Are deeply curved LED screens the way to the future for cinema?

[Marcel Birgelen]

First off all, such a screen should be capable of playing regular DCI content too, especially scope content would be great contender, as flat would probably just look stupid on such kind of screen. So, in order to facilitate this, DCI compliancy would be a requirement already...

Also, you seem to underestimate those "hackers". For example, "they" have already grabbed 35mm scans of Star Wars and released a better original version on a "home format" than LucasFilm ever managed to do in 45 or so years. I don't see Hollywood releasing a lot of movies on in an ultra-wide-screen format, so there will be other AR versions of it, most likely just statically cropped versions or in ultimo, it would be a pan-scanned release. Statically cropped releases can be produced with two or three command-line options on ffmpeg.

Even then, there will always be folks that will want to get their hands on an ultra-high quality release of some oddball format and studios will want to prevent this.

[Frank Angel]

Thing here is, THE CONTENT needs to be considered -- the authors are creating content specifically to fit on that screen. with the story being nothing but a vehicle for the action....what would a hacker gain in being able to grab that cinematography....play it on an iphone? A tablet? even a 89in TV? The whole point of the work itself is the screen, not the story. Probably that's reason no one hacked Cinarama in its short heyday. Futurovision is not going to lose any significant ticket sales because someone bought a hacked DVD of it on a street-corner.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Ah! That's the thing I forgot.
I had figured that the path between the media block (or what have you) and the display would be complex but I didn't consider that, upstream of that, content would still need to be encrypted.

If it isn't encrypted, it needs to be in some kind of tamper-proof secure enclosure. This is the primary reason they moved from external mediablocks in the Series 1 to integrated media blocks in the Series 2: to shorten the pathways over which potentially unencrypted content would flow.

Capturing image data from unencrypted HDMIN DVI or SDI paths can be achieved with sub 500 dollar hardware.

A LED screen has much longer pathways of potentially unencrypted data...

[Randy Stankey]

...exposed paths between the "media block" and the actual imaging device...

Ah! That's the thing I forgot.
I had figured that the path between the media block (or what have you) and the display would be complex but I didn't consider that, upstream of that, content would still need to be encrypted.

Leo, I used to have one of those Onkyo turntables. I wish I could remember where it went.

[Marcel Birgelen]

About a grand (after shipping and California sales tax) would buy me this, which I could modify to play such a record in 2-3 hours. Although this is no longer in production, used examples appear on Ebay quite frequently. It would be an even easier option, because it can do 60 RPM out of the box. I have the turntable it is a modification of (the Vestax BDT-2500), and the variable speed function is great for digitizing records dating from the 1890s to the period between roughly 1912 to 1925, when 78.16 RPM (60 Hz territories) and 77.92 RPM (50 Hz) became established as the universal standard.

There is an easier and cheaper way to recover the content: Simply play it on any decent record player the only challenge will be fitting a 16" record on there, but I've got an old German-built record player that could fit oversized records. although I've never seen them.

Load the recording into your favorite sound editing utility, reverse it and if you recorded it at 45 RPM, you slow it down by factor 0,75 and voila... no expensive gear needed. As I said so, you could do this even on the commandline with a tool like ffmpeg.

Outsmarting the smartest hackers on the planet isn't done by throwing a few half-baked hacks at them, first they'll frown at you and when they realize you're being serious, they'll laugh at you.

[Leo Enticknap]

Make a 16-inch record that rotates counter clockwise at 60 rpm, with the groove starting at the center, going outward. It could only be played on a turntable that has the tone arm on the left and runs backward...

About a grand (after shipping and California sales tax) would buy me this, which I could modify to play such a record in 2-3 hours. Although this is no longer in production, used examples appear on Ebay quite frequently. It would be an even easier option, because it can do 60 RPM out of the box. I have the turntable it is a modification of (the Vestax BDT-2500), and the variable speed function is great for digitizing records dating from the 1890s to the period between roughly 1912 to 1925, when 78.16 RPM (60 Hz territories) and 77.92 RPM (50 Hz) became established as the universal standard.

It would take me rather more than 2-3 hours of waiting around while my computer attempted a brute force attack on an encrypted DCP for which I don't have a KDM, though...

[Marcel Birgelen]

Release groups and hackers have gone to great lengths. Just look at how they defeated sophisticated copy protection schemes like those employed on multi-billion dollar game consoles. A record turning the wrong side round and at an odd speed would be easily defeated with modern technology, for example. It would take like a few seconds in ffmpeg to get that reversed and slowed down.

The encryption on DCPs also isn't difficult by any means, as the tools you need to decrypt it are available in your most common Linux install.

Since the release window has already largely been a thing of the past, the studios could maybe agree that something like HDCP 2.x is sufficient to protect the content from being stolen off (easily) exposed paths between the "media block" and the actual imaging device...

[Randy Stankey]

Make a 16-inch record that rotates counter clockwise at 60 rpm, with the groove starting at the center, going outward. It could only be played on a turntable that has the tone arm on the left and runs backward. Would anybody who tried to play it on a standard turntable even be able to get the music to play?

I am asking a similar question: If a movie was made for a 360-degree, wraparound, theater sized, flat-panel, LED display, would anybody even be able to play it on anything but the system it was designed for?

If so, the methods encryption would be made less complicated simply because, even if somebody did figure out a way to circumvent security, they still wouldn't be able to play the movie correctly. They would have to scale, crop and/or warp the image to fit a standard screen and it would still look wonky, even after all that work. The files for such a movie would likely be huge, even with compression. They wouldn't fit on an ordinary flash drive or any kind of removable media like a Blu-Ray disk and they would be unwieldy to send over the internet. A two-hour movie could, probably, only be stored on a multi-terabyte hard drive and would only be playable on the system it was designed for.

I'm not suggesting that there isn't a reason to encrypt. I'm wondering whether the encryption that would have to be used could be less complicated and less difficult to implement.

It would be like a Juggernaut Effect. A giant, wraparound movie could only be presented by somebody with a large amount of money, knowledge and resources like a large corporation.

I'm not saying that I like this idea. I'm just going, "Hmm..."

[Marcel Birgelen]

Sure, go ahead and copy the movie. It'll be so large and unwieldy that you can't store it on anything but a large hard drive. Even if you did copy the movie, you still couldn't play it because it is formatted for a particular type of display which is too large to fit inside the average living room and too expensive to obtain. If, somehow, you could manage to view the file, the image would be so distorted that it would be uncomfortable to watch.

What do you consider large and unwieldy? Most LED walls won't exceed 4K resolution... My workstation currently drives 4 4K monitors at ease. An unencrypted file will be resized to something that fits on your 4K or 1080p set in no time by anybody with a halfway descent machine. Hollywood does not want this kind of high-res content out there, unencrypted... yet they don't mind spooling it directly to on-line streaming services, where it will be ripped and re-shared to "the masses' within several hours after publication.

If there are, I've haven't seen them but have seen presentations discussing them. That said, the dot pitch is such on screens like Onyx by Samsung that resolution would not be compromised, particularly for typical cinemas

Well, there are tons of examples, but take a look at an example rather close to home. Look at the LED wall or rather "LED curtain" in the back of this stage of this video. You can clearly see the spots arranged in a grid, shining through from behind the screen. The speakers are in front of the screen, but it's a festival stage, not a cinema. From a distance, the screen looks great, but in the close-ups you clearly can see the huge dot pitch. Still, this dot-pitch can easily be halved, and the screen would still be transparant. LEDs are getting smaller and flatter, so creating audio-transparent LED walls with a dot-pitch small enough it works in a cinema setup seems feasible to me.

No! Just no! The use of the screen as an audio reflector is an absolute horrible/miserable idea. the seat-to-seat variation is HUGE. Samsung/JBL has tried it...horrible.

I'm not a fan of the idea and it's not difficult to imagine the potential problems you create with such a setup, but I like to be somewhat openminded. The first digital cameras were horrible, the first digital projectors produced a horrible image, the first class D amplifiers were also horrible. Sometimes a bad idea remains a bad idea, but I honestly need a bit more imput to why this will never work before I want to entirely write off the the idea.

There is no distortion in the image. There is always distortion from one's seated perspective, no matter where they sit. On a flat screen, it is keystone perspective...you might be more used it it but it is very much there.

I guess it's a bit like looking at the moon... We're more trained to look at a "deformed rectangle" representing an image, than at any other forms and I guess our brains somehow compensate for it, without thinking the image somehow looks strange. The geometric deformations of e.g. an IMAX dome projection are often hard to oversee, especially with stuff close to the lens.

[Frank Angel]

I think the average moviegoer would be happy if theaters invested enough (in auditorium monitoring) to get other moviegoers to shut the fuck up and put their goddamn phones away.

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[Randy Stankey]

... The hard part is the "secure environment"...

I was trying to suggest that, if the playback system requires content in a format that can only be played in that particular theater or one just like it, the "secure environment" is the system, itself.

Sure, go ahead and copy the movie. It'll be so large and unwieldy that you can't store it on anything but a large hard drive. Even if you did copy the movie, you still couldn't play it because it is formatted for a particular type of display which is too large to fit inside the average living room and too expensive to obtain. If, somehow, you could manage to view the file, the image would be so distorted that it would be uncomfortable to watch.

Not saying that there wouldn't be any need for encryption. Just suggesting that the encryption could be less complicated.

[Geoff Jones]

One thing is clear: Cinema needs to keep investing in innovation to stay relevant, in a market where entertainment content is ever more instantly accessible on any device and people enjoy an ever increasing picture quality, size and audio quality at home.

Is this really clear?

I would be happy if theaters simply invested enough to ensure that the current technology was presented correctly and that every title was displayed on a reasonably large screen.

But I'm not an average moviegoer.

Based on the comments I've seen over the years, I think the average moviegoer would be happy if theaters invested enough (in auditorium monitoring) to get other moviegoers to shut the fuck up and put their goddamn phones away.

[Frank Angel]

That perspective distortion is present even in the natural way we see. Every angle you view in real life has distortion and the brain simple understands that and we don't perceive it as distortion at all. I have always been amazed how the eye/brain interface is constantly trying to normalize what we see and how we understand it. I have macular degeneration in my right eye; if I close my left eye, i see lots of distortions, especially on things like lines, where a horizontal line will look like it was drawn with wet paint and someone has smeared the paint either it upward or downward in certain places. But if I open both eyes, the line returns to normal and I see no distortion. The brain is ignoring the distortion. Same when we were making video transfers of anamorphic 35mm film with a process that combined letterboxing, left and right edge cropping and leaving 15% anamorphic squeeze still in the image, thus reducing the amount of top and bottom black bars and reducing the amount of edge loss. Thing is, you would think geez,wiewing and image with 15% anamorphic squeeze would be horrific, but again, the brain tends normalize that distortion. I was amazed how quickly movies with that compression left in would look normal and perfectly acceptable. Then again, almost anything would be more acceptable than pan and scan transfers.

Same principle when shooting 16mm with say a Bolex; a savvy camera operator knows that trying to keep one eye closed while looking thru the viewfinder for any length of time will pretty quickly cause the muscles in that closed eye to fatigue and even cause muscle pain. Seasoned camera operators know that you can look thru the viewfinder with both eyes open and with a little practice, train the brain to simply "see" only the viewfinder eye and ignore information from the other eye, thus eliminating the need to close one eye at all. And of course how incredible is our amazing ability to "white balance" every hue we encounter from nearly yellow to nearly blue and they will be seen as "white" without our needing to do anything!

[Steve Guttag]

There are "transparent" perforated LED screens and they're often used for stage productions to put both speakers and additional lightning effects behind the screen. The problem though, with those perforated screens is that they reduce the potential resolution and increase the screen-door effect, which is one of the main disadvantages of a LED screen v.s. projection.

If there are, I've haven't seen them but have seen presentations discussing them. That said, the dot pitch is such on screens like Onyx by Samsung that resolution would not be compromised, particularly for typical cinemas

Another option could be embracing the screen as a hard, reflective surface and strategically aim speakers at the screen

No! Just no! The use of the screen as an audio reflector is an absolute horrible/miserable idea. the seat-to-seat variation is HUGE. Samsung/JBL has tried it...horrible.

It would seem to me that you would still have horizon bend depending on where you are seated, but at least no distortion otherwise.

There is no distortion in the image. There is always distortion from one's seated perspective, no matter where they sit. On a flat screen, it is keystone perspective...you might be more used it it but it is very much there.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Personally, being a curved screen fanatic, I hope to see a large deep curve screen make it to cinema again and LED (or like technology) would be key. Finally, a means of a curved field without the geometric distortions associated with projection. Now, if audio through emissive screens were adequately addressed, I'd think it could be the future for SOME cinemas. It would also end the debate over the mezzanine floor as there would be nothing up there. With a curved screen, there should be enough room to put sound equipment entirely behind it or go completely networked based audio and let the speakers themselves also be the amplifiers (which Meyersound already does though they do have a rackable input module).

It would seem to me that you would still have horizon bend depending on where you are seated, but at least no distortion otherwise.