About Digital Cinema

Why should I bother with the expense and logistics of Digital Cinema, I have a camcorder. isn't that good enough?

With the chaotic proliferation of video on the web its even more important for your message to stand out. Your product or service needs to be seen, and unless it looks great, it will be lost in an ocean of mundane web video. The nature and inherent quality of digital cinema can help you accomplish this.

Whats the big deal about 24 frames per second?

Motion Pictures ("Hollywood" Films) now as always are photographed at 24 frames per second, this stems from the fact that human persistence of vision, or the time an image is retained clearly on the retina, is slightly more than 1/20th of a second. Therefore displaying individual images at 24 frames per second is more than sufficient to create the illusion of continuos motion. All motion picture cameras operate at a standard of 24 frames per second for this reason, any faster is a waste of film.*
It is simple - if you are wasting 6 frames per second - limited bandwidth restricts the quality of your video. By producing and distributing at 24* fps, we can send a much higher quality video on the same bandwidth.

Did you know that 99% of the video cameras shoot at 30 fps?
Video and Television cameras are designed to work with your typical tube TV set (you know, square, low definition, spew radiation) Television sets run at 30 fps (actually 60 interlaced fields) the reason, television was invented long before the computer or even the transistor, and there had to be a way to time the individual frames so they would stay still long enough to see them. This was accomplished by using the frequency of household electricity, 60HZ, used to power the sets and cameras, to also time the images.

So why aren't all cameras 24 fps now? Its been a hundred years!

Most Cameras still need to be compatible with consumer video equipment (video-audio cables, monitors etc) which still run at 30fps because properly converting 24fps material to 30fps requires an expensive piece of hardware called a standards converter which creates "pull-down" that divides the frames into the "fields" of video. Because of the level and complexity and cost of motion picture production this cost to convert to television standards was incidental. So what does all this mean? Now with processing and software advancements Motion Picture Quality Production is available to the discerning Entrepreneur.

*Different filming frame rates may of course be used for special effects but playback is still at 24fps.

*"24fps" refers to 23.976 fps and "30fps" refers to 29.987 fps these actual values relate again to electrical frequencies and backwards compatability for electronic displays.