Digital vs Analog Movies

With the arrival of the digitally-made Star Wars: The Attack of The Clones, the talk is heating up about analog versus digital cinemas. Digital theatres... I can see it now: when there's a mishap, instead of the audience seeing the film jam in the projector and melt and burn right in front of our eyes, we'll get the blue screen of death.

I think I'm going to always prefer the old way. Film melting and burning on a huge screen before an audience is always an aesthetically interesting experience. Plus, you know that if you and your fellow audience-goers clap, and yell, and make enough noise, eventually someone at the concession stand outside comes in to find out what's going on, and notifies the manager who notifies the projectionist who goes and fixes the problem and in five minutes, or fifteen, you're back to watching the movie again, albeit a few feet of footage less than you paid for.

In the digital theatre, the projectionist, wearing headphones blaring the 2010 version of Metallica, will be sitting in his jammies at home in a darkened room, black except for the light from his flat LCD monitor. He'll be scanning blogs and chatting with hax0r dudes and dudettes worldwide while in a little corner of his screen a little dialog box unsuccessfully begs for attention: "Display error -279 at Multiplex 6, Screen 19. Unable to continue movie. Audience is waiting. Abort, retry, cancel?" Posted by brian at May 11, 2002 01:18 AM