No Call For It – likely production processes

DVDs

  1. Locating the copyright holder(s). This is likely to be a complicated business. Films are such expensive things that its producers (the film’s copyright holders) often go out of business after a flop, when their libraries may be bought up by another set of producers, who in their turn… National film libraries (eg the BFI in the UK or BiFi in France) may well have copyright and distribution information for the films they possess – it’s just a question of whether they have the films you want.
  2. Obtaining a licence. Once the copyright holder(s) is/are tracked down, negotiations will proceed for a licence to distribute the film in DVD form. In some cases the prices may be very low, judging by the relative cheapness of some of the low-end DVDs available. However, this may be because the DVD distributors have bought a job-lot of films from a copyright owner, where the price paid was very high, but the price per film was rather low. One conventional way of defraying the costs is to use the royalty system – where the copyright holder is paid a small percentage for every DVD sold – though of course in this case, since a given number of DVDs are going to be ‘sold’, this cost can be calculated at the start of negotiations: if there are 800 subscribers to a particular film, each paying £15, and the royalties paid to the copyright holders are 2%, then the copyright holders will receive 30p per copy, amounting to a very modest £240 in total. It’s difficult to believe that any copyright holder would put up with that. An access fee is also likely to be part of the bargain. Recent investigations led me to a film copyright ‘tracker’ who charged a minimum of £750 just to give me the identity of the copyright holders: as his standard commission was 10% of the final amount agreed with the holders, one might presumably expect to pay upwards of £7,500 for the licence. (I believe this is technically known as ‘pricing yourself out of the market’.)
  3. Locating a print. The copyright holder(s) may hold copies of the film, but it is by no means certain. Prints are usually held by film libraries (both those attached to film institutes and to studios) and private individuals. The print may be available in a number of different forms: the original negative; the interpositive (IP), which is struck from the original negative; the internegative (IN), which is struck from the IP; the release print, which is struck from the IN. As this is an analogue process, there is a certain amount of degradation in quality between each stage; in addition, release prints can become very worn through overuse. (Most of us will have noticed how much DVDs can vary in quality, due to the source of the print, say a cheap DVD that used a low-quality print versus a prestige one advertised as going back to the original negative: it may even be that there are two such versions of the same film available…) There will probably be a cost levied by the libraries – some kind of administrative fee. Modern films are usually delivered on a master digibeta tape.
  4. Digitising the print/negative. This is a version of the telecine process whereby films (generally 35mm) are converted to digital video. There are a number of ways that telecine can work, meaning that the quality of the output may vary greatly. Telecine machines are large and expensive and this job will need to be done externally. (Bringing the film to the telecine might be problematic.) An increasingly popular alternative to telecine is datacine (aka film scanning), where the film’s individual frames are scanned one at a time.
  5. Film ‘restoration’. Given how obscure most of the selected films are likely to be, it may well be necessary to work on the film at the digital stage, fixing colour, sound and other problems. Some films are even going to need to be reassembled into a more or less full cut from a number of different sources. There are specialist restorers who could be hired to do this: obviously this will be costly, and it may be worth having some kind of choice in the ‘pledge’ menu about how much work pledgers are willing to see done on the film, given the inevitable cost. (This also applies to extras)
  6. Authoring a DVD master. Finally, something that can be done on a ‘home’ basis – eg on a Mac with plenty of memory (of both kinds) using Apple’s DVD Studio Pro. It is at this stage that menus, chapters, audio and subtitle decisions should be made. The master at the end of it can be saved onto DLT (digital linear tape), ready for replication. (This requires a DLT tape drive.) Some replication houses (see below) are willing to take the master on DVD-R as well as DLT.
  7. Replicating the DVD. This is different from the more common DVD duplication (where copies are made using a commercial DVD format, usually DVD-R): first the DLT is used to create a glass master, from which the DVDs are pressed. Generally the product is DVD-5 (single layer) or DVD-9 (dual layer), which hold 4.7GB (equivalent to 133 mins) and 9.4GB (240 mins) respectively. This can be done for less than £1 each if sufficient numbers are involved (1000+). An exhaustive description of one person’s experience of authoring and replication can be found in Eliot Hochberg’s ‘New Hollywood Workshop’.

Books

  1. Tracking down the rights holder. In comparison with films and music, this is relatively straightforward. If the author has been dead for 70 years, then the text is in public domain. However, if another publisher has brought out a specially edited version of the text (eg with particular editorial choices) then that version belongs to that publisher, and they will need to be approached for permission to use it. Generally, if the author is in copyright and the work is published, then the publisher will make it clear in their publication whether they have exclusive rights from the author; otherwise the author, or his/her agent, should be approached directly.
  2. Acquiring the text. Although this process could be used to produce books from scratch – commissioned by a collective demand – the more likely use for it would be to bring existing books back into print. (Halfway between this, of course, would be the commissioning of a translation of an existing foreign language text.) This book can be reprinted as a facsimile or the text could be digitised, via scanning/OCR or typing. In this second case the book would also need to be typeset. (The nominator may be the sort of person who has already created the book in digital form.)
  3. Making the book. If the book is going to be a facsimile, then the book can simply be handed to the printers for them to photograph/scan and turn into a new book. Alternatively, the book can be scanned/photographed professionally and the resulting digital images turned into a book without very much trouble (the images could be converted to pdf and put together into a complete book, or inserted into a file in a typesetting program like Quark or InDesign). A third option with a facsimile edition would be to do the scanning/photographing in-house and clean the pages up (getting rid of marks, rotating those at an angle) in a graphics program later on. Otherwise, the text needs to be checked for errors, copy-edited, designed and typeset. Generally the file sent to the printers will be a pdf. There will need to be a whole new copyright page, or at any rate some amendments to the existing one, plus some kind of cover. (See below for questions of appearance, etc.)
  4. Printing the book. While a DVD or CD has only a limited number of formats to choose – and in these circumstances would be limited further in order to allow the maximum number of people in different countries to use them – the choice for books is very open: format, binding, case (hardback or paperback), quality of paper… Many of these choices might well be specified, or at any rate alluded to, when people start pledging: the desire might be as much for a high-class copy of a book as for a copy per se.