The music industry currently treats downloadable content like movie companies treat licensed video games – quick cash grabs that are just a part of the overall marketing mix. But inherent in both of these approaches is extreme short sightedness and inability (or perhaps unwillingness) to challenge the status quo and try and do something, you know, different with this new medium. Doing that would be risky, but as CD sales start to drop, new media formats have room to step in.
There’s some back and forth between Activision and record labels about who pays for it. Right now, Activision/EA acts as a licensor, so they pay the record labels for the privilege of hosting the songs on their service. Most “free” tracks or reduced price tracks are tied in with some overall promotion, for an upcoming record or movie. But things will need to change if this format is to evolve – Activision/EA need to shift from paying out of their pockets to get stuff on, to profit sharing with labels iTunes style. Not, as Activision CEO Bobby Kotick seems to suggest, getting money from labels.
In order for this to happen, labels need to see Rock Band and Guitar Hero DLC not as promotions for physical CD sales, but as a separate entity entirely, with physical sales boost as an ancillary benefit. That is, assuming further market saturation, DLC sales have the potential to be formidable sources of profit in their own right. In a lot of ways, game content seems ideal for the labels – piracy is prohibitively difficult and there’s a lot of control as to how the content gets consumed. And now, the criteria for acquisition isn’t centered around the vagaries of demographics and how the music appeals to those various demographics and niches, but on the much more manageable idea of “if the song is fun to play, I will play it.”
There are a couple of ways to monetize this continuing forward. Activision’s been considering a subscription model, which if they worked something out with Microsoft to tie into Gold Membership, may work in helping clear that initial hurdle of a subscription fee. What a subscription model allows is infinite free reign to the tracks available in the music library – think Ruckus but nearly unpirateable. Content maybe streamed as you play. Activision’s current idea is a limited number of songs a month, but that’s retarded – it needs to be unlimited for people to justify subscribing to the service.
An iTunes-system doesn’t make much sense because unlike songs, game content needs to be demoed somehow. iTunes’ 30 second demo is enough, but people treat game content differently – they need to know if it’s fun. Microsoft might even dredge up its Zune “Three days or three plays” idea, but at the very least the subscription model allows people to try songs without penalty. An extreme idea might be to allow people free access to play the songs, but a lo-fi non-master version of the track – basically perfect for demoing gameplay. Interestingly, this would answer a lot of questions as to exactly how much the quality of the song contributes to how much fun the song is to play.
Opening up the DLC would require a bunch of content, and for record labels to give up master tracks, and for people to author the note charts. This last part is key – bad charting is disastrous. It nearly ruined Guitar Hero 3.
Anyway, here are some predictions, assuming everyone doesn’t get sick of music video games, and assuming record labels see some potential in DLC as a separate music delivery format as to what might be coming down the line:
Filmmakers right now owe it to themselves to intimately understand the technology that powers their art form. That means cameras and computers. We should know what a B-Frame is, or the difference between megabits and megabytes, or why HDV takes up more processing power to playback, or what’s the difference between 3:2:3:2 and 3:2:2:3 pulldown. We owe it to ourselves to understand what h.264 is, and what the difference is between VP6-S and VP6-E, and what values to enter for a data rate, and why we should be encoding in multiples of 16 for width and height.
The reason for this is simple – movies and music videos are splitting up from movie theaters and television. The tools to create movies and becoming more diverse and more complex. Never before have you had so many options as a filmmaker, and never before have you had so many opportunities to fuck yourself. Whereas once you would be deciding between maybe three or four 16mm camera options, and a limited number of film stocks, now you have a myriad of decisions. Should we set it to 24p or 24pA? What about choosing a camera that does 4:2:2 versus 4:2:1? Does it even matter?
Simply put, as the tools become more complex, our understanding of these tools should grow proportionally.
The problem is right now, there’s a void between creativity and technicality. The right-brain/left-brain creative/technical modes of thinking are divorced, when more than ever, they need to work hand in hand. It’s almost as if people are afraid if learning the technical details, as if it somehow fundamentally conflicts with their idea of the ethereal art of filmmaking, and that such details shouldn’t matter because this is creativity and vision we’re dealing with, not bits and codecs and mundane stuff like that. But my concern is simply practical – if you don’t nail down a workflow that you understand from the beginning to the end, you can quite simply fuck yourself later, and no amount of creative thinking can outwit problems that required fundamental technical know-how. There are now more things than ever to worry about, and the problem is, mistakes in these new realms are not immediately apparent the way, say, screwing up an f-stop would be.
Here’s an example – a project I was prepping for a film out was shot at 29.97 with 3:2 pulldown. It was dropped into a Final Cut Pro timeline at 23.97 without removing pulldown. Then it was exported to a color corrector in this form, who returned it using the lib-quicktime codec at 24p (although Quicktime player itself reported it as 23.97). Then this new footage was dropped in on top and everything was going out of sync on export. Every step of the way, there was something fundamentally wrong, but on the surface, it didn’t look wrong. That’s the hidden danger of ignorance – your mistakes will hide from you, and when they do rear their heads, it’ll be that much harder to figure out what went wrong.
The DP and AC should have double-checked their workflow. The editor should have checked the format of the footage. Everything ground to a halt simply because key people in creative positions misunderstood and neglected to attend to technical fundamentals.
But the biggest problem with ignoring technicality is we let ourselves get fucked by the companies making the products.
Equipment in the film industry seems driven by a herd mentality. A lot of people own G-Drives, but when you ask them why they paid twice as much as the usual for an external hard drive, they’re hard pressed for an answer. More often than not it’s because someone recommended it to them, or that’s what they used at work.
Another example is the Panasonic HVX-200. Tons of people use it, and while there are good reasons to use it, anybody who takes a moment to examine the P2 card format would know that they’re getting fucked. Panasonic essentially sells SD cards with a RAID controller using the outdated PCMCIA Card format to interface with it at a ridiculous premium that people pay just because it’s P2 and all the pros are using it. In fact, the PCMCIA format was outdated months before they announced the P2 card format – the guys in charge of that standard even said “Hey everybody use ExpressCards from now on – it’s faster and basically better in every way.” Wonder why you have to find an old Powerbook to use on set to capture the P2 footage? It’s because all the newer laptops got rid of that outdated port, and you’re forced to use outdated technology.
(Incidentally, the Sony EX1, which tends to get eschewed because it does 4:2:0 does use the up to date ExpressCard format.)
And I’ve heard people say the Panasonic shoots 4:2:2 and that’s better, but they can’t tell me why it’s better or why they need 4:2:2 for a web short. They know that everyone uses the Panasonic. All the pros do. So they should too.
Don’t get me wrong – you can go too far with technical knowledge. The only thing worse than a creative person who knows absolute jack about the technical aspects of their craft is a non-creative person obsessing over every bit of technical detail. The answer, as always, is balance. Otherwise, on the other side of the coin, you got entire forums dedicated to people arguing over how 4:2:2 is absolutely necessary, and how can you even think of shooting at 4:2:0, and how 35mm adaptors that cut your depth of field to like the depth of pores on an actors nose are incredible and everyone needs to get them, or how film will never die, or any number of intellectually masturbatory debates one can curl up next to on a lonely night. It’s easy to fall in love with the gadgetry behind filmmaking and lose sight of the ultimate purpose of all that gadgetry to begin with.
Know the reasons for all your actions – creatively and technically. Understand how every choice you make affects your work down the line. Never be satisfied with “everyone else does it” as a reason.
