As you'll have seen in a recent thread the UK Film Council has just invested £11.7 million in setting up 250 cinemas in the UK with HD decks and 2K HD projectors. Athough this hasn't been confirmed, you can almost guarantee that these will be the art house cinemas that currently depend on Film Council support.
I've spent the last couple of days talking to the Film Council and what seems obvious is that the distributors are using the UK as a test market for digital distribution and projection.
The implications for this is if the technology is sucessful and the standards are as good as 35mm then HD is looking to be the playout format of choice for the cinema industry. It's got lots of advantages for the distributors, cheaper, no scratches and loss of image quality etc. etc.
For the indie film-maker this has profound business applications. It means that a film maker with a HD master can get a 250 cinema run without the expense of film prints. As there are already nearly 300 HD cinemas in the rest of Europe, that means that you can have 500 cinema run in the European territory alone. Potentially that means the distributor is looking at a minumum £75,000 return on a HD European cinema run alone, which makes a lot more digital film projects fiancially viable.
This expanding network is going to create demand for a HD originated projects and in fact a small number of companies have now started who only distribute HD.
This combined with the growth of HDTV in the US and Japan means that HD is rapidly carving out an infrastructure in exaclty the market places that indie arthosue films normally do business.
There is more to come on these changes to the business and I'll try to keep you up to date as the story unfolds. There is, in fact, more going on behind the scenes. What I can say is that things are changing and at the moemnt it seems that it's changing in our favour.
I've spent the last couple of days talking to the Film Council and what seems obvious is that the distributors are using the UK as a test market for digital distribution and projection.
The implications for this is if the technology is sucessful and the standards are as good as 35mm then HD is looking to be the playout format of choice for the cinema industry. It's got lots of advantages for the distributors, cheaper, no scratches and loss of image quality etc. etc.
For the indie film-maker this has profound business applications. It means that a film maker with a HD master can get a 250 cinema run without the expense of film prints. As there are already nearly 300 HD cinemas in the rest of Europe, that means that you can have 500 cinema run in the European territory alone. Potentially that means the distributor is looking at a minumum £75,000 return on a HD European cinema run alone, which makes a lot more digital film projects fiancially viable.
This expanding network is going to create demand for a HD originated projects and in fact a small number of companies have now started who only distribute HD.
This combined with the growth of HDTV in the US and Japan means that HD is rapidly carving out an infrastructure in exaclty the market places that indie arthosue films normally do business.
There is more to come on these changes to the business and I'll try to keep you up to date as the story unfolds. There is, in fact, more going on behind the scenes. What I can say is that things are changing and at the moemnt it seems that it's changing in our favour.
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