HD for Cinema
by Phil De Lancie
With the transition to digital television finally underway after years of delays and false starts, the case for producing television with high-definition (HD) video has become intriguing, at least for everyone who feels that their content will be of lasting interest. But in the world of theatrical features, where programming is ultimately viewed on film, the case for HD is less obvious. Why shoot on video if you intend to distribute and exhibit on film? And why-unless you're doing a remake of The Blair Witch Project-risk ending up with a video look instead of a rich and warm film look?
Enter Max CiVon, armed with answers to these and a host of other questions about shooting HD for theatrical release. CiVon is the producer and director of photography (DP) for Sordid Lives, a recently completed feature film shot and posted entirely on HD and released on 35mm. The picture is a comedy built around three generations of a small-town Texas family as they gather for a funeral. Written and directed by playwright and television writer Del Shores, it stars Bonnie Bedelia, Beau Bridges, Delta Burke, and Olivia Newton-John.
Sordid Lives has been screened in Los Angeles and at festivals in West Palm Beach, FL, and San Diego, CA. Upcoming festival screenings include Memphis, Turin, and Dallas. The film is represented by ICM in ongoing negotiations for distribution.
"This film was totally and completely calculated for using HD," CiVon says. "It was a low-budget independent feature, but we had four stars who were interested in doing the material, so they were willing to become part-owners of the movie rather than taking their fees up front. The actors were able to do that because we were able to structure the shooting so that most of them were needed for only seven days. And the only reason we could is because of how quickly we were able to move by shooting in HD."
The bottom line is that CiVon was able to complete the picture for a mere $500,000. That's an extraordinarily low budget for a theatrical feature, even considering that actors in lead-ing roles accepted deferred pay. For financial reasons alone, if Sordid Lives is successful and the visual feel passes muster, CiVon thinks the film might convince others to consider HD pro-duction more seriously for theatrically released movies. But CiVon says there's more to the story than HD's effect on the budget and technical aspects of making the film. Just as the tools of a visual artist-the brushes, canvas, or software-invariably influence the finished work, producing in HD also affected Sordid Lives on the artistic level, and CiVon believes the movie is better because of it.
Special delivery
The first thing CiVon points out when asked about shooting Sordid Lives is the difference between shooting HD for de-livery on film and shooting for deliv-ery on HD or on other video formats. The distinction goes to the very definition of digital cinema, which means applying the techniques of filmmaking to video.
"For many years," CiVon says, "digi-tal cinema was all about trying to make video look like film. But in this situation, we shot HD using techniques that would get us the result we wanted after transferring to film, which is different. It doesn't necessarily look like the greatest video anyone's ever shot, but you have to have discipline and faith that, in the end, it's going to look good on film."
Without that faith, CiVon says, some filmmakers fall into the trap of trying to do too much with the video to give it a film look. "They'll use too much filtration," he says, "or turn up the enhancement circuit to create an artificial sharpness, which creates ringing, moiré, and vibration. And there is often excessive use of the color controls: big adjustments to gamma, pedestal gain, and white balance. These are techniques that you like to use when the result will be delivered on video, but they are redundant and ultimately negative if you're delivering on film because your film stock is already going to give you these things naturally."
Not surprisingly, it's the resolution of HD that lets it be used for production without imparting the look often associated with video. "There is a difference between digital cinema with HD and with other digital video formats," CiVon says. "I've used Digital Betacam and DVCAM, and there's nothing wrong with those formats-there's no reason you can't tell a good story with them. But what you can do with HD that you really can't do with the others is to shoot a film that will look like it originated on 35mm. It's rich and full, and it has no artifacts. We've screened Sordid Lives in 35mm a number of times, and no one has pointed out to me a video artifact like noise or ringing."
CiVon was an electronic cinema instructor at the Sony Video Institute from 1991 to 1997. "I ended up experimenting for Sony," he recalls, "shooting a lot of test projects and working on what a camera should have and how it should work. That allowed me to see the results of different techniques. So while they were developing digital video, I was developing techniques for digital cinema and teaching workshops to people from places like NBC and MTV."
A dual role
CiVon was initially approached to be the DP for Sordid Lives. But he felt that it was crucial to be in the producer's role as well. "Deciding to work in HD and trans-fer to film later is much more a choice in how to produce than a choice in how to shoot," he says. "If you approach shooting HD as just a matter of replacing the film camera with a video camera, you will save almost nothing. To see any benefit, you've got to be able to take advantage of shooting in HD from the producer's side. As producer, I could design how the shooting of the scenes was going to get done."
CiVon lists crew size and lighting package as two areas where HD was more efficient than film. "One great thing about HD is that it's very good in rather low light. You don't lose anything by working in normal light or in mixed light. This applies to all video formats because they are much more sensitive than film stock. But with HD, you have the ability to capture the detail-you see everything. You can see patterns in cloth and curtains. Also, you have a lot more latitude with HD. So you have more gradations between the highlights and the dark places, more like a film stock."
Because of this sensitivity, CiVon was able to rely much more on available lighting for the movie's 20 or so interior locations in and around Los Angeles. "When I'd go in to light a scene," he says, "the first thing I would do is look at the practical lights, such as a lamp or a window. I would only add the amount of light necessary to bring up the scene for the way the director wanted to see it. That meant that the lighting package could be much smaller without compromising visual quality. We had a light grip-truck with 10 or 12 fixtures of various sizes. It was a two-ton package, rather than the five-ton package we would have used if we'd been shooting on film."
CiVon's field package for the single-camera shoot consisted of a Sony HDW-700WS camcorder, a set of prime lenses, Ni-cad batteries, two tripods, a Chapman dolly, and a cart with the video monitor and audio playback equipment. "The HDW-700WS camcorder," he says, "gives you 40 minute loads. The 24fps progressive cameras are still only around as prototypes, so we shot 30i. We used 1035 vertical lines because it is closer to the 1:1.85 aspect ratio of 35mm film. All the new gear has gone to 1080, so we went with an older camera to get 1035."
The biggest problem CiVon faced in equipping the shoot was a shortage of HD prime lenses. He says this is a temporary problem because "the lens manufacturers are now working hard to create packages specifically for HD. Video is generally closer to a 16mm film angle of view than to 35mm, so I was using lenses that are basically hybrid high-end 16mm lenses. I built up the HD camera as a film camera, and primarily used 10mm, 15mm, and 35mm primes. I might have used a zoom lens for only three shots. We were always pulling focus and marking exactly the way you would in film."
Location sound, handled by a two-person crew, was recorded both to the camcorder and to a separate DAT machine. "One of the benefits of video is that you can record the sound and picture in the same place," CiVon says, "but the sound team also wanted to record to DAT. The DAT was used as the master, but we did end up using the sound from the camcor-der in a few places. The important thing is that if you are shooting HD and recording to a separate audio device, you have to have a sync generator that can output video black in HD."
High performance
With a 20-inch HD monitor on location, the actors were able to watch playbacks of their scenes on the spot. "They could see that we were making them look good on screen," CiVon says, "and that gave them the confidence to put more into their performances." But it was the pace at which HD allowed scenes to be shot that had the biggest beneficial effect on their performances.
Describing the typical flow of the shoot, CiVon says that "first the direc-tor and I would make our decisions on the coverage we wanted. Then he would rehearse the actors on their per-formance while I lighted the scene. I would light it so that there weren't any lighting changes for the various angles needed for scene coverage. And I would know where all my camera setups were-perhaps two or three sta-tions set up for a scene."
The point of this preparation, CiVon says, was that "once we got into a scene, we never broke. When the actors went through a very powerful performance, we would be able to change to the next angle and do the next take within a minute so they wouldn't lose their emotions. Shooting film, the actors would have had to go back and kill an hour while we moved the camera, and then they would have to come back and try to figure out what they were doing, and what they were thinking to find that moment again. Shores, the director, is the one who brought out the performances, but the lighting and producing techniques made possible by HD got us a result that you couldn't get any other way."
Being able to move fast-and working with relatively inexpensive stock-also meant having the luxury of a high shooting ratio. "In film, we probably would have had a 4:1 or 5:1 ratio," CiVon says. "But we shot a lot of coverage with about a 10:1 ratio. We covered scenes with four angles that we would have only covered from two angles if shooting film. And we still did it in less time-we were able to shoot six or seven pages of script a day. Our editor was in heaven because we had a lot more choices in post. He had every shot he needed." CiVon estimates that the combined savings in film stock, processing, work print, negative cutting, conforming, and handling came to about $200,000.
Each night during the shoot, the day's footage was backed up to a HD clone that was stored in a separate physi-cal location. "I rented HD equipment from Plus 8 Video in Burbank and built up a transfer and down-conversion station in our production offices. I had two Sony HDW-500 HDCAM decks, one of which had an NTSC output board installed. As we cloned the master, we made down-converted dubs to VHS and Betacam SP, so we had sets of tapes for the offline editor."
Getting emulsional
Sordid Lives was edited by Ed Marx. "We used Marx's own Avid system," CiVon says, "and offlined it the way you'd offline anything else. We cut it in a month. Then we spent three weeks on audio sweetening with David Ho at Audio Post and Picture in Burbank." The show was mixed with left, center, right, and surround channels matrixed into two tracks for delivery on Dolby SR-encoded optical.
With a Tascam DA-88 tape of the soundtrack and the EDL from the Avid, CiVon was ready for online editing with the original camera material. "We worked with Jim Ward at the High Definition Center at Sony Studios in Culver City," he says. "The editing was very straightforward."
The next step was color-correction to even out the scenes. "If you've shot well," CiVon says, "you don't have to spend a lot of time on color-correction, just last minute touch-ups: bring up the black levels here, lower the contrast there. It's about getting the close-up, for instance, to match the wide shot." The key to minimizing correction is to plan scene lighting ahead of time. "If you decide to shoot low contrast for a given interior," CiVon says, "then shoot all your coverage low contrast. Don't decide halfway through shooting that you want a richer, darker look. If you really want to change your technique, wait until the next scene."
CiVon transferred the corrected video to a fine-grain ASA 64 film stock. "If we'd shot at the pace we did on film, I would have had to use at least ASA 400 because ASA 64 or 100 requires a lot more lighting. Normally only the $20 or $25 million studio pictures have the time and the crew to light for ASA 64. So we would have ended up with a grainier look. But with HD, low light worked fine, and we were still able to use a very fine grain stock. It really translated to a great look at the end."
While the film emulsion gives the transferred image most of its film feel, CiVon says Sony's M-Mode transfer process, which effectively resamples the 60 fields per second of video to film's 24fps (frames per second) rate, also contributes. "Instead of dropping fields, it blends them," he says, "so when you see it projected it looks a lot like the standard motion-blur of a film camera. The end result is spectacular-it really transforms high-definition video into film."
Phil De Lancie is a freelance writer covering media production and delivery technologies.
Excerpted from: http://www.dv.com
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