Matthew Greene

Unfortunately the major variables of how good your image looks up on the screen isn't in your control. How they set up the projectors and how they have the various decks hooked up is going to make the most difference. The best you can do is to master your video to SMPTE standards (100IRE for video, 7.5IRE for pedestal, NTSC color space) and do the color correction on a properly calibrated video display. The proper luminosity on a projected image (theatre specs) is 16Fl (@100IRE) whereas in NTSC standards it's 35Fl (@100IRE), it would serve to know what standard the projection is going to be adjusted to but it might not be consistent from festival to festival. I'd find out what's more common and color correct on a monitor at that standard. Obviously, if the festival is taking HD entries I'd do my best to provide them with an HD dub, if they only take SD keep in mind that it's true that an HDCAM master downsampled to SD will appear softer in SD than a native SD transfer because SD needs more edge enhancement than HD (HD's edge enhancement is very fine and disappears when down sampled) so attention needs to be placed on downconversion (specifically color space which is different for HD & SD and edge enhancement). Its always best to Up or Downsample using external hardware (high end eg. Terranex, Alchemist) than the HDCAM deck's built in scaler. When it comes to mastering pick the best format you can master on and make dubs in the best format the festival will take. I shy away from DVD although quality is (variably) good it's a more unreliable screening format, you never know if their player is going to be 100% compatible with your disc, although there are less issues now than in the past. It's also a highly compressed format. Quality-wise if your master was analog, just convert to the best digital format they can play (or that you can afford), you're better off with Digibeta. If your master was on DV or DVCAM then you're better off with DV or DVCAM dubs. When it comes to digital formats, you're always better off keeping it native to your master format, whatever that may be since you don't go through additional conversions, compression or sampling. HDV and HD-DVD/Blue Ray DVD are really good formats for theatrical projection, I'm sure most of the festival circuit will adopt them within the next year or so.