipment and eyewear to bring "Chicken Little" to theaters in 3-D.
 
But there is also a fairly sizable school of thought among studio executives - and influential filmmakers like James Cameron, who has said he will shoot only in 3-D from now on - that 3-D, despite its history as a fad, could this time have a momentous effect on cinema, the way silent movies gave way to talkies and black-and-white to color.
 
"I honestly don't think it's a novelty," said Charles Viane, president of distribution for Disney, which may release all of its future animated movies in 3-D if "Chicken Little" meets expectations at the box office. "I think you'll miss the dimensionalization in movies that don't have it."
 
"Chicken Little" would not be coming to market in 3-D had Disney not been impatient to break the stalemate between studios and theaters over digital conversion.
 
But it also required significant leaps forward in technology, which Real D and the optics company it acquired in February, StereoGraphics, had been pursuing for some time.
 
Unlike some old-fashioned 3-D movies, the Real D process uses a single projector, but it merges two data streams, one for each eye.
 
Because the projector is digital, it can project images far faster than 24 frames a second, the film standard. So "Chicken Little" will be shown at 144 frames a second, alternating left- and right-eye images faster than the eye can detect.
 
The hard part of 3-D is to make sure that the left eye sees only the left image and vice versa. Real D, executives say, does this with an adapter mounted on the projector that polarizes each alternating image so that it can be seen only through the appropriate lens on Real D's cheap, disposable glasses.
 
The system is hardly perfect. It requires installing a special silver screen, which is a disadvantage for showing standard movies; the rapid frame rate diminishes the resolution of the image, from 2,048 pixels to roughly 1,700; and even Real D executives acknowledge that the system would be impractical for theaters with more than 300 seats because of screen-size constraints.
 
 
The main disadvantage of the Real D system is cost: The company charges at least $50,000 up front for e ach theater, and $25,000 a year.
 
Tom Stephenson, president and chief executive of Rave Motion Pictures, based in Dallas, said he had signed up to convert 9 of his 300 screens to Real D and was exploring whether to charge a dollar or two more for tickets, or whether increased ticket sales and concession receipts would ultimately cover his costs.
 
Real D guarantees that at least two 3-D movies will play in those theaters each year, Stephenson said.
 
"Is that enough?" he said. "No. But if it turns out people are really drawn to this technology, you'll get more than that."