My entire book is dedicated to squeezing the absolute optimum resolution, color space and density out of your chosen video system. If you're planing on releasing your movie online then the my book has a good deal of the resource that you'll need. If however, you plan on going the theatrical or festival route, you'll need to print your pixels to film. From the initial choice of camera through production and postproduction, everything you do effects the amount and quality of information that the film recorder has to work with.

Perhaps the most misunderstood and most mystified aspect of video for film is the actual process that up converts the video image and then prints it to film. Just as there are numerous flavors of compression, so are there a number of methods of up-converting the video image to a higher integer of data. This process is often called up-rezzing but there is no way to actually increase the amount of resolution you've ended up with after the production process.

You can tweak the colors, increase contrast, increase the number of pixels that represent the frame, but you can't increase the resolution. What you got is what you got. Live with it.

The most important consideration in the printing of your digital movie is your motivation. Why do you feel that you need to print your picture to film? Is it just to say that you've produced a 'film', or are there other factors at work?

Various video-to-film processes create different looks as well as having different effects on your budget. Kinescope, the process of filming a monitor, is by far the least expensive method for transferring your movie. General prices run between $150 - $300 per minute for 35mm transfer and half that for 16mm.

CRT Film Recorders like the Celco are perhaps the most common method of transferring digital images to film. They basically work by breaking the video frame into separate Red, Green and Blue images. A very high intensity black and white cathode ray tube then scribes each line of luminance individually for each of the three value frames in the image. When the red channel is being printed a red filter actually swings into place as the cathode ray exposes each line individually.

Prices for a 35mm, CRT print can range from $200 per minute all the way up to $1,200 per minute for the more sophisticated Electron Beam Recorder (EBR) depending on quantity of work and what the market will bare in your location. Figure on working out a deal for around $450 per minute for a long form transfer.

Perhaps the best method of printing digital video to film is to print it to a camera stock. Not only do you pick up the inherent texture and look of film, but it's generally a bit cheaper. The CelcoExtream HD film printer is currently the pick of the litter for this process as the bulk of the laser printers don't accept a camera stock for printing. Content that was originally on film, that has been telecine'd to data file generally looks far better when printed to a tight intermediate stock on a laser recorder such as the ARRILASER. The color pallet is rich and full, the contrast is balanced.

Of the several facilities that are equipped to perform this technological wizardry, EFilm in LA and Digital Image in Burbank are widely considered to be two of the industry leaders. Essentially they interpolate the incoming video frames to 2,000 lines of resolution, then print these digitally blown up frames directly to film using a laser beam. An standard long form transfer generally runs in the neighborhood of $650 per minute.

The decision of which method to use must obviously be weighted against the potential recoupment of your movie. Is it quite simply good enough to warrant a further investment of $50,000 for a full-blown, 35mm, digital print, or would a nice $6,000 Kinescope, 16mm print serve your purposes just as well.

Your success or failure in this area will be almost entirely dependent on the quality of the final resolution that you end up with and how methodically you researched all of your available options. Talk to other filmmakers, scout the on-line resources. Any shortcuts or wrong turns taken here will haunt you every time you project your movie.

Perhaps the single best method of creating a buzz with regard to promoting your project is on the web. A simple website can go a long way toward increasing market awareness. While there are many web page authoring programs such as Dreamweaver and PageMill, I've found that the simplest and most efficient pages are simply written in HTML. Perhaps the best HTML primer can be found at Reliable Software. By following this very short, graphical tutorial, you'll be writing your own web pages in under ten minutes.

When you get ready to go a little deeper into HTML construction you might try the NCSA Beginner's Guide to HTML. Templates and page kits abound on the internet and perhaps the single best resource is a company called Elated. The PixelMonger site started out as one of their templates. The Elated graphics packages and scripts are all quite easy to modify and the methodology of their scripting is clean and bullet-proof. Oh yes, they're also free! Thank you Elated.