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MillimeterP2 Safari
Aug 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Cynthia Wisehart
National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Dereck Joubert and his co-producer, wife Beverly Joubert, are shooting a feature about lions with the Panasonic AJ-HPX3000 using the AVC-Intra 100 codec.
Graham Cooke has been doing technical and post support for Dereck Joubert for years, so he's got a good sense of what trouble looks like for a wildlife filmmaker.
When Joubert decided to shoot his current National Geographic project about lions on the Panasonic AJ-HPX3000 (using the AVC-Intra 100 codec at native 1080p), Cooke got that troubled feeling. Specifically, he tried to imagine Joubert on Botswana's Duba Plains, offloading his P2 cards at the end of one long day in preparation for another. He also knew that with viewing support not yet available (at the time) for the new codec, Joubert would initially have to send the files to Cooke sight unseen. (He's now able to view in the field.)
Cooke might have underestimated the renowned filmmaker's desire to leave the film workflow behind. Already a Varicam veteran, Joubert was keen to up the ante for a high-quality film out. (The lions project is a theatrical-release feature.)
Joubert was also willing to trade one set of tasks for another. Yes, he had to log and offload the cards to RAID 1-protected LaCie drives (about 8 hours per drive) and ship them to Cooke at G-Vision in South Africa. But he didn't have to change film magazines or tapes in the field, and he estimates his P2 cards hold 5 hours of footage. He can now stop wondering about the end of the media (although a cinematographer's thoughts must turn to battery life).
Both men gave the codec glowing reviews. Joubert praises it as “sharp and crystalline — but not too much so, still with a warmth and roundness.”
“We think it's incredibly good — probably on a par with some of the mastering formats we've come into contact with, even though the bit rate is quite low,” Cooke says, adding that the post was relatively painless for a shop accustomed to multiformat workflows.
Post workflow was relatively straightforward considering there was already some Varicam 720p footage in the mix that had to blend with the new 1080p footage and potentially some film archival. At G-Vision, Joubert's LaCie drives were backed up as ProRes 422 (which would also go into the Autodesk Smoke for online and grading) and, for offline batch, converted to DVCPRO 1080/23. The Varicam footage was DVCPRO 720 23.98/60, “which coexists on the timeline quite happily,” Cooke says (a timeline supported by a 60TB SAN). The drives came in three at a time, carrying maybe 18 hours to 20 hours of footage; Cooke estimates two and half days to get it into the system and 12 hours to 24 hours for the DVCPRO batch convert. They'll master to HDCAM SR or D-5 for film out.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
