Filmmaker Jamie Stuart has developed shorts for several years through his production business,The Mutiny Company. Working almost entirely on his own, Stewart has carved out his own niche in the film community, documenting the festival environment with experimental shorts for Movie City News, Filmmaker magazine, Focus Features and others.

In this series of columns, Jamie will examine the way that new technologies have aided his personal adventures in filmmaking. Read his last entry here.

Have people lost interest in picture quality?

Quality in any aspect of life is rare and fleeting. This is especially true of web video. Whether it's amateurs uploading home moments, wanna-bes imitating their favorite movies, or just lousy embedded players, the moving images we see on-line tend to be crappy. And for the time being, people apparently tolerate this. I recently read a poll that suggested online audiences didn't care about picture quality at all (until they see it, of course).

When I first started working in digital and, even more so, distributing on the internet, one of my highest priorities was to show that even though I was working with limited resources, I could deliver high-quality results. It's something that's so important to me that when YouTube and MySpace emerged a year and a half after I started, I refused to distribute via their services -- the picture quality was beyond negligent. I've forfeited countless views due to my insistence on releasing solely with Quicktime -- though I've subsequently uploaded many clips to YouTube as a sort of syndication. Filmmaker Magazine also routinely uploads my work to their MySpace page.

This all might sound arrogant. It probably is. My position is very simple: I put a lot of work into shooting, editing and color-correcting my work, and I want people to see it in the highest possible quality. Is that too much to ask for?

It might be. I've been lucky, in a sense. Most of my work has involved an element of press exposure, which makes it palatable to movie blogs, which often link to it. And although this guarantees a fair amount of industry attention, what the industry is really concerned with is hits -- the barometer by which ad sales are judged against (and ad sales equals profits). To achieve a high hit-rate filmmakers invariably need to spray their product out to as many video sharing sites as possible. Only on their own private site might they offer a higher quality Quicktime, which is, of course, beside the video's links at YouTube, MySpace, Revver and blip.tv among others.

My preference for quality has led to several evolutionary choices. For example, although Apple launched Quicktime 7 in 2005 with its H.264 codec, I've stuck with the older MPEG-4, which I find renders color and gradation more consistently. I also changed my standard image size from an initial 320x240 to 400x300 after viewing the QT videos at Mark Romanek's site prior to its switch to Flash (I'll often download QT files to check their attributes -- size, codec, sound, etc.). Upon upgrading from 4:3 mini-DV to 16:9 720p, I settled at an appropriate size of 500x281.

Prior to YouTube, online video was nothing more than an experiment. 2006 was about creating personalities via video podcasting (Frank Ze, Ask A Ninja, Lisa Nova). 2007 was about finding viable models for web series. 2008 is when the corporations get a foothold and start applying their agendas -- a development many of the upstarts are unhappy about, but one that will undoubtedly bring with it higher image quality.

As a filmmaker, I've never intended to make the internet my home forever. I've always viewed it as a means to gain exposure that would allow me to move into more traditional venues. I don't know how much longer this boom will last -- I generally give cultural trends 4-5 years before they either putter out or are irrevocably co-opted. It does strike me, however, that the initial wave of online indie filmmaking, depending who survives to tell the story, is as significant as any development in the history of the moving picture. From now on, as celluloid transitions to digital, there will no longer be a medium, but a series of formats: DV, 720p, 1080, 4K, Quicktime, Flash, Blu-ray. And so on...