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In addition to rapidly taking over the entire home-video market that relied on VHS and bypassed theatrical releases, the new digital cinematography technology also quietly found another group of users: the adult film producers of the San Fernando Valley.
These studios also focused on videotape distribution and had previously relied on tape-based television cameras for shooting. However, with subsidies offered to promote adoption, the new digital cameras had a much lower cost of use than traditional TV cameras. Naturally, there was no reason for them not to switch sides.
Moreover, with digital-to-film transfer technology, footage could still be transferred onto film prints compatible with theatrical projectors.
When projected onto a large screen, the shooting results from Stark Pictures' digital cameras showed little difference from traditional 35mm film cameras to the average audience.
Of course, under the sharp eyes of professionals, the differences were still noticeable.
But once this technology—developed in parallel with research results from the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts—was released, it immediately attracted many aspiring filmmakers who dreamed of the big screen but were constrained by limited budgets.
Not everyone could afford to persist with expensive 35mm film solely for marginal improvements in image quality, at the cost of giving up a tool that allowed repeated refinement and better performances through multiple takes.
Even if not everyone in this group fully committed to Stark Pictures' new equipment, just half of them switching over already represented a significant number.
As a result, Stark Pictures' newly launched equipment quickly experienced a shortage in its rental business.
Henry did not increase the number of digital film cameras available for rental, because rentals were still subsidized. In other words, every digital camera rented out meant Stark Pictures was losing money for the sake of market presence.
Only when someone intended to purchase outright would a brand-new unit be manufactured and sold.
At this stage, Henry's approach was simply to cultivate the market, not to recklessly charge head-on into the traditional 35mm film domain. It was enough to put a batch of machines into circulation and let people become familiar with how they worked.
Most of Henry's energy was instead focused on guiding the digital image encoding team toward developing the 4K—UHD—standard.
The new equipment Stark Pictures had released was, in fact, based on Henry's older technology. The engineers at the studio were merely packaging these already mature techniques into commercially viable products for rental or sale.
But Henry himself had not yet completed 4K encoding, so this was something he needed to keep a close eye on.
The reason he wasn't personally coding was that higher image quality meant larger storage requirements. Hard drives needed greater capacity to keep up—otherwise, if upgrading image quality meant a single high-capacity consumer hard drive could only record three minutes of footage, it would be laughable.
The issue of hard drive capacity was being handled by Stark Industries. This was effectively another challenge Henry had thrown Tony Stark's way.
Yet the two of them shared an unspoken understanding: neither would step in personally to lead the research teams through the technical hurdles. Once the plans were laid out, the hands-on work was left to subordinates, with only periodic progress checks.
The main reason they could delegate like this was that both men were tied up with other distractions.
Tony Stark, the notorious playboy, was busy dating models.
Supermodels who dreamed of becoming official girlfriends—or even Mrs. Stark—lined up to test their compatibility with Tony Stark in bed, as if believing this could let them leap across social classes.
The young tycoon seemed to relish it, leaving outsiders unsure of who was really collecting whom.
As for Henry, after the launch of the digital film camera rental business, invitations to industry banquets became more frequent.
Occasionally, he was even invited onto college campuses, where this man with no formal education would stand in front of students and professors, enthusiastically preaching the future of digital imaging.
His talks weren't simply about stepping on 35mm film to climb upward. Henry always emphasized that, at the current stage, digital film still couldn't match traditional film quality, trying to reduce hostility from the traditional film camp.
After all, the group led by Sony—those with strong ambitions in digital imaging technology—harbored naked hostility toward Stark Pictures, or more precisely, toward Henry. They launched attacks on legal, moral, and technical fronts simultaneously.
Even though Sony had no real footing when it came to patents, they still hoped to drag Stark Pictures into the quagmire of litigation. As long as their opponent was entangled in lawsuits and unable to act freely, Sony would gain time to prepare a counteroffensive.
If Henry had been fighting alone, whether appearing in court personally or hiring lawyers, he likely wouldn't have fared well against Sony's deep-pocketed legal teams.
Legal warfare didn't require winning—only dragging things out. Kryptonian fists were mighty, but they didn't mean much here.
Henry simply let Stark's legal team handle it, and all those headaches stopped being his problem. Industry and studio shared the same lawyers. Enjoying the shade of a great tree was truly comfortable—something Henry was now experiencing firsthand.
According to Tony Stark, they paid massive legal fees every year anyway. If the lawyers didn't get to flex their muscles and bare their fangs now and then, wouldn't that just be wasting the advisory fees?
Besides, if they somehow lost a lawsuit they couldn't possibly lose, that would just prove the lawyer was useless and deserved to be fired.
There was also another unspoken reason: this was exactly the kind of trial by fire Tony wanted to see. If he couldn't punch Boeing or Lockheed Martin, couldn't he at least beat up Sony?
As for the moral front—what could they criticize? At most, they fabricated baseless tabloid stories in an attempt to disturb Henry's state of mind.
If Henry had been an ordinary young man, he might have stormed off to Sony's U.S. headquarters in New York in a fit of rage.
But Henry carried on as if nothing had happened—eating, drinking, and living comfortably. Having lived through an era where everyone was a keyboard warrior, how could a few headlines shake his resolve?
Some people had considered targeting Charlize Theron instead. But perhaps projecting their own mindset onto others, they assumed that a mere girlfriend wouldn't matter much.
After testing the waters with one or two articles—still without any reaction from Henry—they abandoned that line of attack.
The biggest problem was that they had no real dirt. All they could do was fabricate claims of shady deals and unsavory games between Henry and Charlize Theron.
With Henry and J.J. Harris stepping in to persuade her, Charlize's anger was eventually calmed.
Externally, they simply had Stark Pictures' PR team file standard defamation lawsuits. Since the news involved Henry in his role as CEO, it didn't even count as abusing public resources for a girlfriend's sake.
Fortunately, the attacks hadn't hit Charlize's true weak spot. Had they done so and truly enraged her, even Henry wasn't sure he could have talked her down.
On the other hand, for an actress who wasn't even a minor celebrity yet—someone mostly circulating through auditions between film crews—there really wasn't much news value.
Even if reports were published, readers' first reaction would just be: Who is she? At most, they'd comment that she was pretty.
The same went for the behind-the-scenes CEO of Stark Pictures. The general public was far more interested in the scandals of major stars. Even producers needed representative works, or at least affiliation with one of the major studios.
A small Hollywood nobody like Stark Pictures genuinely didn't attract much attention in this era.
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