Demystifying camera specs,view in online flash

FreshDV has been given permission to host the Panavision/Canon talk I mentioned earlier. The films are lower (but still good) inline flash movies you can easily watch in your browser. Some of the detail if the powerpoint presentations is lost but it's still worth a look

 Watch online here. The first five videos are online, the next two to follow later this week.

HD versus film for TV

This is an old article but an illuminating one. This is a report (in word doc format) from the august British Society of Cinematographers, on a BBC HD day in September 2006, where the message was sent out by Alan Yentob no less, "Drama on Film has got to stop!" (here it is in google HTML format). The reason is, apparently that the MP4 encoders that the BBC will use for HD cannot handle the random grain pattern of film. However (as pointed out in the article) this will also count for pseudo film effects added in post, or in low light situations where gain has to be used for HD. Basically the BBC (in the guise of chief technologist Andy Quested) is decreeing to producers how shows have to look in order not to annoy picky license fee payers who've just bought expensive HD ready TVs and get grumpy about things like a grainy image. So more Hotel Babylon gloss, less Life On Mars grit.

Life on Mars incidentally, and its follow up Ashes to Ashes are both shot on Super16 specifically for aesthetic reasons. (ITV's twinned shows Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach are shot of film and HD respectively for similar reasons). It would be interesting to know how Kudos, the production company behind Life On Mars and Ashes to Ashes managed to get that one past the boffins at the Beeb. Has policy changed since again 2006? This document from Kodak (PDF) lists Ashes to Ashes as using stocks from fine grained 50D all the way to grungy and fast 500T ASA stocks. Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes do use a lot of slow motion effects that may have compelled them to use film over HD. Bear in mind that all this time, Dr Who, one of the Beeb's biggest shows is still being shot on 576i SD and deinterlaced in post.

What to do about the "video" look.

One of the things about HDV, as far as I can see, is the need to get the image as right as possible in production. This is a philosophical problem as much as anything else, with DV, the footage looked recognisably below film/HD/High End SD/broadcast video, so you could get away with sub par imagery as it looked impressionistic, in the same way that there are many fans of 8mm still around. However with HDV, we're pushing closer to a high quality, pro look, so deficiencies look rather more like mistakes, as opposed to an "artistic effect"

One of the problems with video (HD or SD, DV or DigiBeta) is that it has problems with the "mid range" sort of look, by which I mean that it's possible, resolution notwithstanding, to shoot wonderful landscapes and sunsets, to which people will go "wow, looks just like film!" However filming two people in close up in a room with generally high key soft light, will look kind of... blah. Even 16mm will take on a kind of luminous quality, even if not properly exposed, regardless if it's in B/W or desaturated, etc. (take a look at Pink Flamingos or the '60s Kuchar Brothers films if you don't believe me). Sorry if I sound like one of those audiophile nuts who claim that they can hear the difference between certain kind of RCA connectors, but I can see it, even in downloaded quicktime movies, and even in big budget HDCAM films (it was certainly there in Star Wars: ROTS)

Anyway, the HDV user needs to use any and all tools to make the video look as good as possible - though of course in this day and post-modern age, looking "good" has more than one meaning (CF the Saving Private Ryan look that is dominating action movies these days).

Anyway, I found this link on using filters with DV and this could be the way top go with HDV too...

http://www.lafcpug.org/curseofdigital_feature.html

Certainly the idea of doing proper HDV "emulsion" tests is one that appeals to me.