With HDCAM on the way out, what formats do festivals want from filmmakers?
HDCAM tapes – once the standard projection formats of festivals worldwide – makes way for newer (and sometimes less reliable) formats. Which one should you choose?
Photo Credit: @yakobusan Jakob Montrasio 孟亚柯 via Compfight cc
Over at Film Festival Secrets, I react to the Film Collaborative's analysis of the current state of exhibition formats at film festivals.
From a festival perspective, I must agree that HDCAM isn't a format we hope to see ever again at the Atlanta Film Festival. We only screened one film on HDCAM this year, and if we hadn't been able to borrow a deck for free, we would have played the film on DVD. It doesn't surprise me that smaller festivals flock to Blu-Ray with DVD as a backup: it looks great, and 90% of the time it plays like a champ.
It's that other 10% that makes larger festivals like ours nervous. Running a medium like Blu-Ray in front of a paying audience is a recipe for disaster – a disaster we experienced first hand when a distribution house (who should have known better) sent us a Blu-Ray of one of their films with no backup copy. The film began skipping in the middle and we refunded the entire house. A bad experience for the audience, and a bad experience for us.