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More and more directors are not only ?embracing digital?; they are embracing a new production metaphor and workflow that goes beyond simply ?using digital tech stuff?: In effect we are changing the rules of the game by following them through a new path. This is kind of a new look at the old briar patch, so I'll take it easy and we'll look at things one by one.
Digital Acquisition is the first theme. Acquisition. Sounds vaguely military, geek, or both. In plain English, so different from Will the Bard's, digital acquisition means that our cameras are no longer ?cameras.? The refined lenses of today's humblest indie shoot funnel their light not to any such contraption but to a ?sensor,? which is geek-speak for a fat chip with a big old gizmo on top that works like a reverse computer screen: each ?pixel? is a tiny light detector and the whole image gets mapped up and chopped up between all these light detector ?cells.?
OK. I fess up. In practice a little sleight of hand gets done in almost all but the higher-end models, and instead of laboriously mapping out every point in every color, most accessible cameras actually have the chip have less rows than what the NTSC TV standard calls for, much less CCIR 601, and don't get me started on HD. The trick is, blue, red and green have different LEVELS or strengths in what our eyes find useful, which are not similar values for all three. Blue is a very short, piercing wavelength, so we like it low in power; red cranks it up a notch for a medium power setting and green cranks it in turn all the way up for the higher power settings. In biology and NTSC this means that our eye's structure translates power settings to colors very efficiently. In compression it means that if you drop about half of the information you still have a lot of information, you just have to pace it, and the eyes will milk up anything that's left and pass it on to the brain, who's the one who has to find the image ?good? enough to watch. Usually what is done is that the green rows are shifted up --or sideways-- so that between the lines with only red and blue information we have lines with green information, in effect doubling the vertical (or the horizontal) resolution.
Tricks and techs aside, it is not only that we have digital acquisition, is the way we have it. We retain most of the benefits of traditional filmmaking but add a few, entirely modern, twists. Not even the tape format is a deal breaker. Humble DV25 can look gorgeous indeed if you distribute your production dollar with sense. Not ?common? sense. That is the sin and the way to the camera store. You need to use knowledge to do the trick. For example, you need to know your codecs to realize that today and for some time yet, MiniDV is not ?lesser? because it is older than HDV. Actually DV25 has mathematically four times as much information as HDV about a region a sixth of the size, so the ?straight? improvement in quality you could be looking at is around 8 to 20 times larger, although experts diverge wildly in this, depending on ancillary considerations. In practice and if no green-screens and complex compositing are called for and one is using a decent camera, the limit is, of course, the glass.
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| Panasonic's HPX 500 |
There are two main areas where you judge the quality of an image. One is the contrast. The eye likes strong, clear contrast. Subtlety is quite alright for nuance, but you prefer your information flow to be crisp and unequivocal. The other is perceived sharpness, with emphasis on perceived. There are technical aspects that can be measured and ?toleranced? and finessed to the creepiest colorimetry troll's specs. But those specs define quite an ample range of choices. Come to think it, I guess that's what they are doing there. But within that range, the artist is the thing, and one of the touches one misses the most in the smaller format cameras is the riches in lensing options that were once the heady domains of cinema.
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| Dalsa Origin |
Smaller or fixed lenses usually address the widest range of choices and therefore are ?generalized? so they perform well under most of the expected conditions their designers can foresee the gizmo working in, but in film language the lens is as much part of the style as is the choice of color palette or the casting. Nothing like the sense of separation one can lend a character by using a lens that whacks the background into a poetic mush of colors without detail.
Put a snorkel or ?35 millimeter lens adaptor? to use the long name, in front of a humble miniDV camera and you have images that rival anything you drool about in feature films. Of course, if you shoot in a video-only camera, you will get a kind of result. If you use one of today's tricked-out progressive cameras that emulate the gamma curve of film, the results will be much more cinematic. Also the frame rate is all important. Shoot 60i and it will still look like video. Shoot 24p and even with telecining to 29.97 fps, your material looks a lot more like cinema. Sure. And, you eat up a lot more light, because that long tube in front of the sensor makes for fewer photons getting to the chip. So you need to light more and trust the master monitor, not the rinky-dinky LCD.
And consequently, lights also have changed. You could get your incandescent Lowell?s and rent your Mole fresnell cans. But there is a plethora of new instruments that use fluorescent light types to produce a more even glow with softer shadows. Think and you will see that these days there are more and more soft lights or light diffuser instruments, not less, because the increased fidelity of even a mediocre consumer camera tends to need more light but see more the hotspots and burnouts.
An all this does not need to go on tape anymore.
Although most practical workflows based on tapeless pipelines ? be those based on DVD technology, like the Sony XDCAM line or those based on flash drives and memory cards, like the Panasonic HVX200 and its brethren ? require deep pockets today, the balance is slowly and surely going towards larger and deeper acquisition formats for the ?High End? productions, such as those preferred by cameras like the Dalsa Origin or the RED. This will result in 16:9 and specialty HD-based technology coming down in cost much faster than SD technology ever did. Just wait around a bit.
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Joaquin Gil is a filmmaker, artist and anthropologist, creator of the ?Video Editing Master Class? series currently available in DVD. His most recent production is the e-Film ?The Outsider? starring Catie Boles, completely made in the digital domain.
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