Network Computingwww.networkcomputing.com

Film brought people together. Couples would go to the "moving-picture show" and enjoy an hour or so away from their lives. Children could spend Saturday afternoons at the matinees watching their favorite serial star. But film itself has not changed much over the years. The quality of the film has gotten better, and color was added several decades ago, but film still remains as prone to damage and decay as it did in its younger days.

The solution is to use a completely digital medium, one that can be played over and over without damage or degradation. George Lucas was one of the first directors to embrace this new technology by screening Star Wars: Episode 1 -- The Phantom Menace in new digital theaters. Although not completely a digital process since the movie was shot on conventional film and then digitized, it did mark the beginning of a new era. Digital cinemas are now in some metropolitan areas and use state-of-the-art systems to store and project the movies.

Pixar was the first company to offer a truly digital film, with Toy Story 2. While a film print was made to show in nondigital theaters, the digital version was all digital entirely through the process. Using a compression ration of 20:1, it was only 30 GB of data.

Digital cinema offers more advantages than just eliminating potential film damage. Movies on film must be shipped on several reels to the theaters. Once there, they're spliced together for screening. When the run is complete, the film is once again cut into several reels and shipped back to the distributor or to the next theater. Digital cinema can be broadcast via traditional networks to several cinemas at once, thereby eliminating hundreds of dollars per cinema in shipping charges. Even over a DS-3 connection, an average-length movie can be downloaded in less than two hours. Once a theater finishes showing a digital film, it needs only to delete the movie from its system and download the replacement.

Although movies are still shot on film, the day is fast approaching when film itself will be a lost medium as everything will be recorded on digital tape, edited on nonlinear digital systems and presented to audiences through digital projectors.