Forum film-maker's films distribution deal...

[miker]

Okay, I note that there is possibly a market for aspiring film-makers to be able to view the 'student' work and 'professional' work of 'established' film-makers on this board - and possibly each other's work, too.

I for one have around 30+ shorts I could contribute from.

Here's my question: how many ppl would be willing to submit their single best short to me, for inclusion on a CD that members of this forum could purchase/distribute mail order?

How many of you would be willing to submit your work to the public domain (GNU type thing, but for films)? You would retain all intellectual copyright, but give me (and others) a license to copy and distribute for non-profit.

What price (???, $$$ etc) would ppl put on being able to get hold of such a compilation?

[Vertino]

Excellent Idea!

you know that is a great idea!

places like MP3.COM ask you to submit your own music for their complation CDs, so why not do the same with movies?

I know that AtomFilms do VHS/DVD editions of the movies that they show, but if we could get something going similar here at eXposure, then that would be GREAT!

the best format would actually be VCD/SVCD, therefore they'll be more avaliable for play.

I've been doing alot of research into VCDs (MPEG compression, etc.) and I believe it is an excellent format to show short movies!

drop me an email if anyone wants to discuss this further!

Vertino - [email protected]

[LAmind]

If you burn a VCD (by burn i mean copy to a CD-R or a CD-RW) will the copy work in computers, or does the VCD have soem kind of copyright thing?

-Ivan

------------------
"A place for everything and everything in it's place".

[Gurdeep Samra]

I don't know much about the production side or money issue of this matter but it is a good idea. I'm off to see if I can more information regarding this topic and I will be back if I find anything interesting.

[ThomYorke]

I think this distribution idea should be followed through as far as it can - you have my vote.

Personally, I know nothing about having films distributed on CD's or what sort of compression you would use (I don't actually have to bother with compression formats with my films).

One question: How would the films be submitted to be put onto the CD? Are you talking about having things sent to you as a file (.avi, .mpeg etc) or would one send in a tape with the film on it?

In terms of cost, that should only be determined at a later stage, as it depends very much on how many films will be submitted, how many people involved and the amount of work they do to justify the price.

But yeah - it would be fantastic to get the films that we make seen. We all TALK about the films that we make, but no one other than us (for the most part) ever get to see them.

Great idea

[Vertino]

The following info is for people who don't know about VCD or Compression...

VCD is obviously "VideoCD" - in the smae way that Audio CDs have a standard format (being 44.1Hz & 16-bit sound), VCDs are MPEG-1 compression with a resolution of 352*288 (for PAL)

Where can you play them?

Computers can play almost any format... software is avaliable on the Internet!

VCDs can also be played on *most* DVD Players... PlayStations (with VCD addon), and all Modern Computers.

also like Audio CDs you can get an play-back time of 74mins!!!

which means if we've got shorts around 5min each... then we can fit between 10-15 on each CD!

The only downfall (that I can see) is the QUALITY! The resolution is quite small, the overall quality is slightly better than VHS (slightly), plus there is a certain amount of "blockiness" in action scenes.

As for the submission process... Computer files (*.avi; *.mpg) would be prefered... however I'm sure people with video-capture cards would be more than happy to help out!

The creation of VCDs are simple... again there is alot of software out there than remove the complexity of the process.

CONSIDERING other formats?

I'd recommend QuickTime or DivX ;-)

however that would purely limit the distrubtion to computers... (I know we all use them here, but others dont!)


Vertino

[andy_winton]

Hi,
I'm in if you want to use any of my
stuff -

http://www.wintonfilms.co.uk/

cheers,

andy

[andy_winton]

Other formats?

What about ASF (mpeg 4), it can give
about 1 / 10 space of MPEG (video CD).

[Vertino]

I think MPEG4 (ASF) is a superb format!

MPEG4 is going to do video, what MP3 did for audio! (we're at the start of a multimedia revolution here!)

I especially love DivX ;-)

however again the major downfall is that only people using computers can view the movies! + they need to install the correct codecs...

could you imagine some studio exec (if it gets that far) - installing new codecs on his Win95 machine... then not having enough CPU power to get a decent frame-rate?!?!

The beauty of VCD (MPEG1) is its simplicity!

now until formats (such as DVD-R) become avaliable for domestic use, then we're stuck with VCD/SVCD as the best offline digital format!

[miker]

I'd agree that any CD would have to be ISO compliant, that means VCD for the moment.

I know for one that my DVD player doesn't like CD-R :-(

I'd be happy to compile an initial CD, but I don't have unlimited bandwidth so I aint spending hours downloading on my pissy 56k!!

I could accept stuff on CD in pretty much any format, VHS or DV. Costs (for me) would come in where I have to transcode everything to VCD compliant MPEG. I'd probably have to sell the CD's on for ?10 a pop + any international s&h, unless I had pre-orders of hundreds, then it might be worth getting them pressed from a glass master with proper inlays and everything... cool.

So, who would buy a VCD compilation of around 10 shorts for ?10 ??

I would ;-)