The Pacific Bell subsidiary of Pacific Telesis Group Inc plans to demonstrate Virtual Hollywood, an all-digital video communications application using its Advanced Broadcast Video Services, which takes the celluloid out of moviemaking all the way from the editing room to the cinema. The company will introduce Virtual Hollywood at the 135th Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers Conference and Equipment Exhibit in Los Angeles today, demonstrating the system transporting digitised video from the Hollywood studios of Varitel Video Inc to remote editing facilities in the Entertainment Digital Network Inc exhibit at the show. The ultimate idea is to squirt movies down the line to cinemas across the country or across the world, eliminating the slow and costly process of mechanical film production and distribution in bulky, heavy cans of copies that all too soon get scratched, although the giant screens to show the movies do not yet exist. For a screening of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, video transmitted from Sony Pictures High Definition Center will be digitised and compressed from the original 90MHz picture bandwidth to 45Mbps using High Definition Television transmission equipment made by Alcatel Network Systems, and transported via Advanced Broadcast Video.
