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MillimeterPondering HD Acquisition’s Future
Oct 10, 2006 8:00 AM, By Craig Erpelding
In the August 22 issue of HD Focus (digitalcontentproducer.com/hdhdv/depth/
hds_stock_rising_08212006/index.html), Barry Clark, executive producer at Mandalay Media Arts, provided insight into the current HD trend in the stock footage industry. Clark, an early participant in the transition to high-definition television, also discussed with HD Focus his ideas on the status of HD technologies in the movie industry, specifically on a broader scale, particularly regarding the use of digital acquisition methods.
Clark, with his background in HDTV and involvement in the Digital Cinema Initiative (Read more on Clark's participation in the initiative in a previous DCP article at digitalcontentproducer.com/displaypres/revfeat/
video_dcinema_horizon_dci), passionately promotes the notion that filmmakers should make HD delivery, not HD origination, their priority. He suggests most filmmakers are better off shooting on film, then moving into the digital domain as quickly as possible thereafter.
“For [many] feature film companies, a resolution of 1920x1080 is not sufficient enough,” Clark argues. “Producers don’t want to cut files into a 2K or 4K film. The fact is a fine grain 35mm film stock has 5K to 5.5K on a negative, which is vastly superior to even a 2K file. So, right now, the best insurance for a [film] producer is to do film above current HD origination options.”
Clark realizes this view is subject to much debate, and different opinions on this topic will continue to routinely appear in HD Focus. Indeed, Clark has watched a series of high profile, big-budget feature films earn big box office this year after being shot using various HD camera technologies. Among them was Superman Returns, which was shot using Panavision’s Genesis digital camera system (Read more about the digital production of Superman Returns in a recent Millimeter article at digitalcontentproducer.com/mil/features/
video_hd_heroes), which uses a 12.4 megapixel CCD chip, laid out in a horizontal array of 5760x2160. However, the vertical resolution is sliced in half, down to 1080, by the process of pixel binning, resulting in a final resolution of 1920x1080. In Clark’s view, the final result on the big screen offered less resolution than he would prefer.
“Watching [Superman Returns) on a screen via a digital cinema projector, the 2K format doesn’t look that good,” Clark says. “With 35mm providing over 5K, people creating 2K features are actually taking a step backwards.”
Most current digital acquisition systems use pixel binning, which occurs in the CCD chip itself. Almost all CCD chips are able to log many different pixel charges both horizontally and vertically, combining these charges into one larger charge called a “super pixel,” which is representative of the entire area of the contributing pixels.
Although such issues concern Clark, they matter less to dozens of other filmmakers, however, all of whom have a wide range of different reasons for preferring to move into the HD universe for acquisition. George Lucas, James Cameron, Michael Mann, David Fincher, Robert Rodriguez, and many others have decided to switch permanently to HD acquisition in recent years. Their reasons vary, of course. Many feel they can acquire a larger range of different looks, many enjoy being able to shoot non-stop for lengthy periods without having to reload film or pay lab costs, many tout the ability to visualize on-set instantly a high-end look at their imagery without having to wait for film dailies to be processed, and on and on it goes. (Scroll through the Millimeter and HD Focus archives for a look at several feature articles in recent years that detail the reasoning behind the choices of the aforementioned filmmakers, and many others, in making their HD choices, and see future editions of this newsletter for more on that topic.)
Randall Paris Dark, co-founder and president of HD Vision Studios in Studio City, Calif., is another filmmaker with a long track record shooting HD and developing HD workflow techniques, dating back to the early years of the technology. He points to several reasons why digital acquisition is preferable for the work he does.
“HD has two huge advantages over film: the ease of camera set-ups and the fact that we didn’t need to get our footage developed,” Dark says. “By looking through the viewfinder on my HD camera, I could see exactly what I was shooting and recording. The sound was fed directly into the camera. As a result, preparation time was significantly decreased. This allowed for more flexibility when moving from location to location, without sacrificing quality of the images.”
But Clark's concern revolves around the resolution quality of the end product once it appears on a big screen, not the potential production advantages of HD. He points out this is among the reasons that many great filmmakers, including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton, Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone, and many others continue to prefer shooting on film.
Clark concedes that recent breakthroughs in HD monitoring and exhibition techniques, such as 4K digital projectors, along with the arrival of a wider range of HD film-style camera choices, have resulted in some interesting imagery in cinemas, and beautiful pictures when it comes to home theater viewing situations. But his main concern is to point out what he views as future limitations of such technology. On movie screens, and increasingly on larger home screens, he suggests that 1920x1080 images simply won’t hold up in the long run.
And for motion pictures specifically, he wonders “how many years does HD have? It’s already reached a plateau with 1080i, the only further step left is 1080p. Then, the jump to 2K or 4K, but it still puts a finite future on 1080. Five years from now, it will be a matter of 4K sources on the high end.”
These sorts of concerns address the issue of what, exactly, the term “high definition” means, or will come to mean, as digital formats and resolution capabilities change and advance in coming years. Dark, who founded his studio years ago based upon the promise of HD acquisition, obviously thinks HD technology is here to stay in one form or another, but agrees it will certainly evolve over the next several years.
“Technology is a moving target,” Dark says. “What we accept today will be laughed at by our grandchildren. Remember we all thought [the video game] ‘Pong’ was pretty advanced at one time. HD is no different from anything else. That being said, I just sold a stock shot I created in 1992 with analog HD. If a picture is compelling, it will stand the test of time no matter what technology was used to create it.”
But as for current 1080 flavors of HD, Clark emphasizes we shouldn’t worry. With the arrival of faster broadband technologies, and a whole new land rush of IPTV network providers on the way, he expects to see a proliferation of HD material eventually streaming over broadband lines anyway. And for that kind of application, he says, 1080i HD will be more than sufficient.
