> I am beginning to look into the creation of (don't know what to call it) a > consortium of colleges, universities, archives, etcetera--places that want to > continue to have the option to show prints--who would, in addition to paying > rentals for screening individual films, pay an annual fee to Canyon to make > use of their services.
A consortium seems like a good idea, but the annual fee on-top of rentals may be squeezing blood out of a turnip. The good thing about a membership plan is that it would offer Canyon a predictable revenue base to work from. But much more needs to be done. For starters, the problems I noted for small schools need to be addressed. Institutions that distribute prints can no longer just think of themselves as being in the print rental business. For one thing: some organization needs to begin working on projection support and maintenance: acquiring a stock of projectors, keeping them serviced, finding ways to make them available along with the prints. For another, everything needs to gets digitized, and made available in a medium rez form along with prints. So, when you rent a print of 'Cosmic Ray' from Canyon, you get an SD DVD of 'Cosmic Ray' to put on reserve in the library for the length of the term. Since these are 'study copies' they don't have to be made with high quality scanners or anything, and Canyon need not spend buckets of money getting this done at a quality lab. Members of the consortium could do the work, by taking rental prints, projecting them onto a small screen with a standard 16mm projector, and shooting the screen with a 24fps video camera, such as a Pana DVX100 or a Canon XG-A1, then capturing the data into FCP or a similar NLE, converting to .m2v and .ac3 with Compressor or MPEG Streamclip, and making a DVD image in DVD Studio Pro -- (or a similar workflow with Adobe, Avid or whatever). I used to have my students shoot a couple projects in 16mm, and that's what we did so they could edit and finish them. Works great. But a fundamental problem remains: the projection of prints is simply too costly and difficult to serve the breadth of the audience who wants or needs those things experimental film has to offer, which is why such imperfect institutions as UbuWeb and Karagarga exist. The only way to save celluloid projection is going to be to move beyond celluloid projection in some fashion where the parts work together instead of working against each other. _______________________________________________ FrameWorks mailing list [email protected] https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
