Digital Cinema in Oklahoma

[Bobby H]

Although it seems to defy logic, the first D-Cinema equipped commercial theaters in the state are not within Oklahoma City or Tulsa.

Carmike Cinemas, as part of its circuit wide commitment to upgrade all of its theater screens to digital cinema, has made the Cinema Center 8 in Shawnee the first D-Cinema equipped movie theater in the state. Carmike's better quality location in Lawton followed the following week.

All screens at both movie theaters feature D-Cinema presentation systems put together by Christie and Access/IT. Each auditorium at both locations is equipped with a state of the art Chrisite CP2000 digital cinema projector featuring 4000 watt lamp houses and 2048 X 1080 pixel 3-chip DLP imaging arrays. They also feature a massive RAID-based Doremi server and Christie DCA21 automation for movie playback on each screen. An even larger Dell SAN server stores all the movie media to move from one theater to another.

The digital movies being played are streamed in JPEG2000 format at bitrates between 150 million and 250 million bits per second. That's 7 to 10 times the data rate of the top end capabilities of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movie discs. That's worth noting for the crowd who thinks their home HDTV setup is anywhere near as as good as what theaters can offer.

I think D-Cinema will filter into Oklahoma City and Tulsa movie theaters fairly soon once chains like AMC, Regal Cinemas, Cinemark and Harkins can get the deals they're working finalized. In the meantime, Carmike Cinemas will be equipping their theaters in Stillwater, Muskogee, Duncan, Ardmore and elsewhere with this new process.

I'm not all totally sold on the all-digital thing. I think movies should still be shot on analog 35mm film, or even larger gauges like 8-perf 35mm VistaVision and 5-perf 70mm widescreen. Analog original negatives have the organic grace to be scanned and digitized to much better digital video playback formats. You can't do that with anything shot on digital video. If you shoot on video you are locked only into the pixels you have with that format. As time rolls on those limitations will seem very puny.

Anyway, Oklahoma is coming along with movie theater presentation technology. It just isn't happening in all the most obvious places.

[Luke]

Interesting read.

I'll be looking forward to comparing a digital theater with an analog one. Since I'm not going to Shawnee anytime soon, I'll wait for one to come to OKC.

Thanks for the update.