Lebanon

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Clearly, digital technology has already taken over much of the home entertainment market. It seems strange, then, that the vast majority of theatrical motion pictures are shot and distributed on celluloid film, just like they were more than a century ago. Of course, the technology has improved over the years, but it's still based on the same basic principles. The reason is simple: Up until recently, nothing could come close to the image quality of projected film.
But things are starting to change. George Lucas kicked off the digital cinema charge in May of 2002 with "Star Wars: Episode II, the Attack of the Clones," the first big budget live action movie shot entirely on digital video. Most theaters played 35-mm film transfers of the movie, but Lucas hopes his next digital picture, "Star Wars: Episode III," will play mainly on digital movie projectors. With more and more filmmakers embracing the new technology, including big names like Steven Soderbergh and Robert Rodriguez, digital cinema is well on its way.
In this article, we'll find out what digital cinema is all about, and we'll see what it means to the film industry. As it turns out, the rise of digital cinema will have a pretty big effect on the world.
Elements of Digital Cinema
Digital cinema is simply a new approach to making and showing movies. The basic idea is to use bits and bytes (strings of 1s and 0s) to record, transmit and replay images, rather than using chemicals on film.
The main advantage of digital technology (such as a CD) is that it can store, transmit and retrieve a huge amount of information exactly as it was originally recorded. Analog technology (such as an audio tape) loses information in transmission, and generally degrades with each viewing. (For more information, see How Analog and Digital Recording Works.)
Digital information is also a lot more flexible than analog information. A computer can manipulate bytes of data very easily, but it can't d...