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MillimeterHD Peek at 2006
Dec 29, 2005 11:57 AM, By Michael Goldman
Happy New Year from the staff at HD Focus and Millimeter magazine!
Since 2006 will arrive momentarily, and with it, a new and exciting year of HD-oriented productions and breakthroughs, we thought it would be a good time to check in with some HD production experts to see what they expect the big HD issues and developments to be over the course of the next 12 months. Three industry veterans, all with long HD-production track records, recently offered their predictions and wish lists for the coming year.
They are veteran television producer John Amodeo, who produced the first episodic broadcast show acquired using HD cameras, Fox’s Titus, and who recently completed another season spearheading HD production on another Fox show, Arrested Development; veteran Hollywood cinematographer/operator B. Sean Fairburn, who has been using and experimenting with HD cameras for several years; and Ryan Sheridan, a longtime HD engineer on television and feature film projects, including the upcoming feature film A Prairie Home Companion, as featured earlier this month in HD Focus.
HD Focus: From your point of view, what is the biggest change you have seen in HD production during the course of the last year?
Sheridan: For me, the biggest change has been the simplest change—people are finally understanding the basic workflow, and are really embracing HD as an easy tool to use, as opposed to a tool that has all these strings attached. As an HD engineer, walking onto a production and not having to answer the full barrage of questions I have been getting for four or five years now is a nice thing. There are still questions, obviously, mainly because there are so many options in terms of cameras and post and things like that. But in general, on a daily basis, major productions now understand and accept HD, and that is a great development.
HD Focus: So what do you see as the next big development or improvement in HD production that we are likely to see in coming months?
Amodeo: From my perspective, as a producer, I think we’ll start to see a proliferation of small, handheld MiniDV HD or near-HD cameras becoming available for location work. They’ll hopefully filter down to the next level, whereby some shows can be cheaply and easily shot using them in their entirety. Like reality shows, for instance, and other shows, like Arrested Development, can use them for specialty shots and in certain other situations.
We are happy with our workflow now (using Sony’s HDW-F900 system) for our stage work, and we have established a look we like that way. [Arrested Development was canceled earlier this year by Fox, but at press time, negotiations were ongoing to bring the show back on another network.] But for specialty shots, or stunt situations—lighter, smaller cameras would be great.
Right now, we have cameras that are not true HD, but which are of a quality to intercut with HD footage. I’m talking about cameras like the Panasonic [AG-DVX100] camcorder. The low-cost HDV cameras from Sony and Panasonic [AG-HVX200] also obviously interest us, particularly the Panasonic camera, since it can shoot directly in 24p.
The other day, for example, we shot [the show’s season finale] at the Queen Mary in Long Beach, and decided to put a third unit into play to get some specialty shots of the ship. We didn’t have another camera available, but we asked the fellow [Brian Johnson] who shoots our DVD specialized features using [a Panasonic AG-DVX100 camera] to help out, and he got into a boat and got the shots we wanted from the water looking up into the Queen Mary. It was lower resolution than the rest of our stuff, but it was 16:9 and 24p, so we are easily able to mix it into the rest of the episode.
Fairburn: I expect to see more accurate high-definition field monitoring that more closely matches postproduction monitors. In large part, that will be brought about by the eCinema Systems monitor that Martin Euredjian has developed [the DCM23 monitor], and others are working on this also. I have already taken [the DCM33] out on two jobs, and it was so nice to do bluescreen work with really accurate monitors.
Sheridan: I also think the advent of LCD field monitors is going to be a great boon for those of us working in HD production. eCinema and a couple of others have made major advances with this, and you’ll see them put to great use in the coming year. It was always so painful to establish an accurate CRT monitor in the field. When we did it, the results were beautiful, but it was always so painful to do it. These LCD monitors are light and can be used in smaller places, yet their display is incredibly close to a CRT.
Fairburn: The other important category that I think will become more accepted in the near future is the issue of 3D acquisition in HD. If you look at the 3D releases for animated films like Polar Express or Chicken Little or Robots, you see there is a good business model there for creating a simultaneous 2D and 3D release of major movies. Disney, James Cameron, all these important people are catching on to this, and now people like Cameron are shooting in 3D to begin with, allowing them to easily offer a 2D and 3D release, rather than relying on the older anaglyph approach (for 3D). Companies like Paradise FX, Pace Technologies, and Cobalt Entertainment are all working very hard right now to produce 3D programming with HD cameras, and I think this trend is likely to take off in the near future.
HD Focus: What other cool HD gear do you see becoming more prevalent to offer content creators more options?
Fairburn: The Sony HDC-1500 [multi-format camera] is a really good new sports broadcast type camera, and it has the ability to do 59.94Psf [progressive segmented frames, per the Sony format]—essentially 60Psf. 1080/60p is a great option for people working in that market. They can shoot 60p but easily play back at 24fps. That gives them garden-variety slow-motion with an HD camera. Most of the HD trucks are starting to switch over to them now, and I expect you will see more shoots with this camera in the coming year.
Also, a longer Zeiss DigiZoom HD lens, one with a much longer focal length than their current version, is about to come out—around NAB is what I heard. I expect that to make the market more competitive, since Fujinon has had that market to itself for so long. Fujinon does an amazing job providing the full range of focal length, high-quality lenses for HD shooting, but it will be nice to have others offering their own versions for this sort of work.
Sheridan: I personally can’t wait for the Arriflex D-20 [film-style] camera to become more widely available. I think they have come up with a way to cross that bridge between digital production and the old, traditional style of 35mm filmmaking at last. They have, from an operator’s point of view, essentially taken an Arriflex 435 [film camera] and turned it into a digital camera, while maintaining the optical viewfinder and letting you use standard lenses. From what I’ve seen, it’s a very robust and better-looking image, and it has the ability for built-in look-up tables, with plenty of latitude in the camera.
HD Focus: And what else is on your wish list for coming months and years, in terms of technology that isn’t available yet, but you certainly wish it were?
Amodeo: In general, as I said, we are really interested in any small, handheld camera that can give you true 24p, as close to HD resolution as possible. The wish list would be for true high-definition imagery from such cameras that we could use to produce network shows entirely—true 24p, 1080 MiniDV cameras. The other thing, of course, is to go completely tapeless at some point.
Sheridan: I’d most love to see true wireless HD. Above all things on my wish list, I’d love to see that happen. A wireless, 24p, full-bandwidth transmitter would be just great. Then we could go totally without cables. Ikegami has their 1080i adapter that can go on some cameras to transmit 1080i material, and other manufacturers are developing reduced or compressed bandwidth 1080p versions of wireless systems. But I don’t know of a full bandwidth system that is close, and that is what I’d most like to see.
The other thing on my list would be an extremely user-friendly third-party application for Photoshop that would allow people to quickly and effectively manipulate images on set, sort of like a small, Photoshop-based color correction bay on set. There are several good color management systems out there, but Photoshop is so universally accepted that a simplified set of GUI tools would be really nice. It’s cumbersome to have to learn a whole new software system. With Photoshop, almost everyone knows it and loves it already, so it would be great if we could develop this kind of simplified version for use during production.
