Those who have watched any movie in Anjali or Athulya might have come across UFO that appears in the screen in the beginning and at the time of interval of a movie.UFO is a satellite movie distributor across India with headquarters at Mumbai.UFO Moviez is the Digital Cinema venture of UFO Moviez India limited.Digital Cinema is a new concept of exhibiting and distributing movies. It uses Digital Media (fibre optics, satellite transmission, hard disks) instead of analogue media (Prints) to record, transmit and replay images. Digital Cinema uses digital projectors instead of analogue projectors. It can store, transmit, retrieve and replay a huge amount of information exactly as it was originally recorded. There is more flexibility in Digital Cinema as the data can be manipulated at low cost and effectively.
How it works?
There are three steps involved in the distribution of a satelite movie.It includes 1,TELECINE
2,DIGITIZATION (Encoding & Encryption)
and 3,DELIVERY OF FILMS
1.TELECINE
The telecine process involves transferring of video and audio from the print (positive OR negative) to Hi-definition standard on Magnetic Media tapes (D5). This process gives best results if it is done with the negative of the film. Telecine is done at the Famous Studios Telecine facility using High Definition Spirit Telecine machine and the data is transferred onto D5 tape.The DaVinci color correction machine is used to carry out scene wise color correctionThis process facilitates all types of audio conversion (i.e. mono, stereo, 5.1 Dolby / DTS.)
2.DIGITIZATION
The digitization process provides the facility of capturing the content, encoding, encryption and quality check.The D5 output is captured into MOV File. There are three capture stations used including one for standby. Each capture station has the capacity to store data up to 1.5 Terabyte. The capture and the conversion is done in realtime.These MOV movie files are then encoded in MPEG 4 format, for which eight encoders are used. Using multiple encoders, the encoding is also achieved in real time.The movie now in a compressed MPEG 4 format is encrypted frame by frame in a cine processor and stored in a NFS server in an encrypted format.
3.Delivary of the films
After the quality check the movie is transferred into a storage device called network file server (NFS).This is the storage facility for all encrypted movies. This storage facility is configured in RAID and stored onto a secured private network.At the time of the release, the movie is transferred from the NFS Server to the cinecaster at the satellite hub station. The Cinecaster is located into HECL VSAT hub at Gurgaon and the movie is transferred form NFS to Cinecaster using high speed link.The movie is then transmitted to the theaters over a VSAT link
This movie in the encrypted format is also copied onto a USB hard drive at the local Regional UFO office as a backup, to be delivered to theaters physically incase there is a failure in delivery of the film via satellite due totechnical issues.Movies stored in the cineblaster cannot be played out by the cinema owner unless an online license is defined by the producer / distributor
In Thiruvananthapuram district seven theaters uses UFO for movie screening.
picture courtesy-www.ufomoviez.com
