From: Roger Beebe (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Jan 20 2009 - 09:20:33 PST
I don't have a ton of time to get embroiled in a thread that may be
dying, but we did, under duress, preview a few videos online for this
year's FLEXfest & it was a logistical nightmare. Some of us watch the
entries together (which meant huddling around my 17" laptop & watching
on an LCD screen, usually in a tiny window with a badly compressed
file); others watched at home & not every (heaven forfend!) has hi-
speed connections at their houses. The few full-res versions that we
got took literally hours to download. I'm all for avoiding plastic &
I too hate the unreliability of DVD-Rs, but FLEX has no plans to go
electronic for now. (For what it's worth, internet storage is now the
fastest growing source of greenhouse gasses, so don't kid yourselves
about how eco-friendly it is to store hundreds of gigabytes of video
on servers that run around the clock.)
For those who are worried about DVD compatibility, we always had at
least two DVD players hooked up to the TV we watched our entries on.
I'd say for all but a few of our 500+ entries that set up worked. For
those remaining few, we were almost always finally able to get them to
play on the laptop--again, not an ideal solution, but don't think
we're dumping DVDs in the garbage if they don't play in one player. I
assume most festival programmers are equally conscientious. Whatever
one might say about the film festival "racket," we're in this for the
love of the game, not for gobbling up entry fees. (At FLEX no one
putting on the festival gets paid--the only payouts go to the winning
filmmakers at the festival.)
Two cents,
Roger
On Jan 18, 2009, at 1:23 AM, Ken Bawcom wrote:
> Quoting bryan mckay <email suppressed>:
>
>> ...Sure, we could all watch things separately on our computers, but
>> there's something to be said for seeing how a film plays in a dark
>> room on a big screen with good speakers in front of a real audience.
>>
>> Bryan
>>
>
> I strongly agree with that. After screening for 18 years, when the
> AAFF stopped screening that way, I stopped screening. Also, there is
> much to be said for a group of screeners sharing their knowledge and
> insights about a particular entry as they watch it, and just after.
> Watching on a small screen, you can imagine what the impact would be
> on a big screen, but when watching on a big screen, you FEEL that
> impact.
>
> I'm sure we'd all like to reduce the plastic waste, and on line
> submissions are tempting. But, time is very important when screening,
> and I can't believe that looking for things on line can be as quick as
> loading lots of DVDs into a 400 disc changer, and just pushing a
> button to advance to the next entry. Perhaps it would be possible to
> download to hard drives, and view from those, efficiently, and with a
> good quality picture. But, how many HDDs, and at what cost, to hold a
> few thousand entries? And, staff would still have to do the work of
> the downloads.
>
> As to how long it took Ann Arbor to accept video submissions, for
> years, the AAFF accepted only 16mm film for programming, and all
> submissions were viewed in their entirety. The program was selected
> immediately after screening was done, and only a few days before the
> Festival began. We believed that we should only look at film, because
> it looks better, and there wasn't enough time to get all the prints
> before the Festival started. When the AAFF was opened to programming
> video, and the amount of submissions immediately went up 300 - 400%,
> all that changed. It had to.
>
> Ken B.
>
>
>
>
> "Those who would give up essential liberty
> to purchase a little temporary safety
> deserve neither liberty, nor safety."
> Benjamin Franklin 1775
>
> "I know that the hypnotized never lie... Do ya?"
> Pete Townshend 1971
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.