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Aerial HD

Jul 1, 2007 11:00 AM, By Michael Goldman

Earlier this year, filmmaker Brian J. Terwilliger earned attention for his independent HD feature called “One Six Right: The Romance of Flying”—a tribute to the Van Nuys, Calif., municipal airport and the art of small plane aviation. A few months ago, Terwilliger was part of a national tour to show the movie, sponsored in part by Sony, and later, he gave a presentation about making the film during Sony’s CineAlta Night event at NAB. (Terwilliger mostly used Sony HDW-F900 cameras to shoot the piece, along with HDW-F950’s mounted into a Gyron HD gyroscopic camera mounting system for aerial cinematography.) Apple also promoted his work since he edited and mastered the entire movie using Final Cut Studio.

Now, Terwilliger is developing several other HD-oriented projects, one of which also deals with his love of aviation. He says he is particularly intrigued by how fast HD acquisition and postproduction technology has advanced just in the short time since he completed One Six Right.

“The next project we’ve lined up, which I can’t name just yet, will be shot using Sony cameras, but probably the Genesis or the HDW-F950, in 4:4:4, recording to HDCAM-SR tape,” he says. “When we started shooting One Six Right in 2003, using the [HDW-F900] camera and trying to be cinematic within the context of a documentary, it was still pretty new to work that way. But by the time it came out, and certainly now, shooting HD is commonplace, so much so that now I would hold off on a project if, for some reason, I couldn’t shoot it HD. There are more places to exhibit and distribute HD now—more opportunities to get the content out there than when I started using this technology.

“But the difference is, now I could use the next-generation [cameras] with HDCAM-SR tape, a better mastering format for sure, rather than the D5 master we used [on One Six Right] or HDCAM. And the other thing I’d do different today is, we would be able to ingest our source tapes directly, on the fly, into the editing system at lower resolution. On One Six Right, we downconverted our HDCAM masters, and we had a total of 143 HDCAM master source tapes. That cost us about $17,000 to do, including the actual time and setup on the machines that do the tape-to-tape downconvert from HDCAM to DVCAM. Now, I have 143 little DVCAM tapes that have no real function anymore. Their purpose at the time was to ingest for our offline editing system—Final Cut Pro—to cut the movie at DV resolution. Now, you can ingest on the fly using source tapes, and you can downconvert on output or you can encode it. That’s what we will do next time—encode on the fly using Apple’s ProRes 422 [video format]. That way, you can also keep the integrity of the timecode, which was another issue the last time. We would save ourselves time and that $17,000 the next time around because the tools are so much more efficient.”

Terwilliger adds that the HD Gyron camera mounting system remains, in his opinion, the best way to do extensive aerial cinematography with HD cameras.

“The processor and recorder are in the helicopter, and you can choose what deck you would want to use—we would now go with the HDCAM-SR decks,” he says. “But no matter what deck you use, the Gyron system is the best tool for that kind of work.”

Terwilliger is a firm believer that HD has revolutionized aerial cinematography, and he has several suggestions about how to maximize the experience in the air.

“Obviously, one thing is to hire the right people, including the ship’s pilot. We used a top guy in Hollywood (pilot Kevin LaRosa), who works on countless movies. And then, you need an experienced and intuitive aerial DP (Carston Bell served as Terwilliger’s cinematographer in the air, while Steve Miles was the film’s overall DP). Tracking shots and shooting moving subjects in the air takes great skill. We weren’t just doing epic shots of mountaintops without much tilt, focus, or roll. We were shooting close-ups of people in other planes, and often, were in close formation. You also have to be a good judge of when to shoot—we shot early morning and late afternoon mostly. The subject and the light had better be right, because your opportunity is limited in the air.

“But the best thing about shooting HD [in the air] is that you roll on everything. With a typical film camera, you have to frequently land and change loads—you can only shoot about 11 minutes of film per load. We had 50-minute loads in HDCAM when we shot One Six Right, and that was great, because the helicopter could go up there for two hours at a time and we could reload tapes from inside the helicopter. To go up there and shoot 11 minutes and then have to come down and change loads would not have been very efficient.”

“We shot just about everything, and many shots in the movie were not planned or intentional. We might have been doing an air-to-air shot, and we’d re-position and do it again, but we kept rolling all the time in-between, and sometimes, what we shot in-between is what we put into the movie.

“And I’ll tell you one more secret—when you shoot that much footage, if you don’t use it, you can sell it as stock footage. So shoot everything when you are in the air—that’s my biggest piece of advice.”

For more on Terwilliger’s work and One Six Right, and to view air-to-air video clips, go to www.onesixright.com.

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