Digital Cinemas

Digital technologies have altered the terms of all the major areas of film: finance, production and post-production, distribution and consumption.  This chapter looks at these through the lens of debates over historical continuities and discontinuities in each area, looking especially at the variety of production and dissemination formats from blockbusters to zero-budget film-making, the impact of technical standardisation, the affordances of different digital technologies, notably bitmap and vector, and the role of platforms like YouTube and their alternatives. The possibilities and challenges of 'world cinema' as a concept in this terrain will be the central theme