A mix-up led to the organisers being sent the wrong digital
film, the use of which has grown rapidly for this year's festival. Photo:
Louise Kennerley
Vince Chadwick, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports
Right director, right topic, wrong movie. So it was last Saturday
at the Melbourne International Film Festival when a packed cinema waiting to
see Werner Herzog's film Into
the Abyss at Greater Union on Russell Street was instead shown two
episodes of the renowned German director's television series, also about Texan
prisoners on death row.
A mix-up had led to the organisers being sent the wrong digital
film, the use of which has grown rapidly for this year's festival.
Technical manager David Thomas said that last year MIFF screened
just 22 digital films, compared with 134 this year. The number of films shown
on conventional 35-millimetre film has dropped from 190 to 40.
Digital cinema packages are encrypted files of about 200 gigabytes
sent by the film's distributor to movie theatres. A pass key must then be
entered on a USB stick to prevent piracy.
The encrypted file only works on projectors of a certain quality
and the pass key is time specific, in some cases only opening the file an hour
before a screening. Films not yet released in the US were more likely to have a
short access period, Mr Thomas said. ''That's the paranoid thing about it, and
it's amazingly cumbersome and messy. Hopefully that gets streamlined in time,''
he said.
Organisers checked the digital file for Into the Abyss the night
before the Saturday session. ''The package said it was Into the Abyss,'' Mr
Thomas said. ''What we had on file was the four-part television series On Death Row.''
A more thorough check was not possible because the temporary DCP
equipment installed for the festival has a smaller server capacity than most
larger cinemas. This means organisers must sample the films in advance, ensure
they can be opened, delete them to create space on the server, and then prepare
them closer to the screening time.
''For a commercial cinema that's generally not a problem because
they would generally not be playing five films per screen per day,'' Mr Thomas
said.
Audience members - some of whom walked out after the first
episode, thinking the film was over - and those with tickets to a subsequent
cancelled screening have been given priority for the rescheduled session of Into the Abyss on August
19 at Greater Union.
MIFF has been using digital film for four years and last month the
state government announced a $150,000 grant to enable organisers to install
four DCP facilities - three at Greater Union and one at The Forum - to keep up
with the increasing number of films available only in digital.
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