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"Journey to the Center of the Earth," the first of a new generation of 3-D movies, will be released nationwide today, and Lancaster has it.
Penn Cinema, 541 Airport Road, Lititz, has just installed a brand-new Dolby 3-D system, becoming the second theater in Lancaster County with the capability of showing the 3-D flick.
Regal Cinema, 1246 Millersville Pike, installed the Doremi 3-D system in March 2007, according to assistant manager Shannon Edwards.
"We're all wound up about this," said Penn Ketchum, managing partner of Penn Cinema. "Dolby is the newest technology out there, and it's great."
Earlier this year, Ketchum and his partners spent $250,000 to change four of their 10 auditoriums over to digital technology for its ultraclear images. Now, for an additional $40,000, a technician from Projection Equipment Digital Interface of Waverly Hall, Ga., has spent part of this week upgrading one of Penn Cinema's four digital projectors to do double duty as a 3-D projector.
That projector will get a workout starting today when "Journey" opens.
To view the 3-D movies, each audience member will be given a pair of lightweight plastic glasses fitted with 47 lenses compressed into two, each geared for the left or right eye.
Viewed without the aid of the glasses, the image on the screen appears blurry with fuzzy colored lines. With them, however, the image is crystal clear and at times seems to pop off the screen. The perception of depth can make the viewer feel he or she is in the scene.
The glasses cost Ketchum $60 a pair, and he ordered 500 of them, twice the number of seats in the auditorium. The same pair of glasses is not used in any two successive shows."One set of glasses is being washed while the second set is being used by the audience," Ketchum said.
The admission price for the 3-D theater is no different than for Penn Cinema's other auditoriums. The same is true at Regal Cinema.
Many other 3-D theaters, Ketchum said, charge the viewers a rental fee or usage fee to use the glasses.
"We feel that showing 3-D movies is consistent with our philosophy of putting the best product forward, so we felt it would be inconsistent to charge our customers extra for a better product. Our customers just expect to get the best, and this is just us continuing to deliver that."
"Journey to the Center of the Earth" will open nationwide on 2,000 regular screens and about 1,000 3-D screens, including Regal and Penn cinemas, because, Ketchum said, "there are only about 1,000 screens that have the digital technology."
"Digital cinema is growing at a rapid pace, which is giving the studios the confidence to believe that if they do make a 3-D digital movie, they'll have places to show it," he said.
The H.G. Wells classic "Journey" will run 3-D through July, then be replaced by another 3-D feature, "Fly Me to the Moon," an animated story about three flies who stow away on an Apollo lunar expedition.
In October, Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas," newly reformatted for 3-D, will be shown, followed by another animated film, "Bolt."
(280) (217) (42) (32) (18) (5) (3) (2)Unlike 35-mm films, which are delivered on reels, digital movies come to theaters on a computer hard drive. The film is downloaded from that drive into the projector's computer, which takes about 90 minutes.
For 3-D, the digital projector is outfitted with a Dolby 3-D system that includes a filter wheel that converts the image from 2-D to 3-D.
Three-dimensional movies, shot using two cameras spaced apart so their images approximate what a person's two eyes would see, are nothing new to the film industry. But the early technology — the viewer wore flimsy white cardboard glasses with red and blue cellophanelike lenses — was crude, and viewers suffered eyestrain and headaches.
That was then. This is now.
"The level of quality of this format is vastly superior to what is historically associated with 3-D movies," Ketchum said.
Starting today, local audiences will judge for themselves.
E-mail: lalexander@lnpnews.com
