The Digital Death of Film?

May 9 -- For millions of science fiction fans, the May 16 release of Attack of the Clones couldn't come soon enough. But for creator George Lucas, the latest installment of the Star Wars legacy may be coming out a bit sooner than he would have liked.

Why? Because most moviegoers won't see the latest episode of the space opera saga the way that Lucas had expected: in a theater that uses state of the art digital movie projectors.

For years, the motion picture industry had been toying with the idea that such systems would replace film projectors that haven't changed much since the days of Thomas Edison. And proponents say that movies stored and displayed from digital computer files instead of celluloid film stock would offer tremendous advantages.

Digital movies don't degrade like film-based motion pictures, which means images stay as sharp and free from visual defects no matter how many times its played. And since the movies are in essence large computer files, they can be sent to digital theaters more easily and cheaply than heavy reels of film.

Click here to see how a digital movie projector would work.

And for Lucas, such potential prospects meant it was time for his empire to strike. His movie production house, Lucas Films, spent a reported $100 million in 1999 to buy new high-definition video cameras in order to produce Attack of the Clones in a completely digital process. The hope: There would be at least 500 theaters in the United States using the new digital projection technology to display his hard work perfectly.