Sundance Film Festival

On Saturday I paid a visit to the production wing of the Sundance Institute Online, housed on the south end of Park Ave. in a century-old former miner’s hospital.

The festival’s daily newspaper has a home on the third floor of the same building, and the podcast department is in the basement. When I visited the second floor, a team of frazzled editors were putting the last touches on the interviews they’d shot the night before for the Live@Sundance video series.

The previous night, a team of Sundance videographers had shot three sequences between 10pm and midnight — it was the big U2 3D premiere. Also, several shooters had been out until almost midnight hot-tubbing with the Canadian heavy-metal band Anvil, the 55-year-old-plus subjects of a festival feature by the same name that had premiered that night. As the editors hacked away at last night’s footage on their HP laptops and desktops in Adobe Premiere, I spoke with Joseph Beyer, producer for the Sundance Institute Online — and the Institute’s only year-round video production guy.

“It’s all about promoting the films,” he says of the Institute’s video operation, which produces two Live@Sundance pieces a day. In these programs, the Sundance Institute Online’s videographers catch up with the filmmakers in Park City to create a profile. All told, the team will create 70 interstitial programs, which run about 3.5 minutes each, according to Beyer. “We’re not chasing celebs,” he says. “It’s filmmaker-centric. We don’t generally interview writers or actors.” His videographers, the vast majority of whom are freelance, mainly use Canon XL H1, XH A1, and XL2 camcorders. They shoot DV because HDV would be too difficult to render within the clips’ 10-hour turnaround from shoot to publication.

His team’s big content production push had started in December, just after the festival selections were known. They spent several days in New York and Los Angeles shooting interviews with 29 of the 32 filmmakers whose projects had been selected for competition. These director interviews have become the Meet the Artists series, which has been running on the Sundance website for five years now.

In online video terms, that’s nearly a lifetime. During that period, the focus of the production has shifted from attracting visitors to the Sundance site to pushing content out to anywhere viewers will watch it.

That includes other streaming sources, but at least as far as monetization goes, DTO (download to own) is the name of the game. Last year, with the for-profit Sundance Channel as a presentation partner, the Sundance Institute began offering its shorts for purchase on Apple’s iTunes online store. That’s continued this year, and two new prominent online distribution channels have come through for this year’s shorts, after 12 months of intense planning: Netflix and Xbox 360.

I was surprised to learn that Xbox Live is the largest online retailer for digital content after iTunes — but not at all shocked to hear that Xbox’s demographic skews very young and therefore very attractive. Beyer says that the Netflix distribution should be particularly attractive for film lovers (many of whom, of course, are already Netflix members and get a certain number of download hours per month with their regular membership), because the Institute and its encoding partners have developed an “awesome” proprietary codec for fullscreen display.

Beyer couldn’t provide figures on the Institute’s monetization efforts via downloads, but described last year’s iTunes sales volume as sizable. “Filmmakers are making real money, fast,” he says. “A short film invitation is a self-distribution opportunity. The filmmaker gets the mathematical majority for the net for each platform.

This year, 50 of the festival’s 80 short selections have been encoded or are just about to be encoded for download via the various platforms. The remainder, says Beyer, have pre-existing distribution deals.

The Sundance Institute Online’s encoding partner is Media Stile, based in the Lake Tahoe area of Nevada. (The company Vital Stream has done back-end delivery for the website for the past seven years.) “We enjoy tweaking Flash and seeing all the new iterations in (Sorenson) Squeeze and On2,” says Beyer. “We’re really satisfied.” They also use Sorenson Spark for batch-processing of clips.

For its own website, the Sundance Institute Online is most concerned with making Live@Sundance streams accessible to the vast majority of website visitors. “We keep it pretty populist,” Beyer says. The data rate is a middle-class 450kbps. (The site used to offer multi-tiered versions of the clips, but they’ve pulled the higher- and lower-quality versions due to lack of interest.)

For publication on the New York Times website, the Sundance Institute Online team uses QuickTime Pro to convert the AVI output of Premiere to 720×480 H.264 MOV files that nytimes.com requires.

How does that encoding affect the way that Sundance Institute Online videographers shoot? It doesn’t, says Beyer. “We shoot and edit things with no regard to the encoding. We’re designing pieces as best as they can be designed. Encoding can be tweaked as needed.”