Dye Track ShowEast Meeting - 11/1/01 Present: Ioan Allen called the group to order. Ioan updated the group; "Jay and Silent Bob" was the last test, printed by Deluxe Hollywood. 12 prints were distributed with no complaints and print life looks to be okay. The film “Get Over It” had five prints in its first release. In England, there is a Demo film called “Red Alert” - probably won’t see it in the States. Dolby Labs is considering making CAT764 Test Film available at cost. Red Readers - approximately 65,000 installed worldwide, with half of those in the US. [Pat Moore comment - the info we see in the market is something around 125,000 screens worldwide, with about 32,000 in the US depending on closures and ownership exchanges talking place in the US market.] NATO has been very helpful in theatre surveys. Ioan commented on a visit to Japan in September ’01, a conference of the Japanese equivalent of MPAA and NATO. Old Japanese projectors have no retrofit for red readers. Ioan also reported a conference in London for the Euro market and reports a very good conversion rate there. Kodak and Dolby continue conversations with Studios & labs in Hollywood. Jack Teahan commented that studios and labs are cooperative and willing to move forward. The desire on the production side is to push hard for a complete program change - they don’t want dual inventory & dual production problems. Can the program be “finished” next year? Ioan would like to see a 500 print release - such action would certainly be seen as a commitment by the industry and encourage the program towards completion. Labs can easily go to high magenta, but Cyan is the target here for a long-term solution. 50% of the current production is high magenta from Hollywood, and higher percentage is being done out of London. 500 high magenta prints of "Artificial Intelligence" were completed with no problem in Japan. Comments were made about a Deluxe printing of “Bandits”, where there was a problem with the printer mask. Brings to light that QC process should use red readers, as the I/R readers currently used did not “see” the Sony track cover the Dolby patch on film. Next meeting to be at ShoWest, time and date TBD. |
