Talk About Digital Cinema

Chris Tostevin
Projection Manager, Empire Cinemas, High Wycombe

Chris Tostevin

With ten years experience in the High Wycombe cinema, including eight years on the projection team, Chris is currently responsible for directing the projectionists and maintaining and operating the equipment in the six-screen Empire Cinema. All screens are equipped with Kodak Digital Cinema systems.

On anticipating digital

I was looking forward to the arrival of digital at High Wycombe - I had seen digital before and I was impressed by it. From a work point of view, I knew the installation process would present challenges, i.e. mess and upheaval in the projection rooms! While it was a lot of hard work to get it installed, the benefits are certainly worth it and I am very impressed by its capability.

On running digital

We normally run 3 or 4 shows a day and at weekends, 5 or 6 shows a day depending on the length of the film. We run 35mm trailers, but all adverts and features are digital. We currently still have two features in 35mm running on the same screen, so five out of the six screens are running digital. However this can change from week to week. For the most part, we've been getting the big blockbuster releases in digital and the few releases we get on film are becoming less and less.

On digital vs film

I wouldn't knock 35mm film as it's what I've worked with for years but I do think the quality of 35mm film prints has a larger variance than digital. From a quality standpoint, the best digital film I have seen is the new 'Pirates of the Caribbean' film but I can't say it was any better than the best 35mm print I have seen which was 'Lord of the Rings'. However, this statement would only be relevant for the first week of the film's life. Film gets degraded, scratched and dirty - digital doesn't, so there is an obvious improvement over film in that regard.

On audience reactions

The managers at High Wycombe have been conducting surveys to gather audience opinion of digital projection. The feedback to date has been quite positive regarding the change to digital The audience at this cinema is quite diverse with a lot of Film Study students - they are knowledgeable about film and have noticed a positive difference.

On the flexibility of digital for the projectionist

Digital makes the job easier because you don't have to handle film and make up a print, but it takes the same amount of time to load the film into the server. So while there isn't a saving on time, digital does allow more flexibility for us. Ordinarily, from a booking point of view, we have never had more than one copy of a film so you can only play it on one screen (unless you interlock it). With digital, if we have one copy, we could play it on all six screens if we wanted to.

On pre-loading all servers

Digital has made things easier from a practical point of view because we don't have to load the films on different screens every week. When we get a new film, we load it in all servers and when we finish playing it, we delete it. So, the digital files are already loaded into the servers and we just have to move the trailers and that's very easy to do. The projection room doesn't have a huge amount of spare room and since going digital we no longer have a lot of film around. That's the major benefit from my point of view - it really makes it easier to move things around.

On the value the TMS will bring

We don't have the Kodak Theatre Management System yet, but I'm looking forward to it because you can load everything once and set a play list from the central server, rather than doing it individually each time. Currently, we have to load the servers manually for all six screens and since we have to return the hard drives quickly, we need to load all servers straight away because we don't know where the film will move each week. We cannot keep the hard drives until we decide, so we have to keep everything on all six screens all of the time. One week, we got very close to there being a capacity problem, but fortunately the new film was shorter with a smaller file size - if it had been longer we would have been forced to delete something we were showing on another screen.

On sequencing ads and trailers

The adverts we get digitally are the same ones we used to get on film, but now they look amazing because film gets scratched very quickly. We have had a comment regarding why we play the adverts after the trailers and it's because we can only get the trailers on film and our automation doesn't allow for switching back and forth between digital, film and then back to digital for the feature.

On the importance of service

Digital machines are a big black box with not many moving parts, but thousands of components that I don't know how to work. I understand how the server works, but I don't understand how the components work. With film, I know how to fix things, but in practice, film is not really any more reliable. Digital is designed as a self-contained unit; it doesn't have parts that wear and when something does go wrong 'emergency call outs' to fix problems will be important. The Kodak service people have been enormously helpful.

On learning by doing

Because we were one of the first cinemas to use digital in the UK, we were learning on the job. While Kodak was setting it up, they trained us on how to use it. It would have been useful to go for training where it was already installed for a better understanding of how it works, but there was no place for us to go to do that. Ideally, you want to run the system for a week straight before going live but that's not practical in a busy cinema where films are showing all the time. However, it is quite easy to learn which means we were soon up to speed and able to continue to offer the best level of service to our customers.

On his personal learning

Learning a new technology is exciting stuff and it's interesting to learn how the system works. I've also learned more about the process of film booking, which is new to me. Before, with 35mm film booking, I wasn't exposed to that side of the business but now being the only cinema in our chain that can play digital on all six screens, I am experiencing new and interesting areas of work.

On working with Kodak

The Kodak system is very easy to use. The operating system and the interface are straightforward and I've got no complaints. The Kodak service people have been very useful and friendly - they come out when called and sometimes they come out when not called just to check all is OK. They're great people to work with and I can't fault the service and support Kodak provides.