Greetings, digiphiles! ROBOGEEK here with the second of two great reports today from my pal DORM LOG, who's been checking out all the coolness afoot at this year's CINEQUEST San Jose Film Festival.
CINEQUEST was recently ranked as one of the top ten film fests in the world by "The Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide," and its DXD (Digital by Digital) programming track is one of the many reasons why. This fest literally brings Hollywood and Silicon Valley together, and DXD has quickly become one of the best showcases around for state-of-the-art digital cinema.
What follows is Dorm Log's exhaustive chronicle of what was probably the cornerstone panel/presentation of CINEQUEST DXD this year. Read on, and discover why all kids love Log as he goes into overtime!
THE DIGITAL HIERARCHY - From DV to 24P
Panel presented by Sony, Quantum and Kodak
Reported by Dorm Log, Special to AICN
As with the digital panel last year, this panel was led by Larry Thorpe, Sony Acquisition Systems V.P. Also on the panel were Jon Zeiderman, director of Artifacts (a digital film which premiered at the festival); Robert Miller (who also appeared last year); Steven Douglas Smith, the DP for the digital film Nicholas; Bob Emery from Media Entertainment; Jason Morgan, President of 2nd Busiest Bean Entertainment; and Bentley Nelson, director of strategic marketing for Quantum Consumer Electronics.
(This was a two and a half hour panel, so be warned.)
Larry started out with a brief history of the Sony digital cameras and some other interesting facts. Their first digital video camera was made in 1991 and was developed for consumers, not filmmakers. He said that Sony (and the other manufacturers) have been accused of making cameras and lenses for profit rather than for the benefit of the filmmaking industry. Larry's response was that companies like Panavision, Fuji, Eastman-Kodak, and others were just as motivated by profit, so this should not be seen as an issue. However, to begin to develop a digital camera targeted at the high-end filmmaker, there needed to be some force (pardon the pun) behind the manufacturing, and that did not occur until Lucas expressed an interest in filming Episode II digitally.
Larry went on to add that this year over 305 of the films presented at the Sundance Film Festival were shot digitally, many using the new 24P (for 24 frame per second, progressive scan) camera developed by Sony. Lucas used 6 of the 24P cameras for shooting Episode II, and many broadcast television programs such as Fox's Titus are filmed in digital.
Finally he showed us a clip of the film Million Dollar Hotel. The first clip showed the 35mm opening of the film. The second showed the same clip, but the scene in a hotel window at the end of the shot had been replaced with a shot of Salman Rushdie and U2. Both the Rushdie and U2 footage had been shot by a 24P camera and composited in. The look was identical to the remainder of the shot; it was impossible to tell that the footage was not shot in-camera.
Next Jon Ziederman, director of Artifacts began to speak. He talked about his experience with DV (digital video). He began his film before the 24P had come out, so his images were of a much lower quality, but he focused on the ease with which he was able to shoot and edit the film. Without having to transfer film to digital for the Avid, he was able to save a lot of time and money. The images he produced were reminiscent of big-budget QuickTime movies. They were fairly low-res compared to film, and exhibited a large number of compression artifacts. The colors, however, were much brighter, and there seemed to be a better visual dynamic range.
Next up was Robert Miller who spoke about The Orphanage, a group of three former ILM employees who now work in the Presidio transferring projects from film to video and back. They have a software package called Magic Bullet that is designed to make digital images look like celluloid. The first example was a DV shot that was transferred to 35mm. Again there were a large number of compression artifacts (visible squares or one color, almost like large pixels), banding in gradients, and aliasing issues (especially with dark diagonals moving across light backgrounds - jagged edges appeared in otherwise straight lines). This was followed by an example of a 24P shot that had undergone the same treatment. As with the DV images, we were first shown the original shot, then a side-by-side comparison of before and after, then just the treated shot. In this case the transfer was excellent! The colors were extremely bright, the details were very sharp, and visually it was just a very vivid image. The downside to this is that such detail requires a large amount of data for each frame, which makes storage and editing costly.
Steven Smith then talked about his project, Nicholas. He said that the advantage of 24P (or any digital camera, for that matter) is the reduction in film costs. From pre-production to editing on an Avid, using DV reduces your costs by 90 percent thanks to a savings on film stock. In addition, dailies are instantly available to the director (and actors, for that matter), and with the right equipment, on-set comps can be done to allow everyone to get a better idea of how the action will look once effects such as blue-screened backgrounds have been added.
Certain issues do need to be addressed, however, such as the clarity of the lenses. The Panavision lenses (Primo 11-1 zoom) were so sharp that at times you could see the actors pores and other minutia that can distract from the viewing. Also, the digital cameras see a lot more into shadows, so traditional lighting has to be altered a bit to get the correct look. Steadycams require a downconverted in order to properly interface with the new technology, and on the whole the image is not as silky as film, it can often be a little glaring.
Bob Emery followed Steve and talked about his film Swimming Upstream (a film that Steve had also worked on). 35 hours of video was shot for this film, which is extremely large for a production w/o a million-dollar budget. But with the technology on-hand, he was able to have a rough cut done in 3 1/2 weeks, and was able to make a complete clone of the film (every frame) within a week.
The point that Bob felt was most important is that nothing changes in filmmaking. You still need a great script, good direction, good cinematography, etc. The only difference is in the application of the technology. Instead of a loader, you now need a video technician and you have the advantage of seeing dailies immediately, but otherwise the process is the same whether you use 35mm or 24P.
The last filmmaker of the presentation, Jason Morgan, was up next. His focus was on how DV shifts the business model. As the others mentioned before him, shooting a film digitally saves an incredible amount in the stages prior to filmout. With the right cameras (such as the 24P), digital sound on par with DAT can be run straight to the camera, making syncing a much simpler process. Without the high cost of film, the camera can be left running between takes, catching some shots that the director would otherwise have missed.
Jason's film, Up, Michigan!, involves a high-school football team. The team's coach is played by Mike Ditka, a man who really hated having to deal with the camera, Jason said. He was often edgy and tense on-camera, but some of the takes they managed to get "off camera" of Ditka were perfect for inserts (shots of him sitting on the bench, chewing gum), and would have been missed with a film camera.
Jason also talked about how he has managed to get his film seen by a lot of people just because it was shot in 24P. "If I tell them it's a romantic comedy, they say 'Everybody has a romantic comedy. Come back when you have something.' But if I tell them it's on 24P they'll put it in just to see what it looks like."
The last speaker of the panel was Bentley Nelson from Quantum. He basically focused on how drive technology affects the digital film industry. He started by saying that the 24P cameras Lucas has are now at ILM filming 2nd unit and model shots. These cameras are rigged to record directly to hard drives as opposed to DigiBeta tapes. This allows a flexibility unheard of in the film industry until now.
TiVo is another herald of things to come. Now that network programming has basically been taken out of the hand of the networks, we can expect interesting changes in the lineup. When you can simply tell the box "I want to record this show, now go out and find it," it doesn't matter if it's on at 2AM." These time slots can become just as effective for advertisers as Prime Time.
Finally the Q&A session started. Someone asked for more info on the history of the Sony camera. Larry told the audience that once Lucas had signed on, a host of other manufacturers did as well. Panavision, Fuji, and others began to make lenses for the cameras, and several companies began to make 3rd party add-ons. The first cameras were delivered in April of 2000, and there are now over 2 dozen post-production companies providing products and services to digital filmmakers. In addition, several major filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola, Danny DeVito, and James Cameron are starting (or in some cases nearing completion on) 24P projects.
The camera itself is only about 17lbs, but once you add on batteries, lenses, etc. the weight begins to climb. Also, it is somewhat quieter than 35mm film cameras, but the digital audio microphones are so good that they can pick up on the motor noise of the tape drives.
The digital cameras have a smaller image area than traditional cameras, and require much smaller lenses. Steve Smith said he had to use 11mm lenses in many of the closeups for Nicholas in order to reduce the depth of field and give more of a film-like impression.
The cost of film is about $90/min for 35mm, while DV only runs about $9/min. The DV camera is about double the cost of a traditional camera, however, so not all things are cheaper.
The question was asked as to why there is so much effort to make digital films look like 35mm (services like Magic Bullet, for example). The answer is that this is simply what moviegoers want. They expect the consistency of film, and anything different doesn't quite fit. Thus the technology, which is capable of 60fps (though not in progressive scan, that only runs to 30fps) is consistenly downconverted to 24fps. Several of the panelists suggested that it is up to this latest generation of filmmakers to take the movies up to the technological level we have available to us, but ultimately it is consumer opinion that is important. If the filmgoers don't want to see it in 60fps, then it will always have to be transferred to film.
As for distribution in digital, there are 125,000 film projectors in the US, versus 30 DV projectors. At this point it doesn't make sense to release films digitally, other than as tests such as Lucas' release of Episode I in LA and NY. However, by filming in digital, and making a 1080 (resolution in pixels) master, the image can then be easily converted to film, DV projector, DVD, video, or broadcast media easily with little loss to quality aside from format limitations.
This ended the Q&A session, and we were treated to one final set of clips. Several scenes were filmed side-by-side with a 24P camera and a traditional 35mm camera. The digital shots were then processed to look as close to the 35mm prints as possible. It was left as an excercise for the audience to figure out which was which. The two formats were almost identical in clarity and color (it was a very good 35mm print). The 24P version had no digital artifacts to give it away, and the color tones were muted to resemble the 35mm palette. In the end, the only way I was able to tell them apart was the grain present in blank areas of the 35mm shots (walls, sky, etc). It was a very impressive comparison, and one that shows just how much more can be done with the technology now available to practically every filmmaker out there today.
- DORM LOG OUT -
