Online preview vs. DVD-r

From: Raymond Salvatore Harmon (email suppressed)
Date: Thu Jan 15 2009 - 06:39:57 PST


Hello all,

I wanted to post a general question about festival submission/screening procedures and get some feedback from the list.

Over the past 10 years most festivals have shifted from accepting VHS tape to accepting dvd for preview. While on the whole dvd-r is an accepted format I am constantly hearing complaints from various artists and programmers about the major issues of incompatibility with dvd-r and computers/players. I myself have had several times when dvd-r sent out could not be watched by someone, even though others from the same batch had no problems elsewhere.

Over the past year I have started telling programmers who request screening copies of my films to watch them via the Vimeo.com site (who can stream in hd). And although I have had some positive response to this on the whole I have meet with a certain amount of hesitation and uncertainty.

While I do understand the difference between screening from film and from video I do not really understand the hesitation in having a film previewed from the web if the resolution is the same or better than a dvd.

In my opinion previewing films from the web not only saves artists money, it is more environmental (not using so much plastic), and on the festival side I know from experience that submissions can take up a lot of room thus web preview saves festivals space as well.

As programmers and artists what is stopping festivals from going over to an all online submission format? (again, I am not talking about youtube quality but full resolution streaming as on Vimeo and other sites)

Yours

Raymond Salvatore Harmon
raymondharmon.com
vimeo.com/raymondharmon
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