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Why film will end by late 2013

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Panel Participants: 
John Fithian – President & CEO, National Association of Theatre Owners
Joe Hart – Senior Vice President, Deluxe Digital Cinema 
Larry O’Reilly – Executive Vice President Theatre Development, IMAX
Joel Pearlman – Managing Director, Roadshow Films & Chairman, Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia
Allan Stiles – Managing Director, Grand Cinemas & Board Member, National Association of Cinema Operators-Australasia
Wayne Duband – former CEO, Warner Bros. International & current Independent Representative for Major Product

The site for all the posts is: CineTechGeek

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The Future Holds...

The Laser Trend

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LLE then publicized an industry effort to shift the regulatory basis for lasers in cinemas. Sony has announced participation with that effort, though they haven’t made any further announcements since their 2008 technology release (or the recent rumor that they are working with a French group on a cinema-based laser project.) And now NATO, the US-centric national association of theater owners, is forming a laser task force 

Here are a few paragraphs of the Optics.com article. Er note that the anti-green speckle effort that is mentioned in the article takes on significance when reports come back from Rochester indicating that they haven’t completely handled the problem yet.

Optics.org – Laser projectors promise brighter 3D experience – Excerpts:

“Xenon lamps have reached their practical limit for high-brightness applications,” said Bill Beck, a co-founder of LLE. “High-lumen projection tops out at about 30,000 lumens with an 8 kW power supply. Most of the size, weight and power consumption of these projectors is driven by the illumination system and supporting optics, which is why they are very big.”

Laser alternative
LLE’s alternative is a light engine producing red, green and blue primaries from the same laser source, with the output coupled to a digital projector using optical fiber. With virtually all the laser power successfully reaching the projector chips, the result is a system that can deliver two- to five-times the brightness level of a xenon lamp.

“Our design is a diode-pumped, solid-state laser system using very mature, low-cost GaAs pump diode bars, MOPA architecture, and non-linear optics for wavelength conversion,” commented Beck. “It satisfies all the key requirements: power for 3D brightness, a long lifetime, and high wall-plug efficiency for decreased operating costs. The beam also has a low etendue, which is beneficial for fiber delivery and for scaling the power to higher levels.”

The company says that it can scale up the power of its system by aggregating the output from several light engines. “Our strategy is to provide RGB engines in increments of 30,000 white balanced lumens,” said Beck. “These will initially be aggregated, so as to supply projectors with input powers of up to 60-90,000 lm. In terms of watts, these modules would output 75-90 watts of RGB.” The company envisages these multiple RGB engines being delivered to a digital projector by optical fiber, potentially 50 feet away, allowing “a very small box to become a very bright box.”

Speckle secret
LLE also says it has cracked one of the field’s particular headaches: green speckle. When a highly coherent light source is used for projection displays, viewers can sometimes perceive an interference pattern as an image artifact, although the severity of this problem can be very subjective. It just so happens that the green channel is the hardest to acceptably ‘de-speckle’, because of the eye’s high sensitivity to those wavelengths.

Beck is keeping the secret of LLE’s victory over green speckle to himself, but admits that it was not an easy fight. “Dealing with speckle was one of the key challenges, up there alongside the development of a low-cost middle-volume manufacturing platform. We have worked for three years to eliminate the speckle, and have existing and pending IP in this area. All I can tell you is that it is really, really hard and lots of people have tried.”

The LLE light engine is also green in spirit, contributing to the energy savings that the cinema industry expects to make as digital projection systems become more widely adopted. LLE predicts that RGB laser illumination will reduce operating costs for movie theater owners by potentially $10,000 per screen per year, by eliminating the need to replace expensive xenon arc lamp projector bulbs and reducing electricity use by as much as 50 per cent. As Beck noted: “Our business model is very much in line with the trend to replace low-efficiency lamps with solid-state solutions, offsetting higher up-front price with lower total cost of ownership.”

Other Articles in this series:

Laser Light Engines gets IMAX funding– Putting Light on the Subject

3D Wonders

The Future Holds...

Laser Light Engines gets IMAX funding– Putting Light on the Subject

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This year marks the transition from the InterOp set of standards to a full SMPTE implementation. This transition is supposed to be completed world-wide by April of 2011. But there is one part of the DCI and SMPTE specs that is being ignored; the need for 48 candelas per meter2 (14 foot Lamberts) of light bouncing off the screen during presentation. This is attainable and probably done regularly for 2D movies, but because of the nature of current 3D technology (some versions which suck up 80% of the light sent from the projector), most facilities are barely getting 3 ftL (10 cd/m2) to the eyes during 3D movies.*

Against this background, Laser Light Engines of Salem New Hampshire USA announces that the IMAX group has made an investment in their company and their technologies. This is auspicious for several reasons.

IMAX once had an unmatchable system for making and presenting movies. Their film stock recorded nearly post card sized frames which could be presented in an immersive style, saturating screens of immense proportions. They took a PR hit for allowing the IMAX name to be used for movies shot in 35mm and upgraded digitally during the mastering and print phase, but still shown in 15/70 (15 perf/70millimeter). They took another hit for surviving by creating a multiplex version of IMAX. Recently they have taken a hit for showing 3D movies digitally, which although done in the best way possible, could never match the dual 15/70 versions.

Using two Christie projectors allowed a full 2K image to be triple flashed to the screen with far more intensity than a single projector could produce. (Although the Sony digital system produces a 4K image, with 4 times the data of 2K, their 3D system divides their 4K chip into 2 x 2K images. Sony also hasn’t progressed their LCOS system into the very largest screens due to contrast issues.) But even with two projectors, the amount of available light to the screen still doesn’t meet SMPTE specifications.

Enter LASER technology from Laser Light Engines (LLE). For several years this company in Salem, New Hampshire, USA, has been approaching and dealing with the detailed challenges which will usher in the next technology leap for digital cinema. This week they have announced an agreement with IMAX which should help each company meet internal goals, as well as the expectations of their audience.

[Press Release attached as pdf for logged in readers.]

If it were as simple as finding 3 LASERs and firing them at the Texas Instruments DLP or Sony LCOS chip, this would have been done long ago. But it is not that simple. At this year’s ShoWest convention, LLE announced that they had met one of the lingering challenges, eliminating the effects of speckle in the green channel, in this case a LASER of 546 nm. (Blue and Red LASERs are at 455 nm and 615 nm.)

It might be difficult for IMAX to portray this to the blogosphere, where they have taken the most hits recently. It is also not prudent to pollute one’s own bathwater by speculating upon a future technology that shows the compromises of existing technology. On the other hand, there is a growing realization that 3D technology may have been generally introduced before it is ready, and speculation is rampant that it is being pushed merely for commercial reasons. That speculation does a dis-service to several hundreds of artists who have done incredible work in the field. Perhaps some clever marketing guru will figure a way to explain that today’s version of 3D is above good enough, well worth paying more for, as there  are extra costs in the production/post-production and exhibition chain…but wow~! the future.

The mantra of this news magazine is that Engineering is the Art of Compromise. Continuous refinements knock away at these compromises, which is why this news is so exciting…there is nothing so refined as LASER technology and no bigger need than to become more green, more efficient, safer, brighter – issues that LASER technology can handle. There will be more on this topic, as well as its companion – optical fibre – in further issues.

[There is a Boston Globe:Boston.com:Business:Technology article named
Casting some light on 3-D of 11 July 2010 that came before the IMAX news. Conjecture on whether exhibitors would change the high heat, short life Xenon bulbs for a slightly more expensive, much longer life, lower heat LASER seems a bit mis-placed, but the article explains many other issues very well.]

* Our series that begins with Scotopic Issues with 3D, and Silver Screens examines these issues.