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“Durchfahrtsland”(photo courtesy of Delicatessen/Edition Salzgeber) DIGITAL CINEMA IN GERMANY – THE WAITING GAME Digital cinema – everyone’s talking about it. Hardly a week seems to have gone by this year without a panel somewhere between Flensburg and Mittenwald on the pros and cons of digital vs. traditional 35 mm projection. September, for example, saw Munich’s Media Business Academy devote a whole day event to the “cinema of the future”, while the Oldenburg International Film Festival staged a roundtable on High Definition and Digital Cinema with director and HD specialist Christopher Coppola, filmmaker Michael Klier and distributor Torsten Frehse of Neue Visionen, and AG Kino’s arthouse trade fair in Leipzig featured a Digital Update to give arthouse cinema-owners an overview of the current state of play in their particular field. But it seems to be mainly talking and not so much action here in Germany when compared with some other parts of Europe. For example, there are the highly ambitious plans of the UK Film Council for the creation of a Digital Screen Network which should reach around 250 screens in 150 theaters and proposes adopting “the highest standards currently foreseen for digital cinema”, the 270 screen network of Digital Houses in Sweden are almost entirely located in country areas and are linked with the desire to break free of traditional distribution, and the announcement of U.S. digital company Avica to create a network of 515 screens across Northern and Southern Ireland to make Ireland “the world’s first digital nation.” german films quarterly focus on digital cinema 4 · 2005 4
At the moment, around 40 German cinemas are participating in the CinemaNet Europe network, another 24 screens located at such venues as Berlin’s legendary Zoopalast cinema, Nuremberg’s Cinecitta multiplex and Munich’s Inselkinos (formerly Forum der Technik) have had digital projectors installed by the Belgian XDC company as part of a 100-screen network across Europe and have been screening such Hollywood blockbusters as Star Wars III, The Island, and Sin City in the digital format; and the ROWO Digital group has put E-cinema technology in place at such cinemas as Munich’s Mathaeser Filmpalast and the Kinopolis multiplex in Landshut to present cinema advertising ahead of the main program. STANDARDS SET – LETHARGY OVER? This summer, the Digital Cinemas Initiative (DCI), an umbrella group formed three years ago by the U.S. studios and exhibitors, announced an industry standard governing the digital cinema roll-out by presenting a set of unanimous system requirements and specifications to help manufacturers create uniform digital cinema equipment throughout the United States. According to the DCI, it is expected that individual print costs would be cut from $1,200 to about a quarter of that amount for the digital equipment and transportation charges would be eliminated as studios adopt satellite and fiber optic delivery systems. The Germans, however, are not planning to accept the DCI standard without further analysis: the distributors association VdF and the exhibitors gathered under HDF-Kino e.V. have commissioned the Fraunhofer Institut to establish a so-called “digital testbed” which would be undertaken probably from the middle of next year. The researchers’ findings would facilitate a level of transparency from which the various players would then be able to hammer out working models for the eventual roll-out of digital cinema in Germany. “All of the majors are saying that they would be ready if – and this ’if ’ is important – the business model is there,” says Thierry Perronnet, Marketing Director for Entertainment Imaging at Kodak. “What we hear from distributors and exhibitors is more of a waiting mode than anything else. People talk a lot about digital cinema but nobody is ready to start because they don’t know how much it is going to cost – and who is going to pay for it. That is the biggest question.” “The advantage of digital projection of commercials has been seen especially in the U.S. [where cinema advertising was hardly developed before] because you can divide it by regions and by cinema,” says Kai Langner, Kodak’s new General Manager for Entertainment Imaging in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Nordic Countries. “The real critical thing is the cost of conversion: when you look at Germany, for example, there are roughly 4,000 screens and today we talk about an investment of €100,000 per screen, i.e. €4 billion in total. One argument will be that the prices will be dropping, but still you have to cover the costs rather fast. But it doesn’t make sense for the whole industry to have two systems side by side, so I think you should have the conversion completed in a three year period. I think, though, that it will be a country-by-country change and it won’t be very cost effective at the start.” GERMAN RETICENCE “In Germany, exhibitors are still rather reticent,” notes Andreas Kramer of the German cinema-owners association HDF-Kino e.V. “There is a situation where they say: ’Before we make any investments in any direction, we will first wait and see what happens abroad’. Many are looking to see what the Dutch do and how [the Belgian multiplex operator] Kinepolis works out.” german films quarterly focus on digital cinema 4 · 2005 5 Kai Langner (photo courtesy of KODAK) Andreas Kramer (photo courtesy of HDF-Kino)
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