Lebanon

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o much with a streaming analog signal. It's a completely different language.
Digital cinema affects three major areas of movie-making:
• Production - how the movie is actually made
• Distribution - how the movie gets from the production company to movie theaters
• Projection - how the theater presents the movie
In the next sections, we'll look at each of these areas in detail to find out how digital cinema is different from conventional cinema.
Production
With an $800 consumer digital camcorder, a stack of tapes, a computer and some video-editing software, you could make a digital movie. But there are a couple of problems with this approach. First, your image resolution won't be that great on a big movie screen. Second, your movie will look like news footage, not a normal theatrical film. Conventional video has a completely different look from film, and just about anybody can tell the difference in a second.
Film and video differ a lot in image clarity, depth of focus and color range, but the biggest contrast is frame rate. Film cameras normally shoot at 24 frames per second, while most U.S. television video cameras shoot at 30 frames per second (29.97 per second, to be exact). Most video footage is also interlaced -- each frame is split into two sets of horizontal lines that fit together. Video is designed this way to work with the standard television format. A television's electron beam paints every other line as it moves down the screen (for example, every odd-numbered line). Then, the next time it moves down the screen, it paints the even-numbered lines, alternating back and forth between even-numbered and odd-numbered lines on each pass. (See How Video Formatting Works for more information.)
All of these factors give conventional video a completely different flavor than film -- the image seems to move differently. In order to mimic the characteristic look of film, movie-makers use digital camcorders that shoo...