Remarks Prepared for Delivery by
Dr. Karen Brown, Acting Director, National
Institute of Standards and Technology
Digital Cinema 2001 Conference
January 11, 2001
Gaithersburg, Md.
- Welcome to the National
Institute of Standards and Technology, and to one of the first – and
hopefully one of the best – conferences of the year. Right up front
I want to take note and to thank our cosponsor, the National Information
Standards Organization.
- I realize that there were
a lot of places around the country where this meeting could have been
held – like Hollywood. I assure you that the mayor of Gaithersburg is
going to be very excited when he finds out that Hollywood chose to come
here.
- You aren’t the first and
you certainly won’t be the last group to come to NIST to discuss a topic
that seems far afield from the sort of thing the federal government
gets involved with.
- The good news is that
NIST is not a regulatory agency.
- The better news is that
we have lots of experience with technical matters of the sort that face
your industry as it looks ahead at the prospects of digital cinema.
- The best news is that
we are an entirely neutral venue for you to share your views.
- I want to explain briefly
what NIST is, and our past involvement in the kinds of issues that the
movie industry is going to need to tackle if digital cinema is to become
a reality.
- Our mission is clear and
simple: to strengthen the economy and improve the quality of life by
working with industry to develop and apply technology, measurements
and standards.
- Our primary customers
are U.S. industry and the taxpayers. We don’t ever forget that. We are,
after all, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
- We work through four complementary
programs:
- the NIST laboratories,
which specialize in measurements and standards,
- the Baldrige National
Quality Program, which manages the nation’s highest award for quality
and performance excellence,
- the Manufacturing Extension
Partnership, teaming with centers around the country to provide productivity-improving
assistance to small manufacturers, and
- the Advanced Technology
Program, which partners with industry to develop enabling technologies
that will benefit the economy broadly.
- When NIST began back in
1901 – yes, it’s our centennial year – as the National Bureau of Standards,
our focus was on manufacturing, but we always have paid a lot of attention
to the service sector.
- And we are no newcomers
to the entertainment industry and to the technologies that underlie
and provide the infrastructure to allow entertainment media to expand
and flourish.
- Let me offer a few examples:
- NIST was one of the
first radio broadcasters in the country, initially transmitting music
and speech. And we helped attack the early problem of poor reception.
The purpose was research, not entertainment, but the benefits of this
technology obviously were broader than anticipated. And let’s face
it: that’s the way it is with most technologies.
- Another example: NIST’s
“TvTime,” a method for broadcasting time and frequency information
on television, was transformed into closed captioning. The technology
won us a share of an Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in engineering
development in 1980.
- We’ve played an enabling
role in bringing HDTV to reality. Some of the same NIST lab folks
who are here today working on digital cinema and from our Advanced
Technology Program will tell you more about that work and our successes
to date.
- Through the NIST Advanced
Technology Program, we’ve even teamed up with one company that is
now using math techniques to restore or enhance movies.
- Electronic Books, or Ebooks,
were hardly “an item” in the fast-moving information technology markets
less than three years ago when we held the first Ebook conference. In
no small part due to our efforts to enable voluntary, open standards,
Ebooks are rapidly taking hold. Open standards are vital for Ebooks
– and they are just as vital for digital cinema.
- I think we should take
note that the entertainment and the information technology/computing
sectors are converging rapidly, and they often end up in the form of
devices and software that look a lot like office productivity tools.
Ebooks likely will look a lot different in a few years, and there’s
no telling what entertainment applications they will find.
- Clearly, there are lots
of opportunities in digital cinema. Here in Washington, that term “opportunities”
often as not is a signal that huge challenges loom. Come to think of
it, since I spent my career in industry before coming to NIST, that’s
true in the private sector, too.
- That clearly is the case
for digital cinema. I think that the conference organizers have done
a great job in recognizing that there are real business AND technical
issues that stand in the way of digital cinema. There’s no sense in
ignoring them. There’s a lot of logic in tackling them now, up front.
The speakers who follow me will be doing that. For now, I’d like to
briefly set the stage.
- We are "awash" in a world
of digital content from text to audio, still pictures, and video.
And digital cinema is no different -- how the bits are transported,
stored, and presented to the viewer or listener is critical.
- Digital cinema represents
a convergent technology solution involving software, projection technology,
compression, digital data storage, and transmission.
- The technology for showing
moving pictures in a theatrical environment is basically unchanged in
over 80 years -- we still have film being passed through a gate and
shutter and illuminated with a light source.
- With the systems integration
of a number of technologies, digital cinema offers some real advantages:
- It costs approximately
$2500-$3000 to make a print of the original film for distribution to
a theater, and an additional $300-$500 in shipping. This totals roughly
$1.2 billion the industry spends on print duplications and shipping.
- That figure could be cut
by at least 50% with the simultaneous transmission (by satellite) of
a first release movie. Likewise, the digital copy is as good on
the 500th showing as the first showing -- while film degrades with each
passing through the projector.
- The cost of the digital
cinema projector (which is several times higher than film projectors)
raises a number of important issues including new business opportunities
using digital projection with other digital content. Interoperability
is critical if such opportunities are to be realized.
- Because the copy is digital,
copy protection will need to be more stringent. Thus security and digital
rights management becomes a huge issue.
- Other digital cinema specifics
relate to the challenges and opportunities of very high quality moving
imagery: Digital cinema is unlikely to succeed if it is “just as good
as” film. Measuring the quality of moving imagery as it is exhibited
on the screen is critical in allowing users to make informed decisions
in deploying this new technology. So is the issue of interoperability.
There’s that word “interoperability” again.
- NIST has a deep involvement
in these kinds of measurement issues. Some examples:
- Our Physics Laboratory
has developed optical technology that is being used to characterize
digital cameras.
- The NIST Electronics
and Electrical Engineering Laboratory's work on displays is improving
the reliability of measurements.
- Our Information Technology
Laboratory is addressing a variety of IT issues including display
interfaces and usability, test methods, compression and security.
- We at NIST recognize the
investments the industry has made in developing open standards. That
includes:
- Establishment of the
Entertainment Technology Center at USC, which is jointly sponsored
by the Motion Picture Association, the National Association of Theater
Owners, and a number of other industry participants,
- the digital cinema study
in the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and
- the digital cinema compression
work in MPEG.
- What about our own investment
at NIST? We are comfortable playing a role in digital cinema – if you
think there’s a place for us and if you can convince us that we are
needed to enable this technology to take off and realize its potential.
- Everything we do with
our scarce resources must at least have the potential to make a real
difference to the economy and quality of life.
- That means that we have
to have continuous private sector input and guidance in developing,
carrying out, and evaluating our programs.
- This conference, with
these participants, is an ideal opportunity for doing just that. We
want to make certain that we can contribute in this area, and that our
contributions will make a difference--either enabling something to happen
that wouldn't otherwise happen or accelerating those advances in a meaningful
way.
- I am counting on knowing
a lot more about the appropriateness of a NIST role in digital cinema
when the curtain falls on this conference. No matter what your conclusions
and recommendations, I hope that you have a most productive conference.
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