The Effects of Digital Technologies on Cinema Assignment - 1

The Effects of Digital Technologies on Cinema - Assignment Example Development of color component allowed the color to be photographically recorded directly from nature instead of artificial/manual addition of black and white colors to prints (Ceram, 1965). Digital cinema is defined as the use of digital technology to project and distribute motion pictures.   The process of doing this is called digital cinematography. Therefore cinematography is defined as the use of digital technologies to capture motion pictures in the form of digital images instead of capturing them on a film. The images are captured on hard disks, tapes, flash memory and other media capable of recording digital data. Examples of such digital film-making technologies are Phantom HD High-Speed camera, Thomson Viper, Red Digital camera, Genesis, Aeroflex D-20 and now 2K d-cinema and digital projectors. The introduction of such technologies has ushered in yet another new era of digital cinematography (Barda, 2002).   Digital imagery existed as from the 1980s as evidenced by Disney’s Tron produced in 1982. This was the first movie to contain high-resolution. However, the first film in digital format was marketed in 1997. From that time henceforth, cinema has experienced technical and social changes as a result of digital technology. The visual components of digital cinema are an important source of its worldwide attraction.   Some of the effects of digital technologies on cinema are positive while others are negative. For example, the new technology has diluted the real meaning of cinema by creating increasing levels of artificialism. Even as we consider the effects of digital technology on cinema, we cannot ignore the persistent relevance that pre-digital filming methods and practices still hold for the current digital cinema (Kotian, 2005). The arrival of the digital technologies brought a sharp division between the old and new media.