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MillimeterHD’s Stock Rising
Aug 21, 2006 3:45 PM, By Craig Erpelding
As the moviemaking world pushes further into the HD realm, so too do the technological specifications of stock footage companies. While major stock footage players insist the imagery they offer remains best defined by the artistic eye of the cinematographers involved, they agree that their imagery, regardless of how acquired, now needs to be finished to HD to satisfy the needs of clients in all sorts of different media.
Barry Clark is an executive producer for Mandalay Media Arts, a longtime producer of documentary and feature films, a periodic user of stock footage in some of those projects, and someone who has participated in the ongoing transition to HD television. He agrees that the stock footage industry’s shift to HD delivery is an important development.
“I think there is a commanding market in the area of HD stock footage,” Clark says. “Strictly HD libraries will have an edge over multi-format libraries for the next few years, especially with network TV looking to remain in HD [for that period of time].”
Paula Lumbard, president and founder of Venice, Calif.-based FootageBank HD, started her business in 2002 as one of the first stock libraries to feature exclusively HD-finished clips. Over the years, the library has grown to include a large volume of HD-acquired material, as well as film-acquired material transferred to HD. She says the whole thing got rolling after she spent literally years listening to industry professionals like Clark buzz about new HD technologies.
“I had been in the business for 20 years, so venturing into an entirely HD-based world was a huge risk on my part [at that time],” she points out.
Fast-forward a few years, and it’s clear the risk has paid off. These days, FootageBank HD and several other players are flourishing by providing HD-based moving images for movies and broadcast product of all types on a global basis.
Phil Bates, president and CEO of Artbeats in Myrtle Creek, Ore., another major industry player, says his company has specific requirements about HD content acquisition, which is growing rapidly into the preferred acquisition format for new stock imagery.
“We will accept HDV footage from outside producers in special cases where the content is unique,” Bates says, noting the size and portability advantages over a heavy, high-end rig. “But for our own projects, we [also] shoot with 35mm cameras, such as the Arriflex 435, and we just acquired the Sony HDW-F900R [camera system], the most recent upgrade to the F900.”
The F900R upgrade features three 2.2 megapixel CCDs and 12-bit DSP in a chassis that's lighter and more compact with HD-SDI outputs and new accessory boards for slow shutter, image inversion, and down conversion with 3:2 pulldown. There is also an optional video cache feature that has been ported over from Sony’s HDW-730/750 camcorder systems to give the system greater production flexibility.
Bates adds that Artbeats prides itself on acquiring hard-to-get footage, and recently used, for example, a Gyron gyro-stabilized system, housing a Sony HCW-F950 CineAlta camera, to acquire new aerial imagery. Once the imagery is delivered, the company imports it into an Apple Power Mac dual-processor G5 with 2GB RAM, running a Pinnacle Cinewave Classic RT capture card (with the Pro upgrade). The company then uses Final Cut Pro for editing before transferring clips to one of the share points on Artbeats’ production server network, which is capable of holding up to 10TB of data at any one time. After the clips are mastered, they are stored as compressed, 192x144 pixel QuickTime files on another RAID (5TB) network that serves www.artbeats.com, its online web store, with everything archived to DVD-ROM.
But native HD acquisition of stock footage is only part of the story. When it comes to transferring film negatives to HD, stock houses routinely look to facilities such as PostWorks, New York, for assistance. PostWorks, whose clients include FootageBank HD, among others, transfers images shot on film using a Thomson Grass Valley Spirit 2K DataCine system with da Vinci 2K color corrector, and outputs to HD D5 tape at 24p. The Spirit 2K uses an advanced Kodak film imaging head and is outfitted with Kodak’s proprietary line array CCD technology, allowing it to transfer material at several different HD resolutions, including native 2K realtime scanning functionality with a scan resolution of 2,048 pixels per line.
PostWorks not only transfers the film negative for stock footage clients, but also performs an initial, basic color correction pass on the imagery, though taking care not to alter the original image too much since end users will have their own plans for the clips, depending on what material they are cutting it into.
“If we get footage of a sunset, we color correct to the level where, if the producer wants it to be vibrant orange, they can do that, or if they want to change the sunset into a sunrise, the small amount of color correction gives them that ability, as well,” explains Domenic Rom, COO of PostWorks Labs.
Even with stock footage companies now routinely providing unique imagery in HD, Clark suggests the transition is far from complete.
“The stock footage industry has a lot of growth potential,” Clark says. “But before that is the big slump. Entrepreneurs, like surfers, will ride the wave for the next few years, knowing the wave will eventually hit the beach. People banking on HD for the long run will be disappointed. They need to alert themselves to what’s creeping up on them.”
And what’s creeping up on them, he suggests, is the potential future requirement for higher and higher resolution material. While most stock footage companies distribute 1080p and 1080i files, people are already looking to what the next format and resolution transitions might be. Lumbard, for instance, notes that her shooters are already transitioning to higher resolution, tapeless camera systems.
“With cinematographers capturing 2K files straight to hard drives, we’re getting even better images—larger, more information, higher quality, more potential for color density,” Lumbard says. “Whether the output is for film or broadcast or large screen technologies, 2K files are providing opportunities never seen before. For instance, we’ve just sent HD files over to a company in Italy that is using our footage to project onto cafeteria ceilings or gym walls, so the larger the images, the better. They couldn’t have provided the same brilliance before 2K.”
But, this doesn’t necessarily mean current HD formats and resolution capabilities will become obsolete for stock footage purposes any time soon. As Clark suggests, broadband advances and wireless technologies are in the process, right now, of creating a whole world of new media (Internet TV, cell phones, PDAs, and Ipods) to feed content to, and much of that world, for the time being, is perfectly content with smaller images and lower resolution files.
“HD is the beginning of a path that we can’t even see the end of,” Clark says. “While 1080 does not provide near enough [image] quality for the major players in the [feature film] industry, HD stock footage companies can look forward to the adoption of Broadband IPTV, which has started a new land rush of IPTV network providers—leading to the proliferation of HD streaming over broadband lines. This leaves 1080 interlaced or progressive HD files as a sufficient source [for those applications].”
