USC Center Chosen for Digital Film Tests

Marking a big step to shift movies from celluloid to digital, the Digital Cinema Initiatives named the Entertainment Technology Center at USC as its lab of choice and announced that it would begin testing in January technologies needed to deliver movies to theaters electronically.

The seven major movie studios created the Digital Cinema Initiatives in March to establish technology standards and build a business model that will make it profitable to distribute digital films electronically to the more than 100,000 theaters around the world.

Consortium representatives said a team of up to a dozen engineers and technology experts would work on the standard for end-to-end delivery -- including final mastering, distribution and exhibition of a movie.