well, the short film is finished and here are some points. I'll split this into two posts with this one concentrating on the actual shooting.
The shoot went quite well as both actors were very professional and worked well with the director. While this post will deal with the technical side of the production I should obviously emphasise that without a good story and decent performers, then great technical proficiency is irrelevant. we had a small crew, of four, with Karen and myself swapping between camera and lighting and sound, and a friend Grace acting as continuity supervisor and general PA. Four really this wasn't enough, especially as one crew member at a time was required to baby-sit my daughter (Ayşegül, my wife, was directing, and little Leyla was actually one of the actors, very good she was too)
Lighting. Karen Savage who is co-credited with lighting takes the credit for the success of the lighting in this project. We used 1000w open face lights ("redheads"), which worked well for general overall lighting but were hard to use for lighting close ups or detail. Really even for low budget productions, it seems that some low power Fresnel units would be required. The Z1 is not a particularly light sensitive camera, and in even reasonable light interiors, we found ourselves always on the edge of under exposure. We tended to be around the 1.6 - 2.2 stop area. This is fine as really we wanted an open iris to achieve shallow depth of field.
We tended to bounce the light a lot (direct light with the redheads would have been to harsh in the confined space. This softened the light nicely but made modelling tricky, especially backlighting. One of the advantages of the location was the way from the dining room and living room, and to the kitchen was semi open plan which meant we could get backlights a healthy distance so the backlighting effect was subtle. In my opinion, backlighting is REALLY important in video, it helps alleviate that flat video look, but needs to be subtle.
Gels on the light made a big difference. Even just a little blue made a redhead resemble daylight, while a 1/8 CTO on a key-light would punch up skin tones nicely. Again, it's GOT to be subtle or it looks like bad mixed source lighting.
Focus. Well, this is high definition after all, and what's the point of shooting HD if it's soft? Focus is MUCH more critical in HD. Some sort of monitoring system is essential. We used my ibook, taking a firewire line from the camera, downscaling to DV, and then playing the results live through a programme called BTV pro. It's just about acceptable for judging SD focus but not even close for HD. We have several shots that are just a little bit soft. the Z1 has peaking in the viewfinder( peaking finds sharp edges in the image, and highlights them in the 'finder - as sharp edges must be in focus) and expanded focus (zooms in the middle of the image but only in the 'finder), though CF25 softens the image somewhat so peaking isn't as effective. The expanded focus feature is OK, but still, the little monitor isn't sharp enough for HD focusing. You can try the old zoom in/focus/zoom out method, but then you won't be able to use the cameras rather nifty shot transition feature for pull focusing. What's the point of pull focuses (pull foci?). Also, faces tend not to have sharp edges, so focussing on them isn't as easy. One solution might be a target card of some sort, that could be focused on when setting up shots.
Additionally I have noticed on some of my other footage that there seem to be better areas of the lens. Fully wide open (1.6) or at either the widest or longest ends of the lens, the image loses a bit of sharpness, but the image really pops out as being high definition in the middle range of the lens. Now this is not based on systematic testing, but one looking at rather off the cuff shooting. Maybe some later tests will confirm this, but I need to get my hands on a proper testing chart AND access to a proper HD broadcast monitor.
Highlights: HDV (at least the Z1) does not handle highlights any better than DV. Really, for a truly film like image you need to keep large areas below 100IRE. White walls, windows, skies etc. need to be controlled! (How do you control skies? I'll get to that...). In the past when shooting mixed light I would have recommended gelling lights to match daylight coming through windows, now I could recommend going the other way. To get good results, either invest in plenty of CTO and ND gels, big, 1.5 metre wide sheets of the stuff, on 100 metre rolls! Expose for highlights, and then add fill in order to balance your contrast ratio. Sometimes you might get good results shooting after dark and simulating light coming through windows with a couple of 800w or a 2K light, maybe gelling them with ½ or ¼ CTB to give a subtle mixed light effect. We did that for one scene and it worked well, though you can see if you look in the final shot that we cheated and placed the light indoors.
As for skies, which look rather ugly when blown out to white on video, i think the best bet is either to plan exterior scenes where you can see the sky, or ALWAY shoot with the sun at least 45° behind the camera. I've got some nice blue skies and cloud patterns to expose well when following this, but as soon as I pointed the camera at all towards the sun's direction, even when the sun had dropped below buildings, the sky was an ugly blocked out white. There might be something that can be done with Sky replacement in after effects, but that of course limits your freedom with camera movement, and requires extra time with After Effects or something similar in post.
I would also recommend shooting as much as possible towards the even, or heading as far north (or south if you're in the southern hemisphere) as you can. I remember seeing Richard Attenborough on an BBC show about British film in the 60s waxing lyrical about "that northern quality of light". What that refers to is that at ANY given time of the year, in the north, the sun will be lower in sky (the same is true the further south you go in the southern Hemisphere) and at lower angles you get a better quality of light because the sunlight has to travel through more atmosphere, and is therefore slightly softer. Anyway, long and the short of tit is, try and use the sun as a key light in all exterior scenes, and not as a backlight unless you have a truckload of HMIs for fill/key lighting, or want a specific cameo light effect.
I'm trying to figure out exactly which Picture Profile settings really get the best out of the Z1 - I'm leaning towards sharpness set to 7-8, Black stretch on, Cinematone setting 1, though the added contrast of Cinematone is a little scary (lots of fill required) it does strengthen the blacks, while black stretch also gives you a bit more leeway in the shadow details. We dialled sharpness back to 2 for our film and it really does look soft in general.
One of the areas I think Low budget filmmakers using HDV must think about is using filters (polarisers, grads, NDs, diffusion, etc.) on the cameras to compensate for the formats shortcomings.
Cineframe Initially I was suspicious of this mode, and I still won't recommend it to others wholeheartedly, but I must admit I'm coming around. It does look very film like (especially when transferred to SD) and it does get rid of some of the MPEG compression artefacts. When converting 50i to 25p in post, the de-interlacing seems to leave behind artefacts from both the 4:2:0 colour sampling issues AND the extra detail from the interlace jaggies. Going CF25 seems to avoid this, though it IS noticeably softer. I notice that while CF was poo-pooed initially in many blogs and discussion boards, a few are coming around to it now, particularly David Newman, of Cineform. However I've not used any really highly rated de-interlacers (magic Bullet, Nattress Film effects et al) so I've not really have the chance to see what the best that can be achieve. I've used some free FCP de-interlacers, or the ones in Virtual Dub or MPEG Streamclip, and after all you get what you pay for.
Conclusions With HD, Everything shows up. The odd cables in the background, lights reflected in shiny surfaces, crew reflected in glass, creases and stains in clothes. On Standard Definition, these things could be got away with, but NO MORE. You MUST double check constantly whether crew members' coats, make up kits, cables bits of light stands are in shot or not. you must take much greater care when shooting HDV. It just shows mistakes up much more clearly, even when down-converted to SD. When the image is sharp clean and well exposed, it does sort of pop out at you, and other less precise shots will suffer by comparison. The much ballyhooed compression artefacts aren't really an issue unless you're REALLY going the Saving Private Ryan path, but de-interlacing does throw up the odd hidden things. You really have to pay attention to set design. Us DV filmmakers have been dealing with the deep DOF for a while and to be honest it's not the deal-breaker for me that it is for some. I'll just back away and zoom in, keep the iris open and maybe go for a slightly cleaner set and background than normal. For outdoor shooting think about where you're pointing it in terms of how the background looks. - I can see polarising filters making a big comeback. Should I ever get a Z1 of my own I can see myself wanting to invest in a set of filters (polariser, a variety of NDs, a few grads, some tints) in order to make the image as pretty as possible before it goes to tape.
Next entry I'll deal with Post Production.
Labels: cameras, Cineframe, lighting, production, sony, Z1E
