Stock shops prepare for infobahn

Like the rest of us waiting for the infobahn to materialize, the film and music stock industries are trapped in a kind of techno-limbo. Transferring full-motion shots and quality sound from shop to end user via pc may be the future, but there’s light years of difference between then and now. To quote an ’80s Howard Jones stock track, you can look at the menu but you just can’t eat.

‘Once it’s in digital, you can do all sorts of things with it – transfer it over phone lines, etc. In its most perfect form, you could dial in from anywhere in the world and get the whole motion shot,’ says Andy Roeder, president of Toronto-based The Image Bank Canada.

‘But you need a compatible sender and receiver compression software, and we’re just not there yet. The technology is out there, but not in a common, usable form that is efficient,’ he says.

In its various forms, tape remains the mainstay of the stock industry. But preparing for the future includes testing the limits of cd for the music biz, and incorporating technology from laser disc to cd-rom on the film side.

According to Rhonda Olson, vice-president development at Toronto-based Fabulous Footage, the best plan of attack is keeping one eye on the future and the other on what the market needs now.

‘A lot of the technology is in its transition phase – there’s things we could do now, but there’s no use converting all our stock to digital when the quality’s only going to get better.

‘The beauty of the way it’s moving is that we can research more easily and get it to our clients faster, but they don’t need it in digital format right now. They don’t store most things digitally – they’re still using film and video,’ she says.

Fabulous Footage is creating a cd-rom catalogue highlighting a selection of the stock house’s most popular shot categories, including international landmarks and animals. The shots are in full-motion, but are limited in number by the medium, which can only hold about 70 minutes of video or about 150 shots, says Olson.

Using cd-rom to market a catalogue of shots is the best use of the medium right now, says Jeannette Kopak, cbc head of program information, English tv.

‘The quality’s not there yet for people to digitize their pictures, but cd-rom can be used to sell stock footage, like a sound effects library. The catalogue might not be the same quality of the real picture, but at least you can have a look,’ says Kopak.

As of Oct. 3, cbc consolidated all stock footage under one department headed by Geoffrey Hopkinson, manager, visual resource center.

Network news, current affairs, Newsworld, and in-house production stock will now be accessed under one database through one department, says Hopkinson.

The five-year plan includes cataloging thousands of cans of old film (current shows are archived daily), and creating an on-line catalogue service, says Kopak.

The Image Bank Canada, a franchise of The Image Bank/ Film, based in Texas, is an independently operated subsidiary of Eastman Kodak. The companies are set to co-release a worldwide on-line search-and-retrieval system called the Kodak Picture Exchange (kpx) in early 1995.

David Prosser, product manager, digital imaging group for Kodak Canada, says Canadian photographers will be solicited for the system, which will showcase 24 stock photographers when it first goes on-line, but most will be American, and a few European.

Accessible with a modem and Kodak Picture Exchange Access Software (us$399), the kpx will let the end user print copies of shots to use in a pitch or place an order for the shot on-line. On-line time will cost $85 an hour, with a $9 charge for any design proofs drawn down.

For in-house searches, The Image Bank/Film has transferred part of its stock onto laser disc to eliminate the linear search process necessary on tape.

Marketed as the Image Index system, the shots on disc are a still-motion rather than a full-motion reference, but it’s a faster way to see the shot to decide if it’s worth putting on a tape for a client, says Roeder. The motivation behind moving to disc reflects the goals of the industry today, he says.

‘The greatest objective for those of us in the stock film industry is harnessing all this material in an accessible and usable form. What we’re moving towards is being able to see shots instantly and manipulate them more easily,’ Roeder says.

Multimedia may be affecting how stock shops do business, but it’s also coming in the front door as a client with increasing frequency, says Mary DiTursi, general manager of Toronto-based Jack Chisholm Footage Library, a division of Jack Chisholm Film Productions.

As the educational sector puts materials like encyclopedias on cd-rom, the demand for stock footage has grown, says DiTursi. Yet despite their cd-rom destination, shots are supplied on tape.

‘There’s a lot of talk, but nobody’s asked us to supply them with stock in cd format. Not everybody’s equipped. They still prefer to take our analog tapes and combine it with whatever they’re using,’ says DiTursi.

The music industry may be similarly hesitant to convert tracks on album, tape, and cd into digital format because of the time, cost, and lack of demand. Toronto-based Chris Stone Audio is updating the computer programs written for the 20-year-old company more than 15 years ago, but that’s the extent of the company’s computer-based renovations.

‘I go through the music, classify it about eight different ways, then when I need something, I hit the search function and the computer gives me cd numbers and tracks. To digitize, I’d have to store them all and then find some way to link them all together, and it’s just not worth it,’ says Chris Stone.

cd-rom technology is having some impact on the stock music industry in the form of book publishers who need music for books being converted to audio, says Stone. There’s a little talk in the industry about music on cd-rom, but he’s not expecting it to become a fad for some time.

What Stone’s looking more favorably towards is an influx of business created by new broadcasting services.

‘As more channels come on tv, they’re going to need more music. Even if they’re just looking for opening and closing sound tracks, they’ll need an inexpensive source, and hopefully, that’s us,’ he says.

Caron Nightingale, producer at Toronto-based Nightingale Music Productions, says the smaller stock music houses are directing cash flow into converting dat and 1/4′ tapes to cd, a process more affordable for the bigger companies.

‘Storage for stock music is definitely heading towards cds, but it’s expensive, and nine times out of 10, commercial music clients need to have something written for them,’ says Nightingale, who adds she’s talking with clients about putting stock music discs together for multimedia.

As for a picture of the industry in five years, Fabulous Footage’s Olson wonders if, in the end, clients will want the kind of access the industry is gearing up to provide.

‘It’s an interesting question – the dream is we have a database and the client logs on and searches for himself. Now, whether everybody will need a cable line or a phone is one question. But despite the how, do people really want to pay for that or do they still want us to run around and build tapes for them because we can build them faster?

‘With an increase of clients developing cd-rom and multimedia, their demands are quite high for content, but they’re not a production company. They’re producers and publishers – not filmmakers,’ she says.