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Early Adopter

Sep 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

Arriflex D-20 gets a workout in Jordan.

 Exclusive Sundance Podcast
Captain Abu Raed DP Reinhart Peschke

At press time, a handful of studio filmmakers were trying out the Arriflex D-20 film-style digital camera — including British director Guy Ritchie for his upcoming Warner Bros. film, RocknRolla. However, one the first D-20 projects expected to hit the big screen is also the first movie ever produced, financed, and made in the nation of Jordan. GigaPix Studios (Chatsworth, Calif.) co-produced the Sundance-bound Captain Abu Raed, directed by Jordanian writer-director Amin Matalqa, and developed a workflow for recording to hard drives during shooting in and around Amman.

Cinematographer Reinhart Peschke collaborated with Arri headquarters in Munich, Germany, to configure three D-20 cameras, and he worked with GigaPix to capture imagery as raw 12-bit Bayer data at 2880×2160 resolution. Imagery was transmitted through tethered fiber cables to a production truck containing GigaPix custom hard drives running AJA Xena 2Ke capture cards. For handheld work, Arri FlashMags captured short bursts of footage — all told, about 35TB.

Peschke is one of the first DPs to shoot an entire feature with the D-20, and he freely admits the choice was driven by his extremely limited budget, a close relationship with Arri, and logistical limitations in the Middle East.

“I decided against film from the start, simply because there is no film lab in Jordan,” Peschke says. “After long discussions with the director, we went with the D-20. Originally, I wanted the Genesis camera [from Panavision], but it was more expensive because there weren't enough of those cameras available.” In the spring of this year, Peschke and first assistant Randy Williams spent three days at Arri Munich testing the D-20. “We learned we were possibly the first in the field shooting a feature film with them, so we felt a bit like guinea pigs, but it was an interesting challenge.”

Peschke's team was also among the first to use the new Carl Zeiss Master Zoom lens on a feature film, as well as a brand-new Cooke Optics 180mm lens.

The workflow was complicated by the fact that Peschke and Matalqa did not view dailies. Rather, using what he refers to as “all my gadgets,” Peschke concentrated on making sure he could measure color, image density, and latitude, while relying on the system's optical viewfinder for focus and composition. Color and nuance would be finalized in the digital intermediate.

“I would sometimes ask the capture guys in the truck to play back certain things to see density and how, if I changed color or light or whatever, what those numbers were — the color temperature and things like that,” Peschke says. “The director would go to the truck to view certain performances on the monitors — even in the raw-data mode, he could get the gist of the performance aspect. I kept a log of certain scenes and could call them up and view them on a 27in. Panasonic monitor in 4:2:2 mode for him. That let us see fairly high resolution and gave us a good picture about color, density, and latitude.”

Before the shoot, Peschke filmed out and screened a few test shots in a theatrical setting. More recently, he watched a rough cut of the evolving movie. “I have a feeling the movie will look better than film in the sense that I was able to use this camera in combination with such fantastic lenses,” he says. “It doesn't have the inherent grain that film has, obviously, but for this story, I wanted it to look very pristine, clean, natural, and pretty. When the story turns a little [somber] toward the end, we had to do a lot of night shooting, and even there, we were able to keep it pretty. I went to handheld with more movement, and bluer tones, but overall, I honestly think it is comparable to film.”

In particular, Peschke raves about the Cooke 180mm lens that Arri Munich provided. “I couldn't afford it at the time we were prepping the cameras — that lens had just come out that very week,” he says. His original lens package contained Cooke S4 lenses for the daytime scenes and a whole set of Zeiss Master Primes to give him the speed he needed for night. But Peschke says he couldn't resist the 180mm. “So after a while, I exchanged three of my other primes for it. I gave up a Cooke 25mm lens and a Cooke 60 Macro lens and a Master Prime 25mm.”

Peschke largely made up for the loss of some master primes by adding the new Zeiss Master Zoom. “[The Master Zoom was] an extremely fast zoom in that range, comparable to the Master Primes that I had,” he says. “I also had an [Angenieux] Optima long zoom to serve as my second zoom. I think I ended up with about 20 lenses on the show, and I needed just about all of them because we shot with two, and sometimes three, D-20s throughout.”

Indeed, when one camera went down, Arri brought a new one the next day and then fixed the broken unit, thus giving Peschke a third camera for much of the shoot. Still, while he raves about the support he received, Peschke adds that the nature of the workflow and other conditions did lead to some problems. Some of the GigaPix hard drives arrived in Jordan damaged from their journey and had to be repaired on location. Sandstorms impeded the performance of some of the hard drives further, as well as some of the cameras and FlashMags until the grips figured out how to better protect them from sun and sand.

Peschke also had to contend with the FlashMags 9-minute record time. “The kids in the film were not trained actors — they were all from a refugee camp,” he says, “so I wanted to get as much material on them as I could.

“The other thing was, I realized the camera wouldn't perform quite as well in low-light situations, since it does not go beyond the recommended 200 ASA. We shot a lot at night and at the airport in Amman, which is a low-light place, for the most part. That meant I had to do more lighting, but there is not much equipment in Jordan. So, before shooting started, I took a trip to Beirut, Lebanon, and hired a truck full of lights and cables and generators. That let me light with only the 200 ASA available in the camera. But I had to bring in some big lights and a crew from Lebanon to do it. The camera was also heavy for handheld tasks, but Arriflex, as I understand it, is working to rectify those sorts of things shortly.”

Indeed, Peschke argues that the D-20's CMOS sensor (with the same width as a Super 35 film gate aperture) and its optical viewfinder alone made it worthwhile.

“I operated ‘A’ camera myself, and the optical viewfinder means a lot,” he says. “It especially helps with focus, and focus is one of the biggest problems in the digital world. And I liked the idea of getting uncompressed 4K data out of the camera.”

© 2009 Penton Media, Inc.