Lucas' Digital Impact?

[Keith Walters]

One of the major reasons that digital Movie production was so slow to get off the ground was simply that the uptake of digital cinema projection didn't proceed at anywhere near the rate that the Pundits had been predicting.

Even the recent wholesale conversion was basically shoved down the industry's throat; not too many cinema owners volunteered for it. Most cinemas had just one or two digital projectors so they could show 3-D movies, the rest was still 100% film.

 

The real problem with early HD to film prints was that you were basically starting the four-generation duplication process with about the same resolution as normally came out of a four-generation process when you started with much higher resolution 35mm negative!

With digital projection, all that was bypassed, but that only gave "OK" quality with HD origination. Of course, if the video was scanned off 35mm negative, there was simply no comparison....