On 7 Oct 2004, at 22:55, <dpbsmith(a)verizon.net>
wrote:
For what it's worth, a former film professor
at BU told me a story
once about
how he had found it difficult to impossible to get permission to use
actual
film frames to illustrate a more-or-less scholarly book. He said that
the
movie studios want everyone to use "production stills" instead, which
are
high-quality conventional still photographs taken more or less
concurrently
with the actual production. I'm not sure exactly why they want this, but
apparently most photographs "from films" that appear in traditional
print
media are production stills rather than actual frames.
But it's obvious, isn't it:
Simple framegrabs they can't exercise any control over because the
aforedescribed fair use rationale would likely be found to apply if
challenged in the courts (which they probably don't want people to know).
So instead, they want everybody to use production stills because the
said fair use rationale would NOT apply with them and the studio would
thus have full copyright control over those and be able to dictate
everybody wanting to use such pictures to heed their every wish and whim.
While I don't doubt film companies have some nefarious motives, in this
case they might also be looking to maximize how good they
look---high-quality still photographs look much better than framegrabs,
and so make the movie look better. That's partly due to higher
resolution and such, but also because framegrabs are part of a film that
was exposed/colorbalanced/etc. with the moving sequence of frames in
mind---the individual frame wasn't exposed and color-balanced in such a
way that would make it look optimal on its own.
-Mark