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Digital ET, Online video

Lights! Camera! Click!

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Suresh Productions’ YouTube channel offers 40 full length films which were produced by them and some of the films like Bendu Appa Rao RMP and Baladoor have more than 1.5 lakh hits. “We saw that several other websites were uploading our content and generating money out of it. That’s when we decided to set up our own channel on YouTube and it partly works as one of our initiatives to control piracy. We are planning to increase the list of films to 120-130 over the next few months,” says Venkat, of Suresh Productions Pvt Ltd. Another production house, Geetha Arts is not far behind. “This trend of streaming movies on the Internet was inevitable because of growth in number of Internet users all over the world. As a revenue stream, this model of generating money through streaming films is yet to evolve. Currently, it comes into picture only after the film completes its theatrical run, satellite and DVD market. But the good thing is that these video sharing websites like YouTube, Hulu, Netflix and Amazon have given us a platform

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ET, Movies

B-town taps festive joie de vivre

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The film industry has a good 2011 as it harnesses long weekends and festivals.

On Diwali day, start at Mannat, Shah Rukh Khan’s house in Bandra. Travel through the heart of the Indian film business in north Mumbai, right up to Film City. The chances are all you will hear is a deafening silence. It is the sound of an industry waiting with bated breath for the first word-of-mouth reports on Ra.One.

 

The Rs 160 crore magnum opus, produced by Khan, starring him and promoted ad nauseum by him, is one of the most expensive Indian films ever made. It is being released on Diwali in a film-crazy country that blows up a lot of money and has fun that week. The combination — SRK, festival and mood — is deadly. Ra.One is destined to do well. Given its budget, how much profit it makes may be a question mark. This however is not about Ra.One.

 

 

“Traditionally, a festival release gets 10 per cent more audiences,” says Sreedhar Pillai, a Chennai-based trade analyst. It is also the time that everyone is equal in the film business. “There is usually an unsaid understanding that no two big films will release on the same day. The only exception is a festival. No rules apply,” says Allu Sirish, marketing director, Geetha Arts, a Hyderabad-based production house. The company has produced, among other films, Ghajini.

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Digital cinema, Digital ET

An easy conversion of 2D screens to 3D

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Around five months earlier, Shrikanth Ghanekar, a city-based wholesale textile exporter, watched a 3D film for the first time. The film, Haunted, was being screened at Regal Cinema here, and Ganekar spent Rs 350 to watch it. However, what Ghanekar did not know was it was also the first 3D movie screened in the theatre.

Regal Cinema earlier had a 2D screen and converting it into a 3D screen would have meant an investment of around Rs 45 lakh. UFO Moviez offered to upgrade their 2D screen to a 3D one at almost one-third the cost. With the theatre owners agreeing to it, UFO Moviez set up a platform comprising dual 3D projectors, along with a playback server, 3D format converter, passive polarised filters, a silver screen and 3D goggles. With the help of these, a movie is now processed in stereoscopic format and played back from the server. The video fro the server is connected to a 3D format converter that processes the stereoscopic video and gives two separate frames as output (one for the left eye, the other for the right).

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