World Premiere of restored movie classic Metropolis to be streamed live with the dicas2020 Multi-Format Encoder

Berlin and Frankfurt (Germany), 5 February 2010 – dicas, the German MPEG-4 expert, is proud to announce that the world premiere of the restored movie classic Metropolis at the Berlin international film festival Berlinale will be streamed live on the internet with the dicas2020 Multi-Format Encoder. Arte, the Franco-German bilingual cultural TV channel, will have an extensive cross media live coverage of the outstanding cinematic event to take place 83 years after the first screening of Fritz Lang’s epoche making movie.

The re-premiere is the result of decade-long attempts to restore the 147 minutes director’s cut of Metropolis which has been drastically shortened to 90 minutes due to financial considerations, right after the actual world premier in 1927. Although the removal of crucial scenes turned Fritz Lang’s master piece into an incomprehensible torso the film studio did not undertake measures to preserve the cut-off footage. It was the sensational discovery of a 16mm negative in the Buenos Aires film museum in 2008 which has put a happy end to years of research work. Apart from a few frames the Argentine copy of the Metropolis master tape contained all the missing scenes which were considered lost for decades.

Franco-German broadcaster Arte is going to show the Metropolis re-premiere parallelly on TV and on its online video portal Arte Live Web. The live streaming on the web is realized by new media service expert Group Galore from Frankfurt, Germany. Group Galore sets on the dicas2020 multi-format encoder to transfer the live video on site into two parallel MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 streams being distributed over RTMP to the Adobe Flash Media Server. The dicas2020 is capable of encoding a single input channel into up to six parallel output formats. For each service the data rate, resolution, frame rate and transport protocol can be selected completely independently and played out in MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, MPEG-4 (part 2) or H.263/ 3GPP for mobile devices. Being an official Adobe Solution Partner dicas also offers Flash compliant MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 streaming.

The world premiere of the restored movie classic Metropolis will take place at the international film festival Berlinale on 12 February 2010.