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Author
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Topic: Berlinale going DCI
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John Wilson
Film God
Posts: 5438
From: Sydney, Australia.
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 04-22-2010 12:18 AM
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“The Future Lies In Digital Cinema” – Head Of The Berlinale, Kosslick, is going for modern projection techniques.
In order to stem the tide of all the different film formats, the Berlin Film Festival has decided to invest in state-of-the-art digitalisation. This is not just a matter of projection techniques, but also of standardising copies of the films.
According to information supplied by the Berlin International Film Festival (Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin) in 2008 there were almost 400 films to be shown at both the festival and at the specialist fair, the European Film Market, that takes place in Berlin at the same time – unfortunately they were submitted in all kinds of formats. In most parts of the world the usual format is in fact still the 35-mm filmstrip with its perforated edges that has been around since the early days of cinema in 1889. For a few years however the film industry has been gradually working on something that is to represent a quantum leap in the field of film technology. After the impact of high-definition images on TV and DVD (with the help of the recently introduced Blu-ray-Disc) people now want to experience the ultimate in image quality on the cinema screen. What is required to achieve this is not just a whole new generation of film projection equipment, but also a new standardised film format that will enable digital “copies” to be shown all over the world in the same way as the 35-mm format.
It has been the organisers of the film festival in particular who have always had to deal with this glut of formats. Feature-length films are still as a rule released in standardised 35-mm filmstrip form, but the list of video formats goes on and on. Names like Betamax, Digital Betacam or HDCAM are probably familiar to some film buffs. It is the small producers in particular for whom processing a film into a 35-mm festival copy in a laboratory is too expensive. They are the ones who prefer these handy video formats that today are circulated above all in DVD form. The range of video formats is never-ending (German Wikipedia puts it at 36 formats) and this means that a festival must already have the necessary equipment to view the films even in the run-up to the festival when they are selecting the entries. A further stumbling block are the colour code formats used in Europe and North America like PAL (Phase-Alternation-Line) and NTSC (derived from the American agency, National Television Systems Committee).
The best way of bringing standardised copies of films to the silver screen seems at the moment to be the transformation of all the available TV formats into a compressed Digital Cinema Package (DCP). This work is either done by the producers themselves or – as is the case with the Berlinale – by the festival organisers. At this year’s 59th Berlin International Film Festival, taking place from 5th to 15th February 2009, the work is being carried out by a special service provider from Tübingen – Bewegte Bilder Medien AG. The boss of this company, Carsten Schuffert, and his colleagues have installed an encoding studio with three mastering stations and a central video server in the film administration division of the Berlinale. Schuffert said that now over 400 films in different formats can be converted to DCP. “The aim is in future to do away with playback in tape form”, Schuffert commented on the work he was doing in the German capital. Furthermore the Berlinale administration places great value on the idea that “from the moment the film is encoded the film file is only available in encrypted form and in this way is then protected from unauthorised access.”
200 gigabytes for a 90-minute feature film
Festival Centre “Berlinale-Palast”; Photo Dirk Michael Deckbar, © BerlinaleDuring the festival the film files will be transported from the memory to the cinemas in the form of a hard disc and then entered into the cinemas’ servers. For the 2009 festival 29 of the 49 festival screens have had digital cinema servers installed – of the type Ropa Cinesuite 2. According to Schuffert, along with the cinemas that already had digital equipment there are now 36 digitalised cinemas. The cinema does not just have to have this server on which the 200 gigabytes necessary for a 90-minute film can be stored, but also a digital projector. As the management of the Berlinale added, “the D-Cinema system is still going to be used exclusively” for the digital performances of the competition. D-Cinema (Digital-Cinema) means the playing back of a high-quality digital film copy that has been produced in line with the standards of the US studio association, Digital Cinema Initiative, and that can only be visualised with the aid of digital projectors that are DCI-compatible.
“These new playback methods are of course important for the Berlinale for the future lies in digital cinema. At the same time however we should not forget the legacy that has come down to us through the years of film history and that is why we are showing 70-mm broadband films as part of this year’s retrospective,” explains the director of the festival, Dieter Kosslick. Meanwhile the distributors and producers at the festival seem to be still backing the old, tried and tested “physical” copy. The Munich film distributing company, Alamode Film, is presenting its film drama, Vaterspiel, in the Panorama section of the festival in the form of an analogue copy. The producer and distributor, Benjamin Herrmann (Majestic Filmproduktion/Filmverleih), who was recently awarded the Bavarian Film Prize, was still not sure by the time of going to press whether his film, John Rabe, nominated in the Berlinale Special section and directed by Oscar-winner Florian Gallenberger, would be delivered on time in DCP format. It will probably only be the competition entries themselves that will be digital – according to distribution manager, Hans-Christian Boese, from the Berlin company of Piffl Medien, Hans-Christian Schmid’s political thriller, Sturm, will be presented in the form of a digital copy. “For its launch in the cinemas later however it will be released in the form of a 35-mm copy”, Boese added.
Translation: Paul McCarthy
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