The Seven Commandments of the Digital Cinema

Digital cinema is a fancy way of saying "digital movies" but it has a nicer sound to it... Lists are popular on the Internet, and I can't be without one myself.

I've been watching the advance of digital technology into moviemaking since the dawn of the personal computer. It's been haphazard progress, but progress all the same. There hasn't been an overall plan for it - mainly because we've never really been able to test the new ideas properly. Instead, people have just digitized older technologies and including their shortcomings in the digital formats. So I (being, of course, a super-genius worthy of comparison with Wile E. Coyote in Operation: Rabbit) have my list of the principles that should be our lodestar as we seek the ultimate digital cinema.

Here follow the Seven Commandments! Keep them well and your cinema shall be free!

First Commandment: Digital Thou Art, And Digital Remain.

The First Commandment may seem oxymoronic - what else would digital cinema be? But it goes much deeper than that: the whole chain of representations that gets an image in front of our eyeballs should be digital. Not only that, there should be no conversions in the chain. Light itself is digital - and the light the audience sees should properly represent both the original light and the moviemaker's vision.

Second Commandment: Thy Pixels Shall Be Square.

Third Commandment: RGB Shall Be Thy Color Space.

Fourth Commandment: Thy Storage Shall Be Lossless.

Fifth Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Scale Thy Frames.

Sixth Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Alter Thy Frame Rate.

Seventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Commit Interlace.

Postscript: An Ordinary Sinner

Well, it'll be no surprise to you to learn that I'm an ordinary sinner. My own animation and the software that I write violates all of the commandments, one way or another. I don't think we yet have the technology to keep them all, though we could do a lot better than we are. What's amazing (and wonderful) to me is how good digital movies look even violating the commandments.

I may even be an extraordinary sinner - I'm flouting the Seven Commandments knowingly and voluntarily. But I'm not letting that get in the way of making animation!