Digital technology and the Film Industry

Production
The use of digital technology and in particular CGI has enhanced film-making and has enabled directors to move films in a new direction. The digital editing allows film to appear more beleivable. This article explains the benefits of digital technolgy, during the production the most common benefit is the time saved as previous editing would have been accomplished using a workplate and manual editing. The new age of digital editing allows the use of CGI and other editing techniques to be used extremely easily. post production advantages allow effects and techniques such as colour grading and various mise-en-scene effects such as editing lighting on faces for example.
Distribution
the most obvious advantage with digital technology is the savings in distribution costs. An average length feature film print costs around £700 .Encoding it and delivering a hard drive to the cinema works out at a fraction of that. In future, the possibility of delivering the movie by satellite or over the net has got the bean counters salivating. One of the other great costs to the movie industry is piracy, which Hollywood claims has cost it $6bn (£3.2bn).Distributing movies digitally means they can be encrypted before they even leave the studios, and then unlocked by software at the cinemas themselves. The release prints of movies arrive in projection rooms as 10,000 feet of film printed as a copy of the original.
Exhibition
Although the cinema experience may be better the cost prevents alot of people going, the better quality sound and picture which most people will not have at their homes. it is no doubt superior at this current time but the cost has to be taken into account. People would prefer to save money than particpate in the 'cinema experience'.The current situation sees cinema ticket prices rising whilst the cost of home cinemas continuos to reduce, the result of this is sales of tickets reducing and forcing cinemas to further raise their prices for tickets as well as other products such as food, which further pressures the customers away from the cinema. The cinema industry is most certainly under threat from home cinemas because of the money saving factors that come with purchasing home cinemas, and in the long run no doubt save people money.
Film piracy is a major concern in the industry. although quality of sound and picture is dramatically decreased the cost is extremely low and they are widely accesible on the internet or dvd so people are likely to purchase such films, this is why there has been a steady rise in the number of counterfit dvd's found.