Cutting Through Bureaucratic Red Tape

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Mon, 04/30/2012 - 20:00 -- Nick Dager

One of the highlights at last month’s Technology Summit on Cinema was the laser projection presentation. The Summit was conducted by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers and as always was held in Las Vegas the weekend prior to the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention. The presentation offered a look at laser technology’s past present and possible future for the exhibition business. The stated purpose of the presentation was to try to answer the question are laser projectors really better than Xenon. The demo featured a Sony 4K projector with a prototype engine from Laser Light Engine. The Sony system as is true of that of all its competitors is some two years away from release. I was impressed by the footage that was shown and will have more to say on that in a bit. But as all the speakers noted the greater hurdle to overcome may well be cutting through all the government red tape that currently impedes any wide implementation of laser projection. Peter Ludé senior vice president of engineering Sony Electronics president SMPTE and chairman of the Laser Illuminated Projector Association (LIPA) moderated the session. Speakers included Jim Houston principal Starwatcher Digital Casey Stack president Laser Compliance and Bill Beck founder and executive vice president business development Laser Light Engines. Ludé opened the session with an overview of where laser originated and where it is going. Xenon gas was first discovered in 1898 he said and the first Xenon bulb was made in 1954. Ludé said laser light offers uniform radiance a light that is close to natural sunlight and lamps that age slowly and uniformly. And while the technology is not fully developed as yet it does offer the promise of projection systems that will provide less heat at a lower cost than current systems with a longer system life and much smaller impact on the environment. He said laser projectors should be mature products within two years. According to Ludé many if not all of the political challenges that laser projection technology faces can be traced to (believe it or not) a 1978 Blue Oyster Cult concert at the Nassau Coliseum on New York’s Long Island. That concert included a laser light show that was a big hit with Cult fans but may have – and he emphasized may have – caused someone in the audience to suffer some eye damage. Regardless the public perception developed that someone did suffer an eye injury that night and both the state and federal government got involved. Today apparently as a result of that one event a dozen states and several federal agencies now strictly regulate the use of laser light in public. A year ago LIPA was formed to work with the various regulatory agencies to educate them on laser light projection and to work together to ease restrictions on its use in movie theatres. There are now twenty members of the association. More information can be found at http://www.lipainfo.org. Jim Houston gave an overview of the challenges that the creative community will face in getting content ready for laser projection. Some color is lost in all forms of digital cinema when compared with film Houston said and he said these losses could be mitigated if the industry would adopt the Academy Color Encoding System. Color issues were a major topic of concern after the footage was demonstrated. Bill Beck founded Laser Light Engine four years ago and he called his presentation – done in conjunction with a Sony SXRD R320 4K digital cinema projector – the first public demonstration of that technology. They were projected on a Harkness 2.4 gain silver screen. Beck showed a series of different trailers and test footage including the Men in Black 3 Spiderman 4 and Pirates: Band of Misfits trailers. All of the footage show was in 3D; some of it was screened at higher frame rates. After the demonstration I heard many people criticize what they had seen. Some of the people I spoke with felt the colors were off; others felt there were occasional parallax and convergence issues. Invariably these people were sitting at the sides of the meeting room. In comparison I made a point of arriving at the event early so that I could get a seat in the center of the room about a third of the way back from the screen. I concede that I do not have “golden eyes” but I thought the majority of the footage was stunning. In particular I thought the Pirates trailer which I have seen in 3D in theatres several times was dramatically crisper and brighter than what I had seen before. Regardless and the speakers made this point many times all of this needs to be taken in the context of that fact that this is prototype technology that is at least eighteen months away from completing. And in that context I thought the demo was a major success. Laser projection especially when screened at higher frames rates presents 3D movies at their very best. But by far the political challenges far outweigh any technical challenges that laser projection must overcome. Casey Stack runs a consultancy that is designed to help manufacturers navigate the various government roadblocks that they and their customers face before laser projection is a reality. Stack said most government regulatory agencies currently put laser projection in the same category as a laser light show (remember the Blue Oyster Cult concert) and as such deem it something that must be restricted when the public at large is involved. At present and possibly even in the short term exhibitors who use laser projectors in their theatres could be required to obtain multiple government permits and be subjected to detail annual reporting about safety conditions in their screenings. This could be a particular problem for older theatres because projector placement is likely to play a critical role in getting variances for laser projection and the layout of some rooms might be a limiting factor. Stack conceded that laser light can be extremely dangerous and no one is trying to make the case that it isn’t. But he and all the other speakers pointed out that no laser light comes directly out of a laser projector; it is all refracted. For someone to experience any eye injury from current laser projectors he said that person would have to take a pair of binoculars and look directly into the projector’s lens. He added that given developing restrictions of projector placement that possibility will be all but eliminated.