The Berlin Film Festival returns to the city for its 65th year from 5 to 15 March. The ten-day Berlinale will feature 2,500 screenings and host 500,000 visitors including 20,000 professionals from 124 countries.
Colt will be supporting the festival for the seventh year, and Rohde & Schwarz is supporting for the third consecutive year and for the first time as third partner.
Colt will be maintaining a viewing experience for visitors to the screenings taking place in venues across Berlin, including the Zoo Palast, Friedrichstadtpalast and CinemaxX Potsdamer Platz. The company has helped Berlinale to address the technical challenges associated with the rollout of a digital cinema. This year will be the first time the Berlinale distributes all films directly from its digital heart, located in a Colt data centre, to 16 film venues across the city. Filmmakers participating in the Berlinale film competition will be able to upload their entries in digital format directly to the Berlinale storage system, simplifying logistics.
“The digitisation of the film industry is almost complete and the Berlinale festival has remained ahead of the curve with Colt’s support. We have faced enormous technical and logistical challenges, in particular the acceptance and distribution of digitally produced films with ever larger amounts of data,” says festival director Dieter Kosslick. “With Colt as a partner, we are well equipped: the infrastructure and services from Colt and the broadcast expertise of its team are essential for making the film festival a success and ensuring film fans can fully enjoy their visit to the Berlinale.”
Rohde & Schwarz will be at work behind the scenes supporting the Berlinale with three R&S CLIPSTER mastering stations, a four-channel R&S VENICE ingest and production server, as well as R&S SpycerBox storage solutions.
The R&S CLIPSTER mastering station will create and review DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages) prior to the transfer into screening venues. R&S SpycerBox storage solutions, which boast a storage capacity of up to 1 petabyte, will ensure that the hand-picked film entries for the Berlinale and the European Film Market (EFM) are backed- up and ready to play.
Ove Sander, technical manager, digital cinema, Berlin International Film Festival, commented: “Once again, we look forward to counting on Rohde & Schwarz DVS GmbH systems. With its incredible speed, the CLIPSTER mastering station lets us generate all DCPs in good time prior to the start of the festival. Since the DCPs are also backed up by the reliable SpycerBox solutions we can depend on everything to run smoothly even when things get hectic during the festival.”
