Discuss the effects of digital technologies on cinema. To what extent Essay

Discuss the effects of digital technologies on cinema. To what extent are pre-digital filmmaking methods and filmmaking practice - Essay Example 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, Arrflex D-20 and noX 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 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 experi enced technical and social changes as a result of digital technology. ... The effects of digital technologies on cinema Positive effects The arrival of the digital technologies brought a sharp division between the old and new media. From experience, film-makers confess that the entrance of digital technologies in the movie making industry has enabled them to ‘tell stories that were not possible to tell before’ and achieve higher levels of realism in their movies. They have also been enabled to impress the cinema audience with effects that were previously unseen. For example, using the digital technologies, movie makers have been able to make shots that are more impressive than those that could have been produced using the pre-digital technologies. Therefore, we can say that the entry of digital technology has created new, great possibilities for cinema. Each of the positive impacts of digital technology on cinema is explained in the following paragraphs. Digital technologies allows film-makers to focus more on actor actions because digital vid eo equipment enables them to be closer to the actors and even being inside the action as it unfolds. This gives them a chance of conducting a more legitimate filmic approach leading to the inclusion of minor details in the movie, something that could not be easily achieved with pre-digital technologies. A legitimate filmic approach helps to reduce unnecessary levels of suspense created by failure to bring out some parts of the movie that need close range shots (Ganz and Khathib, 2006). According to Kotian (2005), digitalization of cinema has led to production of movies that have high abilities of attracting and retaining audience attention due to the special