Miramax is releasing some films on SightSound.com. iFilm.com is holding it’s first “Web-Wide” awards, picking the best online films from sites across the Internet. Microsoft, Apple, and Real are all touting their flavor of streaming video technology as the greatest thing since fork-split muffins. Universities are experimenting with streaming high-definition video over the Internet. And independent filmmakers are hoping the Internet will give them the freedom to distribute their work around the world.

Who’s kidding who?

The movies on SightSound.com can be up to 700MB, are less than VHS quality, contain enough compression artifacts to make them unwatchable, and can only ever be played from one computer. Oh, and they’re charging as much as a rental from the local video store. And to top it all off, these are the crappier- than-normal Miramax movies.

iFilm’s contest is chock full of cutting edge shorts and cartoons, most of them very good. Unfortunately, those of us without a T3 line into our homes are forced to watch them in postage stamp-sized windows. The image updates every two or three seconds and the audio sounds like it was recorded with a coffee can on a string. Then the line gets congested and we have to wait four minutes for the buffer to fill up again, and most of these films are only three minutes long.

Frustrated with my modem, I dropped by Claremont High School and borrowed a connection (thank you Deborah). I downloaded “405″ (a spiffy short that redefines the quality you can get out of PC based video editing) because it was impossible to watch at home. 3 minutes and 3 seconds, over 9 megs, and I was watching it in less than 5 minutes. I was pleased to be able to watch it at full frame rate, and at 240×176 it was way larger then the thumbnail image I got at home, but the size of the video is still unsatisfactory and the time of the download is still longer than the movie itself.

A standard DV stream is 25 million bits per second. My 56k modem usually pulls off 4 thousand bits per second, usually. I’ve seen DSL pull down 100 thousand bits per second, for a moment. None of the current compression techniques used in Media Player, Quicktime, or RealPlayer come close to the detail, clarity, and color of even a lousy VHS signal, much less DV25, or even the 7Mbps of a standard definition MPEG2 DTV broadcast. Is this what we have to deal with?

We acquire on film or DV for maximum image quality, even if Brian is just now discovering the wonders of VHS-C. We edit on all digital, non-linear editors, maybe even spending thousands for Telecine conversion too and from film. We incorporate microphones of all sorts, bribe bands for their music, and meticulously edit in 16bit, 44khz stereo for maximum quality. And now we’re supposed to compress our masterwork to the point where detail is lost and quality is compromised? (OK, maybe we don’t all take that kind of time and effort into our work, and maybe we don’t all have the funds to afford that kind of equipment, but even a project shot with an 8mm Elmo and edited with a razorblade deserves better treatment then what those compression programs will do to it)

The last I heard, Internet2 was still in the experimental stage. Telcoms are stringing up fiber optics as fast as they can be spun in an effort to widen the pipes that feed this marvelous technology into our homes. Stanford, the University of Washington, and Sony have been working on getting a small section of Internet2’s backbone (codenamed “Abilene”) to carry digital video signals identical to the DTV signals now being broadcast across the US (even though only the 12 people with DTV sets can see them). They first tested a 7Mbps stream, and it worked. It redlined that section of Abilene, but it worked. Now they’re trying to get a full 40Mbps HighDef signal fed through the same pipe, and next they’ll try for the 270Mbps Higher Definition. Assuming the fiber doesn’t melt and they pull it off, they will have proven you can send a very good video signal over the next generation Internet. And when Sparky gets done watching his 1920×1080 feed maybe I’ll be able to get my email, because that kind of bandwidth will not be available to everyone at once. When this kind of stream gets switched on no one else will be able to use that pipe. Of course, Internet2 needs to get out of the lab and into commercial usage first.

So where does that leave us Indie filmmakers? Are we doomed to suffer with tiny versions of our work that might be able to get a few pixels larger when the Internet2 is opened up? Are we still going to have to genuflect to the mighty studio bosses in order to get our work distributed?

There are a few bright spots. “George Lucas in Love” got its big break on the net, and now it’s in film festivals and being sold on DVD along with other notable shorts. “The Periwig-Maker” has garnered numerous awards, is up for an Oscar™, and even got Kenneth Branagh to narrate it (never mind my bandwidth was so narrow it looked like a film strip - all it needed was the [beep] between new frames and I’d be right back in Mrs. Ostrom’s classroom learning about dental hygiene - I got completely lost since the story relies heavily on visuals I never saw). There is a use for Internet video, and a hope that it can be used effectively to distribute our productions.

I think the real success story of Internet media is Flash. Macromedia’s clever technology has sparked a whole cottage industry of independent cartoonists. What takes a streaming video hours to download takes one of these Flashtoons only minutes. While streaming video tends to be stuttering and tiny, Flash is full screen and smooth. Flash also allows interactivity so complete you can actually design games with it. And some of the cartoons are actually good. For those of us with low bandwidth connections Flash is the only way to get satisfying entertainment off the Net.

Oh, but wait, I’m a filmmaker, not an animator. I can’t draw to save my life. I have a video camera and a non-linear editor. Flash isn’t for me, and it probably isn’t your bag either (though if you can draw and you want to get into animation I strongly recommend you work with this program). I want to put my videos on the Net, get them seen all over the world, get big bucks, and make more films. Fact is, the Internet is just another tool in our ever-growing arsenal of resources. It can help us get the word out, got our stuff seen (sort of), and maybe get the attention of someone who would be interested in backing us. But it’s just a tool. We do the work. We create the magic. We have to make it happen. I seriously doubt we’ll see the Internet overcome broadcast, cable, or satellite TV as the predominant way to get our entertainment. It will augment the established technologies, but never replace them.

We sit on the edge of a brave new world where people will be cloned, cities will be built in space, computers will be implanted in our skulls, and cereal will never get soggy in milk. Our entertainment will be beamed at us over a web of landlines, from terrestrial antennas, and bounced off geosynchronous satellites. Images will continue to be streamed at us in a preprogrammed fashion, and we will continue to change channels. Interactive programming will be tied into Internet-like technologies and we will be allowed to determine the outcome of our favorite shows, further eliminating surprise and creativity from our lives. But somewhere in this confusing wad of wireless, high definition convergence there will exist some corner where independence, individuality, and freedom of expression will thrive. It is here you will find us, and hopefully we won’t be producing crap.