Something astonishing happened the other day: my computer revealed a new dimension. Really! It happened when I put in a DVD player and watched the same old Phantom Menace DVD I had seen a dozen times on my television.

  That's when it happened. A spark of clarity so bright I could barely believe my eyes. I had expected my computer screen to deliver a lesser quality picture than my television. After all, the computer screen was much smaller and had always produced grainy video on websites.

   So I will admit, my hopes were not high. But the visions that danced before my eyes were truly breathtaking. New worlds. New life. New civilations ... Yes, I know I am mixing my metaphors, but it was really that exciting!

   I force Lucasfilms on my roomates daily, so they usually escape to another room at the first tats of the drumroll. Imagine my further astonishment to find them both transfixed ... as if they had never seen Amidala before!

  If this is what a 12 inch computer terminal can do, what will a giant sized screen look like? I am going to be first in line to see when the new Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones, opens at midnight tomorrow. Wowie!

  Entirely captured on digital film, this is also the first movie to be widely released in digital format. George Lucas shot and edited Clones in the digital domain. He'd hoped that by the time of its release on Thursday, it could be screened digitally too. But there are less than 75 theaters worldwide equipped with digital projectors.

  Purists say a clean copy of a well-projected film still has better quality. Digital storage and projection rips every frame into tiny pixels. There are only so many pixels (1280x1024) per frame. Traditional film is made of individual pictures, each as clean and sharp as a perfect photograph under ideal circumstances. But few people see a clean film in the best of conditions. Theatres often have old equipment, old copies of films and trainee projectionists!

   Digital movies do not tremble or scratch like film? Russ Wintner with Technicolor says digital is better because the movie will look just as good on the last viewing as it does in the first.

   Will the word film become an anachronism. The Motion Picture Association Brad Hunt says it is like the transition from silent pictures to sound or black and white to color.

   Technicolor is offering to give their system to a thousand theatres for free to help establish their digital projection systems. Spokesman Brook Williams says the chip that drives their system works with an array of over a million mirrors, but other systems work with lasers or liquid crystals. Seven of the largest studios have developed a working group to develop industry standards to avoid another 8 track tape or BetaMax disaster.

   It currently costs $150,000 per screen to outfit a theatre with a digital projector, six times the cost of a standard film projector. Theatre owners worry there are not enough movies for them to show, but if everything went digital today, some say theatres would see $800million to a billion dollars in savings each year in the cost of film.

   If you are intersted in the technical details of digitial movies, here is some information I dug up on the Texas Instruments DLP website:

   "Texas Instruments has developed DLP technology in collaboration with the movie industry since 1996. The movie is normally transferred from digital source data generated by the applicable production facility directly to the distributed format with no intermediate film element. The prototype projector uses three Digital Micromirror Devices(DMD), each with an array of 1280x1024 microscopic aluminum mirrors for a total of nearly 4 million mirrors."

   The imaging mirror array is the same size as a normal 35mm frame of film and the movie is projected through an anamorphic projection lens to create the correct flat or scope aspect ratio on-screen. The DLP Cinema prototype projector displays at the standard film rate of 24 frames/sec. Televisions and computer monitors are scanned or "drawn" one pixel at at a time as a single beam of gamma radiation is shot at the screen from behind. Although the DMD is a virtually continuous display device, the display can be driven at 24 fps. Since there is no film being mechanically pulled through a film gate, there is no need to douse the light. This results in a continuous flicker-free display.

  So will this Star Wars picture be all that much better in a digital theatre at the first showing? Maybe not. Maybe flicker wins out over pixelation. It's not exactly a battle between dark and light sides, but the battle for dominance in the projection booth may be just as intersting as the ones on the screen.

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