Digital cinema covers the entire movie production

Film director George Lucas has been famously quoted as saying that film is a nineteenth-century medium, developed out of photography through both media using celluloid strips for capturing and recording their images. This technology formed the basis for films, film-making and cinema for around one hundred years, from its first developments, referred to by Lucas, at the end of the nineteenth century, to the end of the twentieth century. Lucas's comment, in its denigration of the ‘ancient history' of celluloid, indicates a new reality, a replacement for celluloid; a new beginning for film-making and cinema: digital cinema. In the past 20 or so years, digital technologies, techniques and visual aesthetics have had a massive effect on all phases of film-making and distribution process. Digital cinema is above all a concept, a complete system, covering the entire movie production chain from the acquisition with digital cameras to post-production to distribution to exhibition, all with bits and bytes instead of 35mm reels.. This article offers an overview of these changes, explaining the basic working of the technology and mapping the range of practices that had been affected as a result of the appearance of the digital.

Until recently, the actual filming process of a movie production has been done using traditional 35mm or 70mm film cameras using canisters of celluloid. The image quality produced by digital cameras was felt to be significantly lower than film, and so, while the film footage was increasingly being fed into computers for postproduction manipulation, the production process itself remained celluloid-based. Digital filming began, in theory, in the late 1980s, when Sony came up with the marketing concept of ‘electronic cinematography'. The initiative failed to take off with professionals and public alike, and it was only at the end of the 1990s, with the introduction of HDCAM recorders and a renaming of the process to ‘digital cinematography', that making films using digital cameras and related equipment finally began to take hold. George Lucas was instrumental in engendering this shift, when, in 2001-2 he shot the ‘Attack of the Clones' episode of his Star Wars saga digitally, using Sony HDW-F900 HDCAM camcorders fitted with high-end Panavision lenses (the French feature Vidocq was actually the first shot with the Sony camera). While capable of shooting conventional American standard 30-frame/second interlaced pictures, the cameras could also shoot at 24-frames/second, the standard for film cameras, and also progressive video, video made up of complete frames rather than interlaced fields. High-end cameras use a single sensor which is the same size as a 35mm film frame, and allows the same shallow depth of field as conventional film cameras. Moreover, shooting in progressive HDTV format gives an image size of 720 or even 1080 pixels.

The result is a ‘filmic' rather than a ‘televisual' look to the captured image. By the mid-1990s, the Sony DCR-VX1000 MiniDV format camera promised an image quality such that, while still not as good as film, was good enough for low-budget film-makers to begin shooting their features digitally and editing them on relatively inexpensive desktop software programs. The high-end cameras use minimal or no compression processes to reduce file size, whereas the MiniDV systems typically employ high compression rates, reducing image quality in the interests of storage size. Because of the lower dynamic range of digital cameras, the correcting of poorly exposed footage is harder to perform in post-production. A partial solution to this problem is the addition of complex video-assist technology during the shooting process. This might ‘simply' consist of a high-performance video monitor which allows the cinematographer to see what is being recorded and to make any broad adjustments necessary. At its most complex, however, it will include monitors displaying precise waveforms and colour analysis so that the cinematographer and his assistants can make minute adjustments to every component of the image. Such high-technology solutions are, not surprisingly, only at the disposal of the biggest budget productions. The increase in the use of digital technologies and processes in the production of feature films has also affected the logistics of film production, enabling real locations to be partially or, increasingly, fully replaced by digitally created ones. This replacement can be wide ranging. At its simplest, it can just be the augmenting of an ostensibly real space, where small objects or parts of a scene are digitally added to the original footage. More extensively, digitally created scenery can be substantially added to real 3-D spaces, as was the case with the Coliseum scene in Gladiator.

At the current furthest extreme, digital images can form the wholesale replacement of a real-world diegesis with a digitally created one, such as in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow where the actors are virtually the only non-digitally created elements in the film. A further advantage of the digital creation of sets and locations, especially in an age of increasing film serials, sequels and franchises, is that the virtual sets, once created in the computer and stored as data, can be easily regenerated for future film productions, making those lucrative sequels and franchises easier to establish and to make. Economies of scale in digital processes are therefore employed to offset the increasingly spiralling costs of modern feature film production. An interesting reversal of this trend, perhaps, is that this virtual replacement of real locations places an increasing premium on the now recognizably expensive productions which still go to the real geographical location in order to shoot their footage. The James Bond franchise, for example, is still sold on the exotic and expensive fact that the production actually still films its actors in far-flung locations rather than having them stand in front of a green screen with footage of the locations added later in post-production.

The consequence of this increasing use of computer-imaging techniques in the making of films is that the balance between production (the filming of the scenes which will constitute the narrative of the finished film) and post-production (the cleaning-up of the images captured during the production stage and the adding of analogue, and now digital effects to those basic images) has been significantly altered. In contemporary feature film-making, the post-production period is now generally far longer than production period, with most of what will constitute the final image seen on screen being the result of work done in the CGI (computer-generated imagery) and editing suites rather than on-set or on-location. While CGI effects, especially in the largest blockbuster movies, are complex, expensive and time consuming, the latter two are consistently decreasing and are far more attractive to film-makers than the risks and costs often incurred on live location shooting. Other aspects of the modern film-making process are also feeling the effects of increasing digitization. Editing used to be a rather delicate process of handling strips of celluloid, physically cut and stuck together in hard-to-reverse operations. In such conditions, editing decisions were performed only after long and careful thought. In the digital age, such physical processes have been dispensed with. The ‘film' images have, until recently, been stored on tape, but are now increasingly ‘tapeless,' recorded as data files on hard disk or flash memory.

These are then downloaded into an editing system employing RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive/independent Drives/disks). Different versions of edits can be performed with the change of a few settings on the editing console; the sequence being compiled ‘virtually', in the computer's memory, rather than as a physically tangible thing. A wide range of effects can be tried out easily and quickly, without the physical restrictions posed by conventional cut-andstick editing. A downside of this increased efficiency has, however, been noted by a number of practitioners. The speed and ease of modern digital editing processes threatens to give editors and their directors, if not an embarrassment of choice then at least a confusion of options. The careful forethought that came before a physical edit of celluloid has been replaced by a ‘try-it-and-see' philosophy which can result, in undisciplined hands, in a chaotic range of barely separable choices, potentially making the editing process lengthier rather than shorter. But with the editing process on many effects-heavy productions now inextricably intertwined with the complex combination with live action footage with computer-generated images across a lengthy post-production period, this potential slowing of the editing process becomes both less critical and less easy to identify as a separate part of the production.

Digital cinema covers the entire movie production

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