Technical

What happened at AIVF over the last 30 years?

I first became aware of AIVF when Martha Gever was editor of The Independent. I marveled at this national organization that put out each month a magazine chock full of weighty, intellectual and critical articles on film and video.

Indiepix and PixelTools Corporation recently announced that the 2,000 films available on Indiepix.net’s Download-To- Own system will be watermarked using a new technology called MPEG Escort. The invisible, digital watermark allows online purchasers to make copies, but prevents pirates from doing so, (the watermark makes it simple to trace who originally purchased and downloaded the film.)

For years, digital cameras and post-production equipment have been changing the way films are budgeted, shot, and edited. But no matter how films are made today, theatergoers still watch them on 35 millimeter celluloid prints. Even when a film is shot on high-definition video, the distributor has to copy the master onto celluloid before sending it to a theater.

Dear Doc Doctor:

In the post-production phase, technology becomes so complicated—there are so many options. Any suggestion on what’s the best format with which to master my film while still being affordable?

I spent June of this year in Ghent, a small town near Hudson, New York. Hoping to rent some John Sayles movies one night, I headed into town, pulling up alongside a group of heavily pierced teenagers—your average counterculture youth. I asked them where to go to rent a video, and they suggested the Hollywood Video on Route 9. I asked if there wasn’t an independent video store nearby, because Hudson has an arts scene and a wealth of antique stores and seemed like a good candidate for one. They directed me to a strip mall across from the Hollywood Video.

For filmmakers, being experimental isn’t as easy as it used to be. Fifty years ago, tossing aside Hollywood’s conventions of narrative, acting, cinematography, and format exposed plenty of directions in which to push the envelope. Maya Deren challenged viewers by confusing them. Stan Brakhage manipulated his film by hand to create images never seen in the real world.

Many might say the past few years have been good ones for independent filmmakers, largely because digital filmmaking has made movie production so much more accessible to budding directors everywhere. Nevertheless, obstacles facing low budget filmmakers are, and continue to be, many—filming on a tight schedule, publicity, legitimate screenings, and attracting an audience for what is probably a very personal film, all, of course, with no money, can be endlessly frustrating. And then, on top of that, there’s the issue of location permits.

Aaton, the innovative French camera and audio manufacturer, has recently released two new and remarkable products—the Cantar digital audio recorder, and the A-Minima Super16 film camera. The A-Minima is a film camera built to operate like a DV camera, while the Cantar is a digital audio recorder that operates much like a standard reel-to-reel recorder, but records to an internal hard drive in a way that surpasses other digital means like DAT or DV cameras.

Your next film probably won’t be digitally mastered. But the one after that probably will be. That’s how fast the costs of a digital intermediate are falling, even as the quality and benefits of digital mastering rise. Sure, digital video doesn’t have the warmth of Super 16 or 35, and you’re not about to throw away everything you’ve learned about capturing a scene on film. But we’re not talking about shooting your scenes with a digital camera, or distributing your feature on DVD.