Electronic Cinema Debut: Star Wars Phantom Menace Digital Premiere at Four U.S. Theaters

On June 18, 1999, what is considered to be the first few awkward steps for electronic cinema where taken. The digital premiere of George Lucas's "Star Wars - The Phantom Menace" was viewed at four theaters in the United States - two on the East Coast and two on the West Coast. The theaters on the East Coast are the Loew's Meadow 6 Theater in Secaucus, NJ and the Loew's Route 4 Theater in Paramus, NJ. On the West Coast, the digital presentations are at the Pacific's Winnetka-21 Theater in Chatsworth, CA and the AMC-14 theater in Burbank, CA.

The Kodak film print of Star Wars was also running in the same theaters so you could go between auditoriums and compare film vs. E-Cinema.
I was there on 6/18 in the AMC-14 at 1:30 when the lights were lowered and the presentation started. A lot of Star Wars fans were in the audience as well as a lot of people in the industry. The DLP Cinema and THX logos stood out and looked superb. Cheers went up when the trailers were over and the green background Motion Picture Rating clip finished. (You know the one that says this film is rated "PG".) Then it went to black and the "Star Wars" logo came on the screen. It stood there on the screen rock solid and had a kind of three dimensional look. No weave, no flecks of dirt, no scratches. It looked great. The sound of the spacecraft, in outer space, sounded great also.

Now you might call me an idiot but in the interest of science my wife and I viewed the various presentations all day the next day Saturday, June 19, 1999. What I saw I could right a book on but I will condense what I saw and give you some of the highlights.

We arrived in line at the Pacific's Winnetka-21 Theater in Chatsworth, CA. When it was our turn to purchase our tickets. I said to the girl behind the window, "What's the difference in size between the "Big Screen" and the digital screen size." She said she didn't know. I asked her to please find out? She picked up the phone and called the "booth" and asked "Does anyone up there know what screen size Star Wars is projected on and what size is the digital presentation screen." After she hung up she said that no one knows the size other than one is bigger than the other. I asked here to check with the manager. It was 10:30 a.m. and there wasn't anybody behind us. The show didn't start for another 15 minutes. She came back and said the big screen is about 4 ft. wider than the small screen. I said okay we want the digital presentation of "Star Wars". We then proceeded to the theater, showed our ticket stubs and walked into the auditorium. The seating was "stadium seating".

According to a paper handed out by CineComm, the screen was said to be 47 ft. x 27 ft. The projector was a Hughes/JVC model 12K projector. The throw from the projector to the screen was 77 ft. The image aspect ratio on the screen was 2.35:1. The brightness was said to be about 11.6 foot lamberts. The audio was uncompressed 6 channel (5.1) sound.

In order to be fair in the evaluation, we sat at an approximate 40 degree viewing angle. This was verified by using an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper and holding it up to my eye and aligning the far end corners of the page with the left and right edges of the screen. This put us in the middle about 3 rows >from the back of the Pacific Winnetka-21 auditorium. It was obvious that in this theater most people sit less than three screen heights from the screen.

The screen was a flat screen and it is claimed to have a gain of 2.0. This is probably correct as the projected image had a "hot spot" in the middle and was dark on all four corners. The higher the gain of the screen, the more pronounced is the "hot Spot", so much for screen uniformity.

We watched the movie from beginning to the bitter end. The last credits list the ones who were involved in the E-Cinema work. (The film print does not include these people.)

The film was transferred in two formats at Modern Video/Film in Glendale, CA and evaluated at IVC (International Video Conversions) in Burbank on a large screen in what was once part of the famous Lockheed "Skunk Works".

Star Wars has a lot of special effects in it. It is said that about 80% of the movie has effects. 20% of the movie does not have any effects but half of that was shot using a HDTV camera. All of the images from film and the HDTV camera were digitized and composited on SGI machines at 2K resolution. Then the 2K files were output to a film recorder to create a color corrected Inter Positive (IP). That IP was used to make the film prints and another identical IP was generated to be transferred to HDTV for the "Digital Presentation". The IP was transferred on two BTS Spirit telecines. One transferred the IP image directly to a Panasonic HD D-5 tape machine in 1920 x 1080 at 30i. The other Spirit output the IP image using only 1280 x 1024 out of the 1920 x 1080 HDTV raster. Remember the IP film is in scope with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio.

The HD D-5 tapes were then sent to Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and the data was transferred to a Pluto Technologies HyperSPACE(tm) High Definition Digital Video Recorder. It is ideally suited for use to record and playback the Hi Def signals. It uses 20 18 GB hard drives in the array and can store up to three hours of an HD D-5 compressed digital bit stream. The 6 (5.1) channels of uncompressed audio were transferred to a Tascam MMR8 Digital Disk Recorder at THX and was the source of audio for the theaters playback. The audio was kept in sync to the video via time code.

In each theater, a film projector was run one minute behind the electronic presentation so that if the electronic projector failed, the show could still go on. However the lamp for the film projector was not turned on. The sound of the movie projector running could be faintly heard at the back of the auditorium. This also theoretically made it possible in the morning for the projector techs do a split screen and match the film print. Of course no one is allowed into the theater during setup so it is only speculation. (I suspect the Hughes/JVC techs used this to set up their projector as it matched the contrasty film print very closely.) Kodak said the print was on their new Visions Première high contrast print stock.

In the theaters with the Hughes-JVC projector, the Pluto server was played back into a D/A converter to convert the bits back to an analog signal and fed to the projector. The HDTV 1920 x 1080i signal at 30 frames per second had the 3:2 sequence so that the projector could run interlaced with no flicker. On the monologue crawl the letters had a twitter on the top and bottom of the letters as they moved up on the screen and there was interline twitter noticed on the credit crawl. Space ship flybys and pans all exhibited the 12 cycle judder that is caused by the 3:2. Most people are so familiar with the judder that only a few commented about it being objectionable.

After viewing the "Pure Digital" Star Wars presentation we then watched the Star Wars on film. The film was very similar to the electronic presentation but without the 3:2 judder. A scratch was seen and a some dust and dirt particles were scattered throughout the film. After the film ended we went to the AMC-14 in Burbank California for the Digital 7:30 p.m. screening of Star Wars.

The TI projector had a look all of its own and more faithfully matched the IP for detail in the blacks. The projector appeared to be sharper. The TI projector was fed from a Pluto server by playing the bits directly into the projector. The bits were matrixed digitally back to RGB then de-gammaed, as the DLP engine requires a linear gamma response curve to drive the DMD mirrors. TI uses 12 bits to accomplish the transformation. The 3:2 was also removed so that the image on the screen was a true 24 (23.98) frames per second. The monolog crawl and the credit crawl both looked the same as the projected film. No interline twitter. Pans and space craft fly byes were smooth.

Color on the Hughes-JVC was more saturated and matched the film print closely, TI on the other hand looked very natural and the color saturation was more like real life and much easier to view. This brings up the question "Is it real or is it film?" I think I prefer the more natural look, as it doesn't detract from the story as much.

Like I said, in the Pacific Winettka-21 theater the screen was 47 ft. x 27 ft., so to sit three screen heights back, one had to sit in the third from the back of the theater. The viewing angle in the center of the Pacific Theater auditorium was only about two screen heights. The closest row was only about 14 ft. from the screen and the viewing angle there was absurd. At the AMC-14 theater in Burbank the screen was slightly smaller but to obtain the same viewing angle of 40 degrees it was possible to sit about the middle of the theater where the stadium seating ended and the flat seating area began. This theater was designed more like a "shoe box". One could sit as far as 5 screen heights back and as close as 1 screen height in this theater.

Somewhere in the movie an HDTV camera was used to record a couple of scenes. Most thought it was the sequence were the Jeddi tends to Skywalkers wound and collects a blood sample for analyses. Dave Schenullie, THX says that you can't tell the difference between the film and the HDTV scenes. Only Lucas knows which scene(s), and he's not telling.

While waiting in line to see the 4:30 p.m. digital presentation at the AMC-14 in Burbank, a couple of teenagers were telling their friends that "Yeah, Star Wars is being shown in Sony Digital. They use a DVD, man!" I found this interesting because Sony didn't have anything to do with the presentation but the Walkman crowd thinks that anything digital must be Sony or Dolby. So much for brand names.

So, in my opinion, on a scale of 1 (best) to 3 (worst),The film scored a number 3. The CineComm Pure Digital presentation using the Hughes/JVC projector scored a number 2. And the "Number 1" went to TI's Totally Digital Projection.