About 600 pounds of projection equipment was loaded Monday morning into the Renton IKEA Performing Arts Center, host to the Seattle International Film Festival in Renton.
The festival kicks off this Friday, May 18, in the city for the second year in a row.
It may be the last year that 35 millimeter film projection is used in the festival. Renton is the only site this year of all the SIFF venues to have 35 millimeter projection equipment. The rest will use digital systems.
“This may be the last year that we do 35 millimeter for the film festival,” said Miles McRae of McRae Theater Equipment, Inc., that handles all of SIFF’s projection and sound needs. “It’s kind of ironic, but the industry is shifting to digital projection.”
McRae has a family connection to Renton. His uncle, Bob McRae, owned the former movies houses, The Roxy and The Renton, on South Third Street downtown.
The Roxy is now used by a church and The Renton became the Renton Civic Theatre, which stages live theater productions.
SIFF is using a 35 millimeter projection set up and a digital system as a back up at its opening night in Seattle at McCaw Hall, only because the filmmaker requested 35 millimeter projection.
McRae has a warehouse in Ballard were he runs his shop and has lots of mechanical equipment, 35 millimeter projectors and digital systems.
“It’s kind of a sad thing to see it all head toward the metal recyclers,” he said of the older models.
Some of the equipment he owns was installed in 1951 and has been running everyday since just fine, he said.
The projector installed at the IKEA Performing Arts Center is from the 1960s and is based on the same mechanical system that’s been around since the 1800s.
That system has seemed to work well for years, but it’s the movie studios who are pushing the switch in the industry.
“The studios are very concerned about the protection of their intellectual property,” McRae said. “So they don’t want anybody to make an exact copy of their material.”
Now studios deal in DCI or digital cinema initiatives, which are standards of all kinds of technical parameters including the encryption of content, McRae said.
As it turns out, film reels are becoming a thing of the past as films now come on hard drives. Film content is ingested into a local server and it runs off that server with the use of a key that unlocks the encrypted content for a period of time.
“The call for 35 millimeter is becoming less and less,” said McRae. “At this point all the big chains, Regal and Cinemark and AMC, they’re pretty much done with this conversion. There’s supposed to be about 36,000 screens in the United States total. I think that we’re probably approaching 70 to 75 percent have converted.”
Film companies are sending notices saying that by the end of 2013 there may be no more 35 millimeter prints, McRae said.
The cost to movie houses to convert their projection equipment is about $70,000 to $100,000, McRae estimates.
This year in Renton films will again be running off of Dolby Digital sound, which is the standard state-of-the-art for film.
“We’re excited about (SIFF), there’s more DCPs, digital cinema packages, than ever before,” said McRae. “And so you can really see the trends happening.”
