As digital cinema exhibition makes the transition from a science project to a commercially viable network of locations and activities, there are several places to learn the basics.
Each year, for example, the EU/Italian group Media Salles holds a D-Cinema Training. The last few were in England, and the next course will be in Finland in 2010. Details are available at their site, Media Salles Training. Media Salles is also a member of the EDCF, the European Digital Cinema Forum, which has information from their many meetings available to the public. If you become a member, you can download even more information, including pdf files of their two magazines on Mastering and Alternative Content.
Barco has a complete schedule of classes. Harry Mathias at DCMP also holds classes on demand.
Learning Online
Another consulting group with an enormous amount of information on DCinema, ranging from history to politics and emerging technology is Michael Karagosian’s MKPE Site. Look especially at the different topics under the menu pull down marked Digital Cinema.
The group Film Tech is a great resource for documentation, and sprinkled throughout is information on DCinema. There are also several dcinema forums where projectionists discuss the good and bad that they have found in the booth. In the same vein, of a film-centric site making the transition to providing digital information, is the Mad Cornish Projectionist. Humour abounds.
A phenomenal group of videos from Disney Digital Cinema give essential data to a projectionist on how to handle digital movies, especially 3D. Likewise, there is a terrific site of very instructive movies at the site of the Cine Tech Geek.
The real essentials of Digital Cinema are conveyed in the hundreds of pages of documents at DCI Movies. That site contains the Digital Cinema Specifications and the System Specification Compliance Test Plan. Anyone who reads them all gets bonus points. NATO also has an important document, the Digital Cinema System Requirements (pdf), which goes through many technical digital cinema points from the exhibitor’s viewpoint.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Science & Technology Council has a downloadable paper named The Digital Dilemma which brings out much of the data concerning long term storage of digital productions.
More simply and in a Socratic way, working through the Digital Cinema Naming Convention will give a lot of information, and also help organize the data with the relevance to other information. In the same way, the powerpoint at the Harkness Screens site aligns many important points.
Last but hopefully not least, The Directory of DCinema Glossaries on this site lists a number of sites which are filled with DCinema data from the acquisition/camera, post production and exhibition fields. In full disclosure, DCinemaTools is part of the DCinemaCompliance Group, with training and compliance plans as described in this document: Coordinating DCinema Training and Compliance. The link below (seen only if you are logged in) will download the same file.
Please mention other resources as you find them in the comments.