August 27, 2003 - By Sheigh Crabtree, The Hollywood Reporter

Those who made it to the Digital Coast Roundtable breakfast meeting Tuesday in Beverly Hills got an insider's view from leading members of Hollywood's digital cinema community on the overarching goals for the transition.

In citing the universality of 35mm film, Charles Swartz, exec director and CEO of the USC Entertainment Technology Center, shone a bright light on the prevailing mind-set of those working to create a global standard.

"35mm film has been a single standard for distribution under which many improvements have occurred - it has been extensible and scalable," Swartz said. "As a result, film can be a medium of tremendous power. We need to take that same philosophy and look down the road and plan that transition for digital cinema. That means we need to have all the stakeholders in the world agree to reach a single, global, interoperable standard."

Swartz said d-cinema leaders are looking to avoid anything like the current unruly state of broadcast video. "The worst thing that could happen would be to get a plethora of different standards, of different quality levels that do not interoperate," Swartz said. "That's like a recipe for broadcast video and what has gone wrong with having a completely - in effect - unregulated marketplace, where all manufacturers jump in to set their own standards. Or having a regional marketplace where different parts of the world set their own standards."

When asked, on a scale of one to 10, what the chances are for having such a standard, Rob Hummel, a leading member of the seven-studio Digital Cinema Initiatives, said: "About 11."

The session was organized by Robert J. Dowling, editor-in-chief and publisher of The Hollywood Reporter and chairman of DCR.

Copyright 2003 The Hollywood Reporter