Butterflies in the Wind in pursuit of happiness

filmman said:
It's going to be either the foreign market or Internet streaming. DVD sales are declining and it's hard to sell DVDs from websites. The orders are just too few for an indie filmmaker to recover money. I'm going to put more of my movies online and see how that goes.
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This is my 'gut' conjecture why HD DVD didn't win out... the porn people had moved to online downloading quicker, and so, did not use the HD DVD format in sufficient amounts to tip the balance. In the case of VHS vs. Beta, VHS porn tapes seemed to be a sufficiently sized market to sway the ultimate choice. The reason for VHS being prefered, what Sony had put stipulations on the use of Beta master/replication equipment for 'porn', as they did again with Blu-ray. But because porn is now predominantly distributed via download, there was no sizable market for HD DVD that did not include major studio support.

I think also that Sony dropped any licensing charges for Blu-ray, conditional on exclusive use of Blu-ray for HD distribution, which would make sense to bean counters... And no, I don't believe that 90% of the market can really tell the difference on a number of items that Blu-ray superiority is touted... just as most viewers couldn't tell the difference between Beta v. VHS run on consumer grade equipment.
 
All this tells me that streaming and download are the way to go ... especially with the incredible increase in the number of movies being made digitally. Not only the markets are being flooded by the overflow of movies, the Internet is going to be saturated with movies also. Youtube is going to be just the tip of the iceberg.

Mabye there is a window of opportunity, but it's not going to be large or prolonged. It's going to be hard to find a way to make big money in movies outside the Hollywood film industry, which means indie budgets should shrink some more.

Thanks for the info and your analysis.
 
filmman said:
The only way I can think of is in banding together and going to a foreign market with multiple projects and sharing costs. Let me know if you're interested. Email me: vic@felliniesque.com
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I dropped you a line. I'm looking at the AFM next year. I'm looking to brings "Wages of Sin" along with "Divinity", but Divinity will be my main focus.

-Nate
 
Great, I'm glad you're deciding early. We need to plan ahead. I'll respond to your email later tonight. Thanks -- hope we find a few other DVXusers to go with us.
 
Finally I figured out how to output a movie clip from my 4:3 timeline and convert it to 16:9 for the web.

Here it is: http://www.releasing.net

It's a movie clip from my feature Butterflies in the Wind. The movie was shot in 35mm as I've said and the edited 35mm workprint was telecined (picture and mag) to DVCAM. I edited this trailer from the footage on my G5 and FCP 5.04.
 
j1clark@ucsd.edu said:
This is my 'gut' conjecture why HD DVD didn't win out... the porn people had moved to online downloading quicker, and so, did not use the HD DVD format in sufficient amounts to tip the balance.t.
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Is this a boutique theory? Not discounting it but that's the first time I've heard it was porn that settled the VHS and Blu ray wars.

Btw, I went to UCSD, how do you get an email address? I'm always blowing off the alumni association, is that the only way?

Filmman, when you say overseas markets are a good pathway, do you mean specifically creating content specific to those markets? And by collaborating, do you mean packaging several indie features and presenting it to a distributor? As in, "What, don't like Vampire movies? No worries, how about Neo Noir? Got one here!"

That what you mean?
 
HD DVD didn't win because of Sony's massive control and then the PS3 dropped. You are indeed correct about the porn people and the video gamers run the show now. It's still ironic because the Xbox was first off the shelf. The PS3 was a very late arrival and MS took advantage of it even in Japan but it wasn't enough to save HD DVD. We'd probably all have the ability to burn HD-DVDs right now, and the equipment was easier to get from my understanding. Hollywood seems to want to lock us out as much as possible but sooner or later it all come down the pike. The problem now is everyone has a television but not a computer and internet w/ highspeed connection. When DSL becomes cheap as dial up then downloading will become even bigger and probably the norm. But everyone hates DRM so how do we keep our stuff from being stolen?

-Nate
 
brianluce said:
Is this a boutique theory? Not discounting it but that's the first time I've heard it was porn that settled the VHS and Blu ray wars.

Btw, I went to UCSD, how do you get an email address? I'm always blowing off the alumni association, is that the only way?

Filmman, when you say overseas markets are a good pathway, do you mean specifically creating content specific to those markets? And by collaborating, do you mean packaging several indie features and presenting it to a distributor? As in, "What, don't like Vampire movies? No worries, how about Neo Noir? Got one here!"

That what you mean?
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Here's a 2006 article, which mentions the idea..

http://www.macworld.com/article/50627/2006/05/pornhd.html


As for the email... the email and library card are the only benefits of alumni membership that I could see... but since I don't get down to the library, but rather do my research on line, the library privilages are that much of a benefit they use to be.
 
Brian:
Filmman, when you say overseas markets are a good pathway, do you mean specifically creating content specific to those markets? And by collaborating, do you mean packaging several indie features and presenting it to a distributor?
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No, I don't mean that. I've been attending foreign markets like Cannes, AFM and the old MIFED for over twenty years. I know a lot of buyers, but the participation fees are too high for me to take only one or two films a year. The costs of a market are about $30,000 for the one week or two that they each run. That's why I don't rent a room or booth nowadays; I just go there to check things out and make contacts or do pre-sales (not easy to do).

So I figure if I had five or even ten films to go to the market with, I can
divide the costs between a bunch of producers and take all the films at once and represent them.

By the way, I don't sell movies as a package, a very common practice among foreign market film distributors. I sell each film separately. The demand for the various genre films is vastly different. Germany pays the most and is one of the best customers for action movies for example. Then there are France, Italy, Spain and Scandinavia -- which are next in price. The UK and Australia and South Africa are also good markets, but more difficult to sell. The Far East markets pay little and the Middle East pays even less. Russia and Eastern European countries are harder to sell, but they are an emerging market. Japan is a big territory, they pay the most in the Far East. Korea is next. The other territories, like Belgium, the Netherlands, Israel, Portugal and Greece pay little.

It's too much information to put down off the cuff, but you get the picture. If I sell all these territories, a no-name action movie can make about $150,000 to $500,000. It will take three or four markets to sell all the territories.

If you have a name talent in your action movie, you won't be asking me to distribute for you; you'll be going after a bigger distributor with an established name in the foreign market. There are literally hundreds of them. Personally I won't give my name-talent movie to any of them. I'd rather shelf a movie than get ripped off. But that's just me. LOL
 
Nathyn said:
HD DVD didn't win because of Sony's massive control and then the PS3 dropped. You are indeed correct about the porn people and the video gamers run the show now. It's still ironic because the Xbox was first off the shelf. The PS3 was a very late arrival and MS took advantage of it even in Japan but it wasn't enough to save HD DVD. We'd probably all have the ability to burn HD-DVDs right now, and the equipment was easier to get from my understanding. Hollywood seems to want to lock us out as much as possible but sooner or later it all come down the pike. The problem now is everyone has a television but not a computer and internet w/ highspeed connection. When DSL becomes cheap as dial up then downloading will become even bigger and probably the norm. But everyone hates DRM so how do we keep our stuff from being stolen?

-Nate
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You can burn a HD DVD on a DVD disk... just the amount of shortened to whatever you can fit on to 4 GB...

There is no equivalent for Blu-ray...

Oh, did I mention that HD DVD didn't have the idiocy of 'regionlization'... but guess which format has it...

The way I view my PAL DVDs is via VLC, the open source player... and I disable the standard DVD player widgets in all my computers, so they won't 'auto regionalize' after 10 (or whatever) uses.

I recall reading something about Mac's not connecting via HDMI to a device that does not honor whatever DRM protocol that is within the spec for HDMI devices (don't recall the set of initials at the moment...).

This is a bit worrisome, if one wants to connect one's Mac to a HDMI compatible display, which perhaps does not have the protocol embedded in its smarts.

But perhaps it is only for playing iTunes content that this is a problem... but isn't that when you want it... go over to a friend's house and play movies, eat popcorn, whatever... but can't use their HDMI display because it's not DRM safe...
 
One thing about Blu-Ray is you can build a whole industry around it and I think that's what they want. Something where you have to upgrade everything. I was hoping HD-DVD would win out too but I knew it wouldn't. This would go the way the Betamax did and it always seems to go that way especially when corporations decide what's best.

-Nate
 
Blu-ray would be great if it could be used for mastering or archiving. I wonder what the stats are for how many Blu-rays sell in comparison to Standard DVDs?

I'm still wondering whether or not to buy a DVD duplication system or find a low-priced DVD replication service somewhere.
 
I'm encouraged by the improvement of quality in web video. I'm using my own encoding and hosting now. Let me know what you think of the two clips I have on my website now:

http://www.releasing.net

I encoded them both with DVKitchen. I really love this program. Let me know if you think the quality of the video is better than the free video hosting websites.
 
filmman said:
I'm encouraged by the improvement of quality in web video. I'm using my own encoding and hosting now. Let me know what you think of the two clips I have on my website now:

http://www.releasing.net

I encoded them both with DVKitchen. I really love this program. Let me know if you think the quality of the video is better than the free video hosting websites.
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They both look very good. I would still give YouTube HD and Vimeo a try just so you can compare. Afterall, it is hard to beat free if the quality in the two is close.

Jim
 
Thanks Jim.

I'm hoping to sell from my own website though and it looks like download will begin to generate some business for filmmakers. On Youtube, Vimeo and free web hosting we don't own our movie. They get all the advertising revenues too. Plus if they think the rights are in question, they can remove the movies we submit to them. I like to build my own domain and sales venue.
 
filmman said:
Thanks Jim.

I'm hoping to sell from my own website though and it looks like download will begin to generate some business for filmmakers. On Youtube, Vimeo and free web hosting we don't own our movie. They get all the advertising revenues too. Plus if they think the rights are in question, they can remove the movies we submit to them. I like to build my own domain and sales venue.
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1) What do you mean: we don't own our movie. The filmmaker retains the right to his/her film if they put it up on Vimeo, correct? I know there is something in the fine print that makes it seem like that is not the case, but from my understanding the filmmaker still owns the rights.

2) What about Amazon? You could list it there, yeah, they take a cut, but they are also Amazon. They can reach more people than the average filmmaker.

Just some thought. I do like the download idea though.
 
Yeah, I'm using Amazon. They don't advertise though. There are millions of items on their website; but still it's better than nothing.

On the free web hosting servers, it's true, they don't have exclusive rights, but it's still their servers and we don't get anything. We get exposure, that's all. Again, they don't favor us. It depends on the audience.

I don't understand how a short, insignificant movie gets millions of viewers on Youtube; it doesn't make sense. The exposure is great, however.

We need to find a way to sell more movies from our own websites. We have to like have our own association of indie filmmakers. I'm trying to build such an organization from my website: http://www.releasing.net/
 
I'm thinking of breaking up my movie Butterflies in the Wind into segments and playing it from my own website as high quality but small frame (about 500 pixels wide) digital streaming.

Perhaps this way I can monitise the movie to a greater extent than just selling DVDs.

Any thoughts will be appreciated :-)
 
Vic I think I saw you at Starbucks today over on Pass Ave.

The only reason I think it was you is because your wife was standing behind me in line and I recognized her from your movie. Her voice is what got me to turn around and look. And sure enough it was her. While I was waiting for my coffee she was with two other people and I suspect one of them was you.

I would have said I but I was in a hurry and it might have been weird.
 
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