Many theaters have been less than enthusastic about moving to Digital Projection systems for the lack of any standards. They were too afraid to invest $100K on a digital projector only to find it rendered incompatiable or obsolete in a format war between studios. Not anymore.

In 2002 all major studios (Universal, Disney, Warner, Fox, Paramount, Pixar, Lucas, Sony) got together and gave birth to a group called Digital Cinema Initiative or DCI with a purpose of establishing and documenting specifications for an open architecture for Digital Cinema components that ensured a uniform and high level of technical performance, reliability and quality control. Under the agreement, studios will share a bit of revenues they saved by going digital (from $1200 a print to a mere $10-20), with the theater chains, thereby encouraging them to invest in digital projectors.

After 3 long years they released their worldwide standards today. Its indeed a good news for digital filmmakers, as they can output to a particular spec which can be shown in any digital cinema in US (and hopefully worldwide).

So ok, now what exactly is this standard? Well, you can read it here [PDF 1.2MB] – its only 176 pages I will try to update this post with a concise summary.