Digital Big-Screen Future Now Showing at a Few Select Homes

The lights dim, the curtain parts and cinema’s digital future comes up on display in the person of Russell Crowe as the gladiator Maximus, standing out clean and sharp on screen, with nary a millimeter of celluloid film rolling anywhere on the premises.

This demonstration of projection-by-digital-bits, however, isn’t taking place in a commercial theater but in a private home nestled in a canyon high above Santa Monica Bay.

“This is a precursor to what someday will be in theaters,” said Bradford Wells, a Los Angeles builder of private screening rooms, including this one made for film director Jon Avnet. “But we’re convinced that what’s going to drive the expansion of digital cinema is the home market.”

He may be right. Most of the publicity about digital cinema has focused on the prospects for screening Hollywood features digitally in the exhibition halls of major theater chains--most of which are currently bankrupt and in no condition to bankroll a multibillion-dollar technological transition.

But digital projectors suitable for private use already are being marketed by manufacturers such as Panasonic, Marantz and Zenith. Most are designed to project content from computers or DVDs and are initially being pitched at the high-end home theater consumer (they carry price tags of $8,000 to $13,000).

And then there is Avnet’s screening room, which is built around a cinema-standard digital projector using technology from Texas Instruments and costing about $125,000. Avnet, the director of such films as “Fried Green Tomatoes” and “Up Close & Personal,” has long been a technology enthusiast. Until recently his energies were focused on audio. A music lover with eclectic taste, he was known for insisting on the highest caliber of sound reproduction and editing for his film soundtracks.

When he started work on converting his home office into a screening room, he began exploring the potential of digital video too.

What he envisioned was a DVD-projection TV on a grand scale--one that could throw an image onto a screen 15 feet wide.

For a time, Avnet and Wells, whose firm Bradford Wells & Associates has specialized in private and commercial screening rooms for 12 years, debated whether it was possible to simply improve the experience of watching projected video by delivering the image to a wide screen. The image quality of most existing projection TVs, however, falls off fast as the image size increases because of the low resolution of standard video--as anyone who has squinted at a dimly lighted big-screen Super Bowl broadcast knows.

For that reason, Wells was skeptical when Avnet proposed what amounted to a 15-foot-wide television screen. “I said, ‘I can’t do it.’ ”

But around the same time, Avnet saw a demonstration of digital projection technology developed by Texas Instruments. He asked Wells to look into customizing the system for a small room. Within a few weeks Wells had secured the help of American Hi Definition Inc., a Calabasas company that provides projection systems for trade shows. AHD built the projector and over a period of 10 weeks, Wells installed it, configured a rack of accompanying electronics for the projection booth and finished the room.

Avnet’s screening room is spacious and comfortable, measuring about 25 by 20 feet and furnished with several rows of plush seating upholstered in navy blue. Guests can stretch out by draping their legs over large red ovoid footrests that Wells calls dinosaur eggs.

At the center of the seating arrangement is a console with a retractable touch screen, from which the host can control DVD and satellite TV sources and manage everything from the lighting and sound volume to the retracting curtains and the projection focus.

At the heart of the system, of course, is the digital projector. Texas Instruments’ digital light processing system, which is probably the most popular of several competing technologies in the digital cinema field, uses as many as three palm-size chips, each with 1.3 million microscopic mirrors that pivot as many as 1,000 times per second between two positions that either beam light onto the screen or block it.

The chips are fed television signals from either of Avnet’s two satellite dishes, or from a specialized DVD player with a digital output from Theta Digital Corp. of Agoura Hills. Consumer DVD players output signals only in analog--converting them internally from the DVD’s digital information--for two reasons: Your home television is an analog device, and DVD distributors are afraid that making the digital stream too accessible would facilitate piracy by allowing users to make perfect DVD copies. Because Avnet’s projector is digital, the conversion isn’t necessary--indeed, it would lead to some loss of picture quality.

Filling out the room equipment are a $25,000 sound system by Miller & Kreisel Sound, a Culver City firm, and about $10,000 worth of DVD and satellite reception equipment.

Altogether, the room cost more than Avnet would have spent on his original plan for a conventional setup of twin 35-millimeter film projectors, possibly along with a big-screen projection TV for DVDs. The film projectors would have cost $100,000 total--but they would also have required paying a projectionist every time Avnet wished to screen a feature film.

“It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever done anything so ahead of the curve and extravagant,” Avnet said.

By most measures the result is spectacular. The room dimensions and the placement of the loudspeakers give guests the impression of being surrounded by image and sound, creating a remarkably immediate experience. Because video is better than film at tracking motion (compare the sharp image of a running back streaking across the field on any NFL broadcast with the blur on film by a camera panning across a landscape), the eye follows the flash of broadswords on “Gladiator” as though the viewer is present on the set.

On the other hand, the huge image tends to magnify the shortcomings of retail DVDs, which are typically recorded at resolutions well below what will be necessary to project a satisfactory image at a commercial cinema. In this room, one is unmistakably watching “Gladiator” on video--although it may well be the best video picture ever.

For Avnet the system has obvious virtues. Almost all movies today are edited digitally, with editors manipulating film images converted to video rather than physically cutting and pasting snippets of film. Avnet now is set up to screen dailies in the comfort of his own home. While directing or producing a movie, he uses the screening room almost every day.

But perhaps most important, the room gives him the opportunity to tinker with a technology that can only become larger in his professional life as time passes.

“Part of what I’m doing is using this as a workshop,” he said. “I’m not old enough yet that I’m afraid of this stuff, and I know I have to know enough about it to survive.”

Still, as a filmmaker Avnet is reserving a healthy skepticism for some aspects of digital cinema--particularly filming.

“I wouldn’t shoot on digital until I think it has the ability to handle light the way film does,” he said, “although I’ve already seen some incredible images on it.”

The problem is that digital camera resolutions are still not as dense as the best commercial-grade film. That’s one reason why digital images, which are made up of data bits usually represented as ones and zeros, often are not as rich in contrast as film; scenes shot in low light tend to wash out.

“It’s only a matter of time till you get enough [digital] ones and zeros,” Avnet said. Meanwhile, he has his projection workshop. “In my spare time I monkey with the room a lot,” he said. “But I have not taken it through its paces yet.”