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MillimeterHD Engineering on the Prairie
Dec 13, 2004 5:02 PM, By Michael Goldman
In the five years since he first started working as an HD engineer on major feature film and television productions, Ryan Sheridan has witnessed a major streamlining of how HD shoots are structured and operate.
“The camera technology hasn’t changed that much in the sense that we are often working with the same Sony cameras that first became available four or five years ago, but the accessories have all improved dramatically, and [rental companies] like Clairmont and Panavision have taken the various tools available and made them easy for assistants to use,” says Sheridan. “Matte boxes are easy to use, follow focus is easy to work with, and of course, we have so much more control over the cameras, and cleaner applications, thanks to fiber. We don’t have eight cables running to the camera anymore, or six or seven custom pieces needed to make something work right. That helps the engineering aspect go away for filmmakers, and they can concentrate on their story, performances, and managing the look they want for the piece.”
Sheridan points to his recently completed work on director Robert Altman’s upcoming film A Prairie Home Companion, due for a 2006 release, as a prototypical example.
The movie is the second consecutive theatrical feature shot in HD by the 80-year-old Altman, following 2003’s The Company. This time, DP Ed Lachman, ASC, ran the shoot for Altman, and Lachman hired Sheridan to work the shoot as the production’s HD engineer. Sheridan points out that Prairie Home Companion is essentially a stage performance shot almost entirely at the Fitzgerald Theater in Minneapolis, and more importantly, it’s an Altman picture. Therefore, he says, HD simply made sense for the production.
“HD lent itself to the style of this show, and also to Mr. Altman’s preferred method of filmmaking,” says Sheridan. “He favors long, sweeping takes, with great freedom given to actors—to let them keep roaming around the stage while he shoots without stopping. Based on those criterion, Ed Lachman knew he wanted to shoot HD, and gave me a call to discuss the kind of options we might have to expedite Mr. Altman’s vision for the film.”
Sheridan says the fact that Lachman consulted him at all is another sign that HD production and those who make it possible are becoming more accepted within the industry. He says he and Lachman discussed such options as using Dalsa’s Origin camera and the Advantage camera from Pace HD before finally settling on using Sony HDW-F900 cameras. The F900s were outfitted primarily with Fujinon HD Cine Style lenses, and controlled through a specially configured and streamlined engineering station. They also decided to incorporate three Sony SRW-1 HDCAM-SR portable digital recorders into the mix—a valuable addition to the workflow, Sheridan says.
“Other camera systems simply weren’t adaptable on our compressed schedule, or weren’t ready yet, so we stayed with the tried-and-true Sony camera system, but with a difference from how we have done it in the past,” he explains. “We had to answer the question: Do we shoot with high compression on HDCAM, or low compression on HDCAM-SR? We were comfortable with the HDW-F900 cameras, rather than the 950s, because we had used them on The Company previously, and were shooting entirely in a theatrical situation and would not require the extreme latitude controls that the 950 would give us.
“But we decided to record to HDCAM-SR in the 4:2:2, 10-bit format using the SRW-1 VTR. What that did was permit us to roll in-camera as backup, but also roll directly onto the SR deck. In essence, that gave us immediate cloned masters of everything we shot,” Sheridan says. “That cut out the need to conduct the cloning process in post, which would have been a very expensive thing. By shooting HDCAM in-camera on the HDW-F900, but recording offboard in the lower compression HDCAM-SR format, we gave ourselves an immediate backup master in-camera, and a master-master, and avoided that cloning stage and the resulting costs. And the Fujinon lenses let Ed capture everything from extreme close-ups to extreme wide shots with two lenses, and sometimes with just one. They have low-flare characteristics, and that helped lots of shots that looked directly into lights on the stage, without having them flare or wash out the image.”
Sheridan adds that, as part of the streamlined rig configured by Clairmont for the production, Lachman had access to a Sony MSU-750 camera networking unit for on-set color-correction, sort of along the lines of the style adopted these days by many dramatic television shows that are now shooting HD. This approach let Lachman get his imagery anywhere from 75% to 80% close to the final color correction on set, Sheridan says.
“It was a mobile rack that we could roll anywhere, with all monitoring and downconverting coming out of the camera and into the rack through a single Evertz fiber connection—a hybrid cable,” Sheridan says. “Mr. Altman and Ed had the ability to switch between all four cameras, and Ed had the ability to play with color and match everything to what his experienced eye was seeing. That gave him complete artistic control over the cameras. He could pull blacks without adding noise to the images, and do it all in realtime, which really helped us be more efficient.
“He could probably have finalized the color even more, but we wanted to make sure we didn’t commit to anything that could not be undone later, so we never delivered more than about 80% of the color as Ed visualized it. We left blacks a bit up to get over noise issues, and retained the ability to crush them in post. But generally, we had the basic color close to where it will finally end up. This kind of approach would not have been possible a few years ago, which shows you how far the gear and people’s comfort level with the technology has come.”
