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Earth in HD

Oct 9, 2007 12:00 PM, By Craig Erpelding

40 cameramen and 4,000 days of cinematography document our planet like never seen before.

Co-director Mark Linfield recently concluded work on an epic production when his team made the final cuts and delivered Earth—a film which documents the remarkable wildlife and unique habitats of our planet in high definition. Shot in parallel with the Emmy award-winning 11-episode television series Planet Earth, scores of cameramen and postproduction crew members compiled monumental amounts of footage filmed in more than 60 countries over five years in order to achieve the vision set forth by the BBC.

“Early on we all had worries about whether the series would have the right ingredients to breakthrough—to create a splash. So the fact that we succeeded is hugely rewarding for everyone involved,” says Linfield on Planet Earth receiving four Emmy’s (including Outstanding Cinematography for Nonfiction Programming and Outstanding Nonfiction Series). “Natural History camera operators are a special breed, they are unusually dedicated and innovative—not to mention patient. So it’s great that these talents have finally been recognized with significant awards from outside our own industry.”

To achieve such recognition, it took not only incredible innovation on the part of the DPs in the field, but also strategic decision-making in preproduction.

“Editorially we were keen to film subject matter that was either unfamiliar or shot in a very fresh way, and both have implications for size of production team and budget,” Linfield says. “Unfamiliar wildlife tends to live in very remote places or in politically unstable countries, and filming things in a fresh way can usually be read as using very expensive and very heavy equipment often with a slightly larger crew.”

With this in mind, Linfield’s team looked to the benefits of HD acquisition technology such as Panasonic's 720p AJ-HDC27 Varicam system and its increased portability, extended onboard recording times, and better low-light performance, not to mention the ability to review rushes on a remote location without having to wait for film to be processed. However, the crew specifically wanted to benefit from the Varicam's variable frame rates—albeit for reasons other than the traditional perceptions for over- or under-cranking.

“It isn’t just the overtly slow-motion material that requires [the variable frame rate] function,” Linfield says. “Our camera operators are used to making slight adjustments to frame rate on a lot of shots that the viewer would consider normal speed—a bird hopping around on your lawn filmed in close-up with a long telephoto will look unnatural at 25fps, but often just right at 36fps or 45fps. Our cameramen are very used to making these judgments when shooting film and we didn’t want to remove this part of their craft just because we were moving to tape.”

Linfield also notes Varicam's color palette and dynamic range modes proved highly beneficial for this project due to cinematographers having to shoot from the hip in high-contrast situations. “The last thing you want is your exposure sliding off the end-stops so that shadows crush or highlights clip,” Linfield says.

But the crew found Varicam’s Film Rec mode—basically a series of pre-set cine-gamma curves—allowed them to use more dynamic range from the sensor without having to use a video knee, which would damage the image quality of subjects such as polar bears or birds with white plumage that are near the top of the luminance scale.

Although these benefits are intrinsic to HD technologies such as the Varicam, Linfield says the production team worked very hard on Earth to uncover new techniques and equipment that would help to generate a fresh look—noting the single biggest leap being the use of the Cineflex "Eligible," a gyro-stabilized Sony HDC-F950 Cinealta camera recording 1080 at 30p either to HDCAM with a Sony HDW-250 VTR (via setting the HDC-F950 to record 29.97psf and the HDW deck to record 59.94i) or direct-to-disc with an S-Two recorder. They found the degree of stabilization offered by this five axis gyro rig highly superior to anything used previously, having no trouble stabilizing a 2/3in. video lens at 400mm or beyond.

“The ability to film a stable image at range, and perform smooth camera moves meant we could film animal behavior from the air for the very first time,” Linfield says. “That’s about as big a revolution as one could have. [On prior nature shoots] we used aerials to set the scene, and the behavior would be filmed from the ground on a tripod. With the [Cineflex] gimbal we could film animals in areas inaccessible from the ground and get a plan view of a scene, which apart from being visually unfamiliar and more interesting, is often more revealing. If you film wolves hunting caribou from the air, you see how the wolves work the caribou in a way which is totally impossible if you film the same scene from the ground.”

Underwater footage for Earth was acquired with the Sony HDW-750 mainly due to the fact that underwater housings created for Digi-beta cameras also fit the 750. But an additional benefit the 750 provided was its ability to shoot interlaced, whereas the rest of the film was shot progressive. Linfield notes that in nature programming, having scan options can be extremely useful for certain shots.

"There are times underwater when it is helpful to be able to shoot interlaced—small shoaling fish in close-up, for example. Here the extra temporal resolution of interlaced can help," Linfield says.

By far, the biggest directorial challenge for the movie Earth came from the scope of the central premise, which Linfield says is a “fresh and revealing portrait of the whole planet in only 90 minutes”—having to decide on what to include when all living things and every type of landscape is eligible for highlight. So they devised more of an environmental message to the film than what the Planet Earth television series had. While many environmental films focus on what has already been lost due to the global warming phenomenon, Linfield and the BBC wanted Earth to be more inspiring and used the film as a chance to take stock of what our planet still has and what we stand to lose.

“You obviously need a balance between the epic and the intimate; you need to touch on the broader principals—the things that make our planet tick, but still have individual animal storylines that provide the engagement and drive the story arc,” Linfield says. “In the end we chose three key animals: polar bears in the arctic, elephants in the sub-tropics, and humpback whales, which journey from equator to pole. These characters were ideal because they are engaging, but also because they represented key environmental challenges facing our planet. Polar bears are the most graphic way to tell the story of global warming, elephants in the sub-tropics [provide insight to] the changing distribution of rainfall and the expansion of deserts, and the humpback whales go on the longest marine migration of any mammal—one which requires a healthy ocean all along the way.”

In post, two different routes were used in taking the imagery up to 2K. The first was to upscale in Apple Shake using the optical flow mode and the other was to use the ZOM filter in Digital Vision's Nucoda film master. Linfield says the key with the Varicam—whose frame rate converter box was originally designed as an on-set visualization tool for off-speed material and introduces another cycle of compression—was to go back to the original camera masters and recapture the material in the native DVCPRO codec then frame-rate convert the material transparently in Apple's Final Cut Pro. "The additional compression cycle is of little significance for HDTV with most material, but is clearly seen on the big screen and is best avoided for cinema projects," Linfield says.

Earth is scheduled for international release this fall. For more information on the movie, go to www.loveearth.com.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.