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MillimeterFeature Film HD Choices
Jun 26, 2006 3:05 PM, By Michael Goldman
As major feature films captured using HD cameras proliferate, it’s interesting to take note of the nature of the decision-making process that major filmmakers have used to decide what systems, formats, and workflows to use for their particular projects.
As detailed in recent or upcoming issues of HD Focus, Millimeter, and Digital Content Producer, movies as diverse as Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, and David Fincher’s upcoming Zodiac, among others, are combining to make 2006 the year that so-called HD movies became fairly common. But all those filmmakers had widely different reasons for choosing HD, creative needs to fulfill, and approaches to using the technology, as our series of articles illustrate.
Following are a few telling comments from Fincher and Singer about their particular (and very different) HD choices, excerpted from Millimeter’sand DCP’s ongoing series of recent feature articles on this topic.
Director David Fincher on the tapeless direction he took the production of Zodiac using Grass Valley Viper FilmStream cameras recording to D.MAG digital film magazines, and the reaction he received from studio executives about making this kind of radical change from their traditional process:
“We had seen the D.MAG hard drives work (on commercial projects in recent months), and we decided that was the way to go, because of random access and the ability to constantly review it,” Fincher explains. “But I wanted to get totally away from tape while doing it. It never made sense to me to have a 4:4:4-capable camera that records to any kind of compression on a tape format that you can’t immediately play back. … If you have a stable and reliable platform upon which to record, and immediate replay of what you just did in 1920/1080p, 4:4:4, why would you even consider putting a tape deck on top or on back of your camera? Therefore, a 35lb. camera, like [Panavision’s] Genesis, with a tape deck stuck on the top, just wasn’t something I was going to embrace. Plus, we wanted this to be a widescreen movie, and Viper has a nice way of dealing with anamorphizing the 16x9 pixel array to give us full use of 1920/1080p across the 2.37:1 anamorphic aspect ratio. We really wanted to get as much resolution out of it as we could, since I did not want to crop the frame top to bottom. Why start out with a 2k image, and then throw a third of the frame away?
“But the studios often had what, for me, was a surreal response early on [to this tapeless workflow]. They were trying to understand who, exactly, would take the digital media from the set and get it cloned and archived safely for them. I said, ‘the same, totally underpaid PA’s who normally take your film from the set in the middle of the night to the lab. Now, instead, they will be taking an anvil case with a D.MAG in it back to the editing room.’ When we started working on it, a lot of people had trouble understanding what we were doing in that sense.”
Director Bryan Singer on his grudging movement toward HD, culminating in his use of Panavision’s Genesis Digital Camera System for shooting Superman Returns onto HDCAM-SR tape:
“It took me a while to convert to the Avid, let alone shoot a big, romantic movie, which Superman Returns is, with digital cameras,” Singer explains. “I’m kind of surprised we went this way, to be honest, but we did. I talked to all the guys (shooting with digital cameras)—George Lucas, Michael Mann, Jim Cameron. I was at Lucas’ ranch with all those other filmmakers a few years ago when he had his digital summit to educate everybody about HD. That was before I made [X-Men 2], and I was hardly a convert at that point. I wasn’t ready. But I got to talk to a lot of filmmakers about this process, and I became more open-minded by the time I took over this project.
“At first, it was scary. I mean, you put your $200 million movie all on $80 HDCAM-SR cassettes—that’s a little unsettling. But the truth is, it translated beautifully and gave us that rich look we wanted. By that time, I had been real blessed to have so much interaction with filmmakers exploring HD ahead of me. Jim Cameron, who is a friend of mine, was developing his 3D digital system at the time, for instance, and he showed me some early stuff from his documentary work. That kind of exposure gave me the confidence to make this change, and for Superman Returns, I think it worked out great.”
