I was recently thinking about how much better movies in theaters are than streaming, and had the thought: how do such undoubtedly massive files get sent to theaters everywhere?
Some kind of internet transfer could be good since you can just upload once and let whatever theaters need it take it, but the logistics of making some kind of website that can have every movie ever on it and is also completely secret would be horrifying. In addition, the file size and importance of losslessness makes any internet transfer I can think of impractical.
You could also give everyone physical copies of the movie, but that would entail massive shipping costs and effectively bar small theaters from getting all but the very most well funded movies. Producing millions of drives, especially ones with the capacity for your movies, seems like a silly way to run a business as well.
tl;dr full detail, complete movies have way too much detail and there are way too many movie theaters that need to receive them for any distribution process i can think of to work. how do movies get from “file on the last editors computer” to nearly every theater projector in the world having access to it?
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>You could also give everyone physical copies of the movie, but that would entail massive shipping costs and effectively bar small theaters from getting all but the very most well funded movies.
I worked in a movie theater before they went digital, so shipping physical copies was the only way to do it. They’d come in a “can”, about a foot and a half across, or sometimes two cans for a long movie.
Sometimes we’d get an early preview. In order to keep the preview exclusive, they’d make the delivery guy sit next to the physical film the whole time we had it. (To keep us from copying it somehow, I guess?) Once, while I was putting together a film (it comes in pieces), the delivery guy told me his life story and the history of his home country.
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