The Dream Factory May Never Be the Same : Electronics: Sony’s investment in high-definition technology could change the face of film, video and television.

Hollywood, often mocked as a dream factory, actually does have dream factories, hidden far from the madding glitz.

Most work in anonymity while others are think tanks to the stars, like Industrial Light and Magic in Northern California and Apogee in the San Fernando Valley.

Now brace yourself for possibly the greatest dream-factory assault on our eyes, minds and entertainment dollars since Edison founded his “invention factory.” The reel has been reinvented and with it will come television pictures and cassettes as brilliant and as sharp as the best of magical film.

It lacks a sexy name but it’s called digital or high-definition television, filmmaking by the electronic numbers. And when digital gets through doing Hollywood nothing in films or TV may be the same. How movies are made, the television sets we buy, the video cassettes we rent or shoot will all change. After you’ve seen HD, all else is mere TV, for in HD the number of lines on your TV sets and cameras are doubled to 1,125.

Quietly this month, HD has established a beachhead of sorts in a major Hollywood studio, the relocated Columbia Studios in Culver City, once home of giant MGM. There in the middle of a massive renovation project, a handful of engineers unmindful of the overworked air conditioning have uncrated their equipment and are getting ready to show filmmakers how digital tape and digital equipment can change their lives.

There is a biting, historic irony in what these five men who form the Sony Advance Systems are doing. They are the first to be given space in the sprawling, gutted Metrocolor Building where once hundreds of thousands of MGM and independent films were processed in countless labs and stored in mammoth vaults, all since moved off or junked. They are in a temporary setting and later this month will move into new offices around the corner, where they will display side-by-side demonstrations of 35-millimeter film and digital tape.

While film is Hollywood’s king, the new kid, digital tape, is the pretender. John Galt of Sony Advance Systems sees all sorts of virtue in HD: it can speed up editing time and save production costs, it can achieve sharper special effects, it can produce film-quality pictures. It will do for filmmakers what computers did for typists.

Technicians call it high def, but most filmmakers call it high dollars, possibly huge deficits.

When Sony paid $3.4 billion for Columbia and moved it to the Culver City lot, it also budgeted another $10 million for its 2-year-old HD team. Right now, the Sony people say their main interest in Culver City is to demonstrate their equipment in a studio setting. Certainly they’d like to sell a lot of their six-figure digitals to film and television studios.

The real payoff, however, for HD will come in the consumer marketplace: new and expensive sets, new and revived cassettes, new home video recorders.

Even now HD is among us.

Computer-generated television commercials have been produced with HD equipment.

Segments of “Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams,” “The Abyss,” “Back to the Future,” “The Hunt for Red October” were generated with HD computers and digital equipment.

The recent PBS movie, “The Ginger Tree,” was done in HD.

Two concerts filmed in HD were broadcast this year on MTV.

Last week Sony introduced three HD products for sale in Japan only: a 36-inch commercial HD monitor, a commercial HD decoder and a $17,000, 36-inch-wide television set capable of HD pictures once a consumer decoder is implanted in it.

So far, HD and most digital work has been concentrated in television, its electronic parent. The Japanese TV network NHK is using the Kaufman Astoria Studios in New York to make HD movies and television features and recently started shooting in HD in the Los Angeles studios of KSCI. CNN has experimented with high def, as has the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

Next year in Los Angeles, a different sort of Hollywood High opens its doors, an offshoot of New York-based Rebo High Definition Studios. New York already has four HD studios conveniently close to Madison Avenue’s advertising agencies.

Some HD companies are supplying startling vivid medical image tapes to doctors and hospitals. HD Pacific, a software company in Seattle, is offering opera in high definition.

But let’s get back to Culver City:

Sony may have lost ground in the last home entertainment revolution when its Betamax video recorders were outnumbered and outflanked by the VHS systems. That was one skirmish. Now Sony thinks it could do something bigger. Since that earlier loss, Sony bought itself a Hollywood studio and a library and, earlier, a major record company (CBS Records).

Now it and other consumer product manufacturers are getting ready to sell HD sets, once the FCC next year and the rest of the world two years later agree on how many lines make for high definition. What follows will be HD video recorders, players and cameras.

And HD tapes, tomorrow’s digital money cow.

All those classics, all those Westerns, romances, musicals, animated comedies and films you’ve already seen will go digital. Just like that Hollywood finds another market for its reruns.

Don’t forget movie houses.

As Cinerama, Cinemascope and VistaVision were Hollywood’s big-screen answers to television, technologies may set off a new wave of filmmaking to lure HD couch potatoes: new, big screens for big, new spectacles, pictures delivered by satellite. The effects capable from the eye-exciting images of the HD computers may generate new ways of cinematic storytelling. Some of those ways have been seen in portions of recent adventure, art and sci-fi films. HD will fit in neatly with that perennial of Hollywood studios: the revival film. “Fantasia” brought back again in big-screen HD. “Ben Hur” and “Lawrence of Arabia” riding again.

High-definition movies, because they are done digitally, so far show no signs of deterioration. All film--the old spools, the newer safety films--change chemically, and never for the better. Digital HD endures. Some engineers believe that HD might even restore life to faded film.

So in your mind’s eye take a walk on the imagined yellow brick roads that once were MGM, go past the newly scrubbed white Thalberg building, past the new Columbia signs, turn left at the commissary and take the first stairway to your right, just past the aging letters: Metrocolor Building.

Then walk over to what is called the Metrocolor Trailer. Since August of last year, some 4,500 units of left-behind canned films, motion picture trailers and negatives have been advertised for return to their owners. The lab once held 200,000 units. The collection is called “Unclaimed Mysteries.” Prove ownership and the film is yours, assuming no money is owed.

Most titles sound as if they belong to B movies, but one title seems prophetic in this new, evolving dream factory.

It was called “One Step Beyond.”