Working with High Definition Video for Feature ‘Bone Creek’

Includes the Basic Menu Selection for the ‘Film Look’

by Michael Corbett

I am a self-described “film chauvinist.” Film is kinetic and visceral. You load the camera with film, shoot it, process it, cut it, glue it together, and then, watch the outcome projected on a wall by a noisy clattering projection machine.

I started my career shooting 1200 feet of 16mm film every work day on local news stories, running it through an industrial style ME 4 processor, editing it, and watching it go out over the air on the 6 o’clock news.

Shooting news I got so comfortable with Kodak ASA 125 tungsten reversal film that to this day I can estimate the ƒ stop in most common shooting situations within a stop. The organic emulsions on the film from the people with the yellow box were user-friendly and robust. The film gave us a good 3 to 5 ƒ stops of acceptable exposure range for broadcast TV and rich highly saturated colors.

When so-called portable video cameras came on the scene, they were big, clunky, prone to technical problems, and captured images in the American television NTSC format (never the same color twice). They used very slow lenses and needed lots of light.

As I graduated into television commercial and feature film work, video was looked upon with disdain by my peers and me. NTSC video was an inferior medium we were forced to transfer our beautiful film images to for mass distribution.

Fast-forward forty years. We have shot three feature length narrative films in the last 5 years as class projects on 16mm film with our collaborator, Emily Edwards from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This year she insisted that we use High Definition video for our feature project “Bone Creek.” I argued, resisted, and drug my feet but finally gave in.

I was afraid of this new format. Not only was this video, but it was tapeless with a whole new workflow far removed from manipulating real pieces of film that you can hold up to the light to see the image. The images are now all stored as ones and zeros on P2 cards or portable hard disk drives.

I am sure we are way into overkill, but we have all of the media from “Bone Creek” archived on Emily’s computer, on the instructor’s workstation in our editing lab, on the portable Firewire drive we use to transfer the files from Yanceyville to Greensboro, on my computer at home and on a RAID drive we purchased specifically to archive this project set up to mirror the files on two separate disk drives. I am still anxious that our work on this show is secure.

We launched into pre-production on “Bone Creek” not knowing what camera we would shoot with. We had been holding off on committing to the purchase of an HD camera until the second-generation HD cameras had enough time in the field to be reviewed. We finally committed to the purchase of a Panasonic AG-HVX200. Unfortunately, we were not able to order it in time to arrive for our first day of principal photography.

Adjunct faculty member, camera instructor Jonathan Quade, stepped up and offered to loan us his JVC GY-HD100 camera recently purchased for his production company. This would be the camera’s first shoot. Jonathan was anxious to let us work out the kinks in the tapeless HD workflow with his camera.

As the production evolved, we were able to bring in Emmy award-winning director of photography, Flip Minott, to be our guest DP for a week. He agreed to bring his $50K+ Panasonic’s AJ-HDC27H VariCam to use on the shoot as part of his master’s class sessions. The week that Flip was with us, our HVX200 arrived. The outcome was that we were able to work extensively with three different HD cameras during the twelve weeks we were shooting “Bone Creek.”

Jonathan’s JVC records in HD on standard Mini DV tape cassettes. To improve the workflow on his productions, he decided to acquire a Firestore battery operated portable hard disk drive to capture the image media. We recorded both to tape and the Firestore drive while using the JVC GY-HD100. This gave me a bit of comfort having the tape as an archive backup of the media as we started production. Flip’s VariCam also recorded to tape. The HVX200 is designed to record HD to P2 cards as the primary media storage. For budget reasons, we elected to purchase 2 Firestore drives instead of P2 cards for our HVX200.

The first day of shooting changed my view of HD in a profound way. One of my chief concerns about shooting on HD was how well the cameras would process high contrast day exterior lighting. Jonathan had chosen the JVC specifically because of the reviews of the camera on this kind of shoot. We shot outside in the woods with some supplemental lighting from reflectors and 575 HMI’s for hair lights and fill. The images looked okay on Jonathan’s inexpensive monitor. It was when I got home that the paradigm shift occurred.

In only a few minutes, I was able to drag the files from the Firestore drive and open them with Final Cut Pro. The images were stunning. The workflow was simple, straightforward, and effective. In just a few hours, I edited the day’s scene into a rough cut, color corrected using Apple’s Color program and output a QuickTime movie to show the class next day.

I was hooked. When we shoot film, it normally takes 10 days for shipping to the lab, processing, telecine transfer, digitizing to hard disk and return shipping. I will always be biased toward film as my image capture medium of choice, but the almost instant knowledge of results offered by tapeless HD production is powerful.

As good as HD is for the production, it is even better for use in the classroom. The students and I were able to review the media and adapt our workflow and techniques to produce a better project. This provided them with a more powerful learning experience by virtue of the timely feedback.

The Film Look

Another area of anxiety for me on my first HD shoot was achieving the so-called “film look.”  I called my good friend Filp Minott and picked his brain on how he approached this issue on his first feature length HD project, “Terror Inside.” His advice included getting very familiar with the camera’s operating manual and setting every menu to the “Cine” or film choices.

The details varied with each of the three cameras we used, but here is the basic menu selection for the film look:

• Recording format 720p. This results in better image quality than 1080i.
• Use 24p mode. Progressive scanning at 24 frames per second directly mimics the way a film camera captures images.
• Use a 1/50th of a second shutter speed (1/48th of a second on some cameras like the JVC). Video cameras default to a 1/60th of a second shutter speed which is approximately 17% faster than the film standard of 1/50th of a second. This does not seem like very much of a difference, but the slight additional blur of each frame at 1/50th of a second adds significantly to the film look.
• Select “Cine” or film gamma settings. This configures the camera to mimic the same color sensitivity curve as film.

The number one thing you can do to mimic the theatrical feature film look is to keep the depth of field as small as possible. Of course, this makes focus much more critical. This is exactly the point. It comes down to the look you achieve when the subject is in sharp focus and the background and other elements in the frame are slightly out of focus. It is this ability to focus the audience’s attention on the important story elements that makes the most film-like impact.

Quite simply it comes down to the fact that the longest lens on video cameras using 1/3 inch video capture chips is in the 40mm to 50mm range. With a 16mm film camera, you would shoot the same shot to get the same framing using a 100mm lens. With 35mm film, you would use a 200mm lens to get the same field size. Add to that most DP’s shooting film will light to an exposure of ƒ 5.6 or less to reduce the depth of field even further.

Until we are all using HD cameras with chips the size of a 35mm film frame like the Red camera and film camera lenses our only option to approximate this shallow depth of field look is to back the camera up as far as possible and use the longest lens setting on the camera. Use a high quality polarizing filter both indoors and outside, light to an ƒ 2 or ƒ 2.8 indoors and use the ND filters built into the camera when outside in daylight to keep the exposure to an ƒ 5.6 or less.

Flip also emphasized how important having a high quality monitor is for critical focus and lighting. He urged using a tent-like setup to provide a dark area to view the monitor when shooting day exteriors.

All three of the cameras we used on this production suffered from poor quality viewing systems. They just can’t make video screens yet with pixels small enough to get the really sharp resolution needed for critical focus. The solution for this is a viewing system like film cameras use that allows the operator to see directly through the lens.

My students and I had a great time shooting this picture. HD is here to stay, and I have learned to love it.

Michael Corbett has worked on television commercials and feature films in roles as varied as grip-electric to producer-director. Corbett presently serves as the Director of the Piedmont Community College Film and Video Production Technology Program in Yanceyville, North Carolina.