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MillimeterEX1 in China’s Quake Zone, Part 1
Aug 26, 2008 2:33 PM, By Darroch Greer
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When the tragic Sichuan earthquake (magnitude 7.9) struck China on May 12, HBO decided to send a filmmaker to the region almost immediately in order to capture documentary footage. The network’s call went out to Jon Alpert, a documentarian who has been specializing on shooting footage in war zones and disaster areas for decades. He was one of the first reporters to film in Cambodia in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and in the American Embassy during the Iran hostage crisis. His adventures have also taken him to Afghanistan during the Russian occupation and previously to China during the Tiananmen Square massacre. In the early 1980s, he almost got killed in a bombing raid while shooting footage of Nicaragua’s Sandinista rebels.
Back then, Alpert found himself lugging some 80lbs. of film-camera equipment through his harrowing experience in the Nicaraguan jungle when his partner ran away. Over the years, however, he has migrated to video technology, and for his trip to China’s quake zone this year, he took with him Sony’s handheld, solid-state HD camcorder—the PMW-EX1.
Today, Alpert is the co-founder and co-director, along with his wife Keiko Tsuno, of DCTV—an independent, non-profit media center based in New York (DC stands for Downtown Community). DCTV has been teaching mostly low-income and minority community members the essentials of television production for the past 35 years. Along with teaching more than 50,000 students, Alpert and his team have managed to win 15 Emmys, three duPont-Columbia Awards, and a National Endowment for the Arts Leadership Projects for the Millennium grant for their documentary filmmaking.
Alpert’s co-director on the China earthquake project is Matthew O’Neill, who joined DCTV in 2001. HD Focus recently discussed with both men how and why they chose the EX1 technology to take to China.
“We’d been using the [Sony HVR-Z1Us] since Jon and I filmed Baghdad ER in 2005 and loved them,” O’Neill says. “They looked great, they were better than anything else we had used up to that point. We had looked at the P2s and thought about going tapeless when they came out. In the end, back then, we didn’t like the feel of the camera, were intimidated by the Solid State media, and passed, sticking with what we liked in the Z1. But Jon and Sony really pushed to switch over to the EX1s.”
“We started shooting with the EX1 halfway through a project we were doing on high school basketball,” says Alpert, regarding a project they did prior to leaving for China. “We were supposed to start the project with that camera, as basically (an early Sony field test), but the cameras didn’t come over from Japan soon enough, and so we actually shot half the project with the Z1U, and then we switched over to the tapeless camera.”
O’Neill became a believer when he had to shoot an emotional rendezvous between one of the basketball players and his mother that was supposed to take place in a well-lit airport, but occurred in a car outside at night instead.
“I flipped on nine decibels of gain when we went outside and still thinking that it was going to look mediocre when looking in the monitor on the camera,” O’Neill says. “We loaded it into the system on an HD screen—you’d have thought I was shooting it in daylight. It looks fantastic. All the detail, in very mediocre yellow outdoor light, instead is transformed into a beautiful better-that-your-naked-eye point-of-view.”
But an airport is not China in the middle of a horrific natural disaster. Alpert, in particular, was used to such trying situations. Using tourist visas, he and O’Neill grabbed a minimal amount of gear and 10 days after the quake the duo arrived in Chengdu, about 3 hours from the epicenter of the quake.
Alpert speaks of himself and O’Neill as two teams, consisting of themselves and their Chinese speaking colleagues they would pick up along the way.
“When we make our programs, we don’t light,” Alpert says. “We don’t have an audio person with us. It’s a one-man band, and you’re responsible for the reporting, the cinematography, the audio—that’s how we do it.”
The two men feel that perhaps the greatest advantage to using the EX1 in a disaster area is the workflow they developed. Using Sony ProMedia 16-gigabyte cards that each record about an hour’s worth of material (Sony just released 32-gigabyte cards which can hold 140 minutes of 1080i footage), the team loaded two cards directly into the camera and headed to the field. When they returned to base camp, they downloaded the data to their MacBook Pro and used Sony’s XDCAM Transfer to transform the material into HD QuickTime files ready for editing.
“What’s really useful about it is you see it in, more or less, HD quality that night,” O’Neill says. “[Usually,] when we go out on trips, we’re often just a small team in the middle of nowhere. We don’t have anything to review our footage on or even talk about it. In this case, you have the files that night. Jon and I can critique each other’s footage, then go out into the field the next day and improve upon it.”
“Actually, when we leave the hotel in the morning, we’re carrying probably six flash memory cards each, so we have six hours worth of recording capability,” Alpert adds. “Initially, we took the (laptop) with us in the back of the car because we thought that maybe we were going to have to camp out, and in the evenings, we would clean our cards. But it turns out that we never had a day in which we recorded more than six hours each. We’d return to the hotel, clean off the cards, and start fresh the next day. The interesting thing that really makes it advantageous for our work is that, basically, you can carry everything you need with you in your shirt pocket and in your pants pocket.”
But the DCTV team’s experience in China, from a technical point of view, was most deeply impacted by their ability to shoot in low light. See the next issue of HD Focus for part two of their explanation of how the technology worked during their post-quake adventure in China.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
