Sundance Film Festival

On Park City‘s Main Street a wiry young man playing accordion and wearing a sandwich board promoting the tongue-in-cheek micro-festival Tromadance was told by local cop to stop making music on the sidewalk or face a $150 fine. Virtually all Festival film posters and flyers had been stripped off walls, windows, poles this week. There remained few visual clues that a major film festival was underway in this small mountain resort. Rowdy, chaotic, young, independent - these don‘t mix well with orderly and upscale. Face-lifted to better end, however, was the Film Center (in years past called the Digital Center) in the basement of the Mall on Main Street. Classic Mies van der Rohe Barcelona lounge chairs and chic white backlit walls framed tastefully arranged booths including Adobe, Heuris, Intel, HP, Blackmagic, Sony, Canon, and Panavision. Usually this space is a gray, dimly lit, and trade-show looking, so kudos to Director of Sundance Digital Initiatives Ian Calderon for spiffing up the premises.

Notably the only piece of film equipment at the Film Center was a Panavision Panaflex with a 17.5-75mm Primo Zoom, on hand for direct comparison to a Panavision Genesis, also sporting a 17.5-75mm Primo Zoom. Genesis is Panavision‘s entry in the Digital Cinema camera sweepstakes and uniquely uses a single 35mm-sized custom Sony CCD chip with RGB microfilters for color image capture. The body of Genesis is about the same size as the Panaflex, and the portable Sony SRW-1 HDCAM-SR deck mounted atop the Genesis resembles the Panaflex‘s 35mm magazine. (Both cameras can rear-mount their “magazines” for Steadicam use.) Truth is, Genesis is a beefed up F900 with a giant CCD. Even the menus are the same. 1920 x 1080 output however is 4:4:4 RGB. At present there are 30 Genesis cameras worldwide, with up to 12 used in the recent Australian production of “Superman,” due out this summer.

When I inquired as to the availability of the Genesis to low-budget independent production, I was told that this was top-shelf equipment “out of reach” to indies. While this opens the door to criticism - why showcase, at an indie film festival, technology not appropriate to indie needs or means? - it also speaks well of Sundance‘s efforts to keep indies abreast of the latest in Digital Cinema production, clearly a gathering wave. At an immense trade fair like NAB, for instance, “star” gear gets mobbed. At the Sundance Film Center, by contrast, I could take my time quietly going over the Genesis and asking endless questions. Over at Sony‘s booth, Canon‘s Joe Patton casually let me borrow a Canon 5mm prime ($26K) and 35mm prime ($18K) to experiment with lighter configurations of Sony‘s new XDCAM HD. Calderon told me that on Sundance‘s first Saturday, over 2,080 people passed through the Film Center equipment exhibition. But my experience of the Film Center was different, as a rare island of calm amidst the chaos out on Main Street - it became one of my favorite places to meet people — and I think Calderon should be encouraged to perpetuate his elegant technology showcase, including the several days of workshops and seminars by Adobe, HP, Avid, and Kodak. While I didn‘t attend any of them, I heard good things about them from those who did.

Speaking of Digital Cinema cameras, I ran into Arri‘s Franz Wieser on Main Street. Turns out that I was misinformed that there are only two Arri D-20s in existence. Franz said that at present there are six cameras worldwide, with two in the U.S. He added that by year‘s end the U.S. will have six D-20s in total, available from New York‘s Camera Service Center. Franz said that CSC Marketing and Sales VP Simon Broad told him that CSC has created a new Digital Department and is bringing Andreas Weber from Germany to run it. CSC, he says, plans to host D-20 seminars and training series later this year… and all this from a company with no previous electronic cameras in inventory! Arri and CSC, incidentally, seem encouraging of indie use of the D-20 for feature film projects, unlike rival Panavision.

In the reports-of-film‘s-death-have-been-greatly-exaggerated department: this year‘s Sundance furthers the impression that Super-16 is undergoing a significant revival. I don‘t have hard figures, but saw quite a few “half D.I.” HDCAM screenings of films shot in Super-16. A big success story is apocalyptic thriller “Right at Your Door,” shot in Super-16 and screened as 35mm - based on evident CGI effects, I believe it went the full D.I. process - which has just been acquired for $2M by Lionsgate. Last month at Kodak‘s Christmas party in Manhattan I learned that 2005 was a banner year for sales of both Kodak‘s 35mm and 16mm negative products. The other night at a raucous condo party (which later migrated to a large hot tub), Fujifilm Account Executive Jonathan Bell described the same for Fuji, calling the past year “incredible.” Perhaps that‘s why Postworks New York recently bought The Lab at Moving Images lock, stock, and barrel. The lab is now operating at the same location under a new name, The Lab at Postworks, and Postworks Director of Post Production Services Anthony Caputo, who spent most of the week hanging out at the New York Lounge on Main Street, told me Postworks intends to move the entire lab to a building on Varick Street by year‘s end. They‘re also adding a print developing machine, something The Lab at Moving Images never had.

But whether film- or video-originated, at this Sundance I‘ve seen an unfortunate amount of questionable results from digital projection, especially crushed blacks and false color tones in blacks. I‘m one of those who befriend projectionists because I believe they have a lot to contribute, so I spoke to Damian Lopez-Gaston, a projectionist at the big screening room at the Yarrow Hotel, to verify which films were projected as HDCAM and which as film. Why is it increasingly hard to tell the difference? Since 1997, Lopez-Gaston has used at Sundance a first-rate German Ernemann 15 film projector which projects both 16mm and 35mm, and let me tell you that registration is rock-solid, with zero shutter-timing errors or lost contrast from lens scatter. In other words, near perfect film projection that matches digital projection in clarity and image steadiness. Crushed blacks and ugly signal noise in dark tones seemed to plague “Puccini for Beginners” for one, an InDiGent romantic comedy shot in 50 Mbps MPEG using Sony‘s XDCAM. After the screening I conferred with Lopez-Gaston. It was projected HDCAM. We both agreed that with the growing use of electronic reproduction, from capture to D.I. to projection, that tone-scale errors and other image reproduction mishaps are on the rise. Which is why “color management” and “look-up tables” will enter the filmmaker‘s popular vocabulary in the coming years, especially at Sundance, where cost-cutting formats and post strategies are sure to be pioneered first.