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Who hasn't sat through a film in the cinema when snow or a series of white streaks appeared on the screen? This is due to the progressive deterioration of the chemical print as a result of the film being repeatedly dragged in front of the projector's spotlight, causing irreversible damage. Added to this is the fact that the copies handed out to cinemas are usually of low quality anyway, due to the duplication process. This circumstance is aggravated when it comes to highly commercial films shown in virtually all cinemas and which require thousands of copies to be made.

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With digital cinema, all these problems become a thing of the past. Firstly, by digitalizing the images with a powerful scanner, the quality of the image is equal to or superior to that of the chemical reel. Secondly, the digital copy of the film will have the same sharpness in fifty years as it had on the day of its opening, however many times it has been screened.�

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For now, the only disadvantage of this type of visualisation and distribution is not the technology's lack of maturity, but that its implementation means a complete revolution in the traditional relations between producer, distributor and exhibitor. Hollywood's aim is to transfer the codified films to each continent and to forward them on to the main country markets. Hence, the cinema that holds the screening rights would receive the film via satellite and pay for each separate screening, much like the pay-per-view system of digital channels.

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The final step towards digital cinema will be taken when digitalizing films will not be necessary because the films will have been shot entirely using digital cameras and computer-generated effects. The first film to have been made in this way was The Secret of the Pyramid, where the main character was computer-generated.. The list of films that have included computer-generated sequences is getting longer and longer (The Mummy, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Titanic, The Phantom Menace, The Matrix, Invisible Man, etc.), up to and including Toy Story, the first entirely computer-generated film. This animated film was followed by other such well-known works as Star Wars Episode II, Final Fantasy or the Spanish film Lucia y el Sexo, all shot on digital film.

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However, there are two golden rules that the film industry must keep in mind before the this tidal wave of bytes floods the market: special effects and the digital format in which the images and sound are do not in themselves guarantee the success of a film (the success of The Blair Witch Project is a case apart) and that human creativity is still the most profitable factor, whether it has special effects to back it up or not.

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In fact, the detractors of digital film claim that so much technology only serves to give more importance to form rather than content, which is what truly matters when judging whether a film is good or bad. The debate is similar to when studios began colouring classic black and white films such as Casablanca, which caused more than one critic cry fury. When all's said and done, technology is a means to an end, which in this case should be genuine content. This is something Orson Welles was well aware of when he directed Citizen Kane, considered by experts to be the greatest film of them all.

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