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Coming to a cinema near you - courtesy of ESA 
We've got digital television. Next comes digital cinema. Thanks to ESA, cinema-goers in five European countries will be able to get an early taste of the new technology later this summer. As part of an ESA-funded project, ten cinemas in Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK will be screening movies transmitted and played digitally rather than by the conventional analogue method.
The advantage to the cinema-goer should be no blemishes on the moving image and greater and consistent clarity. Conventional film suffers from degradation, which increases with the number of times it is played. Movies stored digitally on the cinema's computer hard disc can be played indefinitely with no loss of quality.
"Cinema is the last medium to go digital because the amount of information you need to handle is enormous if you are to have the same quality of image we're used to seeing with analogue 35mm film," says Francesco Feliciani who coordinates the digital cinema project from ESTEC. The information contained in a TV image is far less as the screen is so small. The same amount of information displayed on a cinema-size screen would result in a very grainy, poor quality image.
Digital cinema is now becoming a reality, thanks to technological advances in digital compression, storage, delivery and digital projectors. ESA is supporting the take up of this new technology under its ARTES programme, which aims to encourage European and Canadian industry to exploit new ways of using satellite communications. The Agency is collaborating with two project teams which are working on different aspects of producing and transmitting files containing about 60 Gbytes or about 100 CDs- worth of information, enough for one feature length movie.
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