by Gary Welz, Tangent Design
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Cinema on the Web
The Web Cinema Group is an international community of filmmakers united by their interest in new media and dedicated "to the independent filmmaker using new media technologies to finance, create, produce, distribute and market independent film."The Group utilizes all new media technogies to meet its goals. Born as a Web site, it now uses a listserv, Internet forums, and Internet chat for exchanging ideas and making contacts. In the near future it will be using Internet Phone Communications from Vocaltec, providing Real Audio, and VDOLive video coverage of selected meetings and speakers.
Bi-monthly meetings in New York deal with all aspects of the business and technology of film production. Some recent meetings have showcased technologies for streaming video on the Web, film Web sites, online soap operas, the Microsoft Network, Sony digital cameras, and the IEEE 1394 Serial Bus standard a.k.a. Fire Wire. It is also the organizer of Digifest, the First International Digital Film Festival, which is being held in New York April 11-20, 1997.
The Group's founder and leader is Jonathan Sarno, a New York-based filmmaker and new media entrepreneur, who is also the founder of CNI Cinema. Sarno believes that the future of film is in digital production, editing, and distribution. In particular, he feels that recent developments in digital video technology will dramatically reduce the cost of independent film production, and this will lead to a far greater number of films being produced and hence to a wider range of cinematic voices and styles.
As Karl Marx would say, everything changes when the means of production are in the hands of the workers. Digital cameras with image quality as good as those used for broadcast television are now in the $2,000-$5,000 price range right, although the price should come down.
Last November at COMDEX, Miro Computer Products AG announced the miroVIDEO DV 100, an IEEE 1394 (Firewire) solution for digital video editing systems that bridges the technology gap between digital camcorders and desktop computers. The firewire bus will sell for about $1,000 when it comes out in the first or second quarter of 1997.
Previously, digital video had to be converted to an analog version before it could be edited. As a consequence, the image quality of digital video programs was never as good as film. The new technology enables producers to create a first generation from a desktop video editing system. This video is the highest quality video possible, and it approaches the quality of 16 millimeter film. It lacks the graininess, but it is otherwise almost indistinguishable.
The miroVIDEO DV 100 is compatible with the Sony DCR-VX1000 Digital Handycam and Sony DCR-VX700 Digital Handycam, two inexpensive digital video cameras.
The remaining hurdle is distribution. The limited bandwidth available to most users of the Internet is still frustrating for anyone with a serious interest in film. Sarno laments that it will be three years or more before anything like digital video on demand or digital distribution of feature films really levels the playing field.
The Web made it possible for almost anyone to publish text and still pictures globally without the cost of paper or mailing. When cable modems, ADSL, or other high-band technologies make it possible to deliver full-screen/full-motion video to anyone's home from a Web server, we can expect to see a revolution in filmmaking similar to the one we've witnessed in print publishing.
"These are the early years," Sarno says. "No filmmaker would be interested in the Web if they thought this is all there would be. This is like television in the '50s when screen screens were tiny and everything was black and white."
