"We had the world's most public test-screening," says Niv Fichman. The producer of Blindness is laughing as he recounts the moment when the lights went up after the film's world premiere in competition at Cannes. "The crowd was cheering but [DOP] César [Charlone] was saying to [director] Fernando [Meirelles] and me, 'I guess we have some work to do.'"

Changing a film after its world premiere is audacious. But Blindness was projected digitally at Cannes. Thus, because Fichman and company had not gone to the expense of a negative cut and a print, making changes was an easier choice.

Whether any filmmakers presenting features at the Toronto International Film Festival will take the opportunity to make post-festival adjustments, 57 of them are in a better position to do so. That's the number of features screening this year at TIFF via digital projection, the most ever.

But changing a film is also risky. Most of the world's influential critics are at Cannes, and their opinions established there -- mostly in print. Blindness was noticeably altered, but those same critics at Toronto may hesitate to deliver a second opinion, especially with so many new titles demanding their limited TIFF time.

Fichman says digital presentation was not the original intention. He says the window between Cannes' selection announcements and the festival screening was narrower than in past years, forcing the production to rush. And while Fichman wants to make it clear that he and his team were happy with Blindness, their own reaction to the film -- and to the feedback from buyers and critics at Cannes -- led them to re-evaluate the film's original iteration.

Having a digital print, says Fichman, "allowed us to make the decision on our own. We could maintain our independence."

He says the key financial players -- Canadian distributor Alliance Films, Miramax, which is distributing the film in the U.S., and Focus Features, which is handling international sales -- were all consulted. But there's a world of difference between asking your distributors and sales agents if they have any suggestions for changes and asking them to pay for those changes. Blindness screens on Saturday as a TIFF special presentation.

Andrei Gravelle has watched digital projection from its infancy. He has been with the Toronto International Film Festival Group for 16 years, four of them as its technical manager. TIFF's first HD screening was in 2000 with Bernard Rose's ivans xtc, a thinly veiled portrait of former Hollywood superagent Jay Moloney, who took his own life in 1996 following allegations of cocaine addiction.

Over the next few years, the growth was exponential. Says Gravelle: "We had five or six, and then double that the next year. It plateaued around 2005. And now we are seeing growth again. This year is another leap."

Gravelle also handles technical issues for TIFFG's children's film festival Sprockets, which screened DreamWorks Animation's Over the Hedge on D-cinema as a work-in-progress in 2006.