FIlm v Digital

Earlier this year I was invited to have a tour behind the scenes of a cinema, which I jumped at the opportunity. During the tour I was shown the various projection rooms which was of great interest to me. Standing in the room above watching the film go around the various projector equipment I could really feel the magic of cinema. As the projectionist was explaining how the films wound around the equipment and the process of running the films I could quickly see that it was a highly skilled job. A lot more work goes into playing back films in the cinema that you might think. The film you can see playing in this scene was on seven different real's of film. You would never think that while watching the film playing seamlessly in front of you.

One of the rooms that I visited had a digital projection system in it. This has many obvious benefits, but all that magic and skilled work had gone from this room. Rather than running the complex tape based system all that is required is a simple computer hard drive. It wont be long before all the films are replaced by hard drives... and no doubt they will be replaced by streaming the movies from head office at some point.

What will happen to the projectionist? There is not skill involved in putting a hard drive in a computer and pressing go is there.

A blog article has been written about this by Paul Moxham @PaulMoxmovies which you can read by clicking here.