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Taking Stock in HD

Jul 12, 2005 12:35 PM

By Michael Goldman

The proliferation of high-definition acquisition technology is rapidly affecting the stock footage industry. For years, many major libraries have been offering footage transferred from 35mm to HD to their clients, but now the race to produce HD-originated material is intensifying. In recent months, major industry players have begun upgrading their infrastructures with HD equipment, and launching cinematographers across the world in the hunt for HD footage.

Smaller companies, meanwhile, are finding niches of their own, thanks to HD. Some of those companies, in fact, would not even exist without the maturation of HD acquisition technology. Colorado’s Mammoth HD is a prime example. This small company was launched last fall specifically because founder Clark Dunbar realized that the longevity of standard-def video for libraries was a short road. “The market would obviously be moving toward HD, which is capable of downconversion to fit current models, even as those models begin to change,” Dunbar says.

Mammoth now offers HD footage from 15 major cinematographers that it represents, and is currently offering corporate and broadcast clients HD footage in all major formats. Most recently, the company dove into the HDV world with the acquisition of several Sony HDV-Z1U camcorders. It is already offering what it calls a new and growing “Z1 gallery” of images on its website at www.mammothhd.com.

Dunbar says the arrival of technology like the Z1 camcorder is having a direct business effect on the stock industry by allowing more players to jump in. These new businesses might not have previously had the resources and bandwidth of industry giants.

“It’s a three-chip camera, a very good lens, and an excellent price point, which means we can get great-looking imagery for certain types of things,” says Dunbar. “Certain motion types of effects don’t work as well with it, but for under five grand and using DV tape, it gives you incredible quality. It’s not the same HD you would get on (a Sony HDW-F900) camera, for instance, but for companies like ours that serve corporate and broadcast clients, it allows us to offer more product in an affordable way, even while we collect footage in various other HD formats at the same time. After all, the idea of an ‘HD library’ is pretty general, and it should include material that originated from all sorts of cameras, which ours does.”

While only a handful of companies offer HD footage exclusively, many are hunting to add more HD to their collections as quickly as they can find it. Earlier this year, for instance, Artbeats (www.artbeats.com) launched HD shoots in 12 countries over five months in order to acquire HD footage for a dozen new collections in the royalty-free Artbeats Digital Film Library. That project traveled to remote corners of the Earth, including various African, South American, and Asian countries, and brought back reams of footage for Artbeats using a Sony HDW-F900 CineAlta package.

DP Craig Walters, who led four trips to 11 countries for the Artbeats project, explains that shooting HD stock is a culturally different animal than his normal work, which is shooting documentaries.

“I’m normally only concerned with getting visuals to tell a specific story, and I rarely get enough time for B-roll,” says Walters. “This job for Artbeats was, in essence, 100% B-roll. My job was solely to concentrate on finding interesting and pretty pictures for their library. We brought a tiny crew (camera operator, local guide, and translator) and shot off sticks or handheld. We carried a standard Fujinon 7.5x20 lens, and the idea was to shoot using a very straight camera setup, as lightweight as possible, knowing that Artbeats could do extensive color-correction later if needed. We also shot at 30p (29.97 actually) to avoid the pulldown issue with the whole conversion from 24fps, since much of this footage is typically used (for broadcast applications)."

Meanwhile, industry giant Getty Images, according to company officials, has made significant investments in recent months in Sony HDCAM and Panasonic D5 decks, HD production monitors, restoration tools, and other types of postproduction tools designed to build a more vibrant HD pipeline for its extensive libraries. Getty Images also recently made a deal with Universal Studios to offer transferred clips from major movies from the Universal Studios film library in HD for clients. Those clips are available at www.gettyimages.com/universalstudios.

These are all examples of an ongoing, major evolution toward making high-def a major foundation of the stock footage industry, according to Artbeats president Phil Bates.

“It’s inevitable that everyone will be shooting HD in the future,” says Bates. “Until now, people had been looking for footage that could be HD, and in the past, that was always 35mm that could be transferred. But a lot of the clips people wanted were not already available, or easy to get in 35mm. Since we shoot so much of it ourselves anyway, it just made sense for us to do it in HD this time around, and then offer the footage optimized for NTSC, PAL, or film, if that is what people want. That is the way this industry is moving.”

(For more on HD stock footage, see the upcoming July issue of Millimeter.)

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.