Films take the 'D' step

Digital film releases and digital exhibitors are increasing in India, despite the downsides.

You may not have noticed it, but there's a huge change in the way films are being exhibited today. When Titanic released in India in 1997, it released with just about 11 prints""- and ran for 25 "housefull" weeks.

Since then there has been a sea change in the biz of motion pictures. For one, no film, even a Bollywood blockbuster, can hope to run that long. But that's not the story. Instead, the other big change is in the breadth of a film's release "" in the wider number of centres where it is exhibited today.

A typical Hindi film in the country releases with about 400 prints; if it is a blockbuster like Krrish this may go up to 540, but this is still far less than for a typical Hollywood release. One of the factors that deter a wider release is the cost of prints and one way this can be brought down is by using digital technology.

In the last couple of months, digital technology has picked up like never before. With Bollywood big-wigs like Yashraj films and Adlabs all jumping the bandwagon, the days of the print "" much like the traditional camera or vinyl record "" are waning.

Krrish marked the watershed. While there are four companies in the market currently providing digital technology for exhibition, their efforts were yet to gather steam when one of these, UFO Moviez (an off-shoot of the Apollo group), tied up with Filmkraft, the production company for Krrish.

The result was the biggest-ever digital release for a (big) Hindi film "" 15 per cent of the screens were UFO's. Recent release Corporate, a smaller budget film, went even more hi-tech "" about 30 per cent of its screening was digital.

"In future, a substantial per cent of all releases will be in the digital format", says Aditya Shastri, CEO, UFO Moviez. By August, as many as 500 cinemas will go digital and not just in B and C centres, earlier targeted. "We are now focusing on the Delhi and the UP market," adds Shastri.

On the face of it employing digital technology for exhibition is win-win. With real-time satellite transmission and simultaneous release worldwide, the chances of piracy are drastically cut. (According to some estimates, a Hindi film loses about 35 per cent of its revenue because of piracy).

The reach and the returns are also wider "" particularly lucrative at a time when companies like Yashraj Films look at almost half of their revenue from overseas. The costs of prints is also saved so why hasn't digital cinema come of age in India till now? In Hollywood, companies like Fox, Dreamworks and Disney all support it.

Quality is a major concern. Adlab's Nishit Shetty puts things in a perspective while suporting digital cinema for all the above reasons.

"Digital cinema should be an advancement over the current quality of 35mm print. The investment needed in 2k resolution projectors and servers is very high. Interoperability standards between different equipment manufacturers are still being worked out."

While most of the players in the market use Mpeg 2 technology, UFO says it uses Mpeg4, which enables satellite transmission in real time "" instead of DVDs having to be delivered to respective theatres, as some allegedly do.

On the other hand, their resolution is 1.3 K till now, equivalent ostensibly to the quality generated by a print. "If you can't tell the difference between a print and digital, it is good enough", says Shastri. Is it? Watch Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna "" digitally.