I JUST COMPLETED MY first project in HDTV, and despite all of the technological limitations, there were definite advantages to be found in this new medium. (For anyone who has spent their career shooting negative only to view it in video resolution, it’s a heck of a lot of fun to see your film projected on a beautiful, 50-foot diagonal HD screen rather than a tiny television monitor. Very nice, yes…)
I’m not here, however, to toast HD as a second coming for color TV or to pretend that picture quality will improve the quality of our lives or, for that mater, our television viewing time-if you want a reality check in that department, try watching TVLand for a couple of hours. Or better yet, call your parents and ask them if Gilligan’s Island was better in color or in black and white. Trust me, they’ll have no opinion in retrospect.
What I am here to talk about is my belief that HDTV will bring about a second childhood for a lot of wonderful DPs who cut their teeth on feature films but never made a splash in commercial filmmaking. You know the ones I mean, the cinematography giants whose images are known throughout the world but whom agencies and production companies grumble about when you get them on a 30-second spot. You can just hear the complaints: "Everything is going so slowly."
Like a lot of young directors, many up-and-coming DPs have been spoiled by the amazing powers of telecine equipment and the colorists who operate it. Think of all the things we do to a negative: We crush it, clip it, defocus it, filter it, saturate it, desaturate it, add power windows all over the place, work the secondaries, make 50 different corrective passes and reassemble them in Flame. The only thing we don’t do is leave it alone. Which is cool. We have the technology.
Problem is, we are rapidly closing in on 2002, the year our glorious leaders have chosen to begin The Age of Digital and High-Definition Television. And, although HD represents a significant improvement in resolution over regular TV, the supporting technologies are still quite primitive. I liken HDTV to the first mass-production vehicle in the world, Ford’s Model T. Although it represented a new technological paradigm, it was noisy, stinky, slow and frequently out of commission due to lack of qualified maintenance. Hell, a horse and buggy could have blown a Model T off the road.
That’s where HD is at right now, the Model T stage. It’s a new and superior technology that’s destined to replace the old, but it needs time to develop so that it can eventually whup ass on the horse and buggy. Toward that end, several technologies are emerging: computers that can better handle the resolution, bandwidth enough for HD broadcasts and digital encoding that squeezes three (or more) channels into the bandwidth of one.
Which is great, but despite all the technological advances, producing in HD resolution takes four to five times longer than the television production calendar we have come to expect, not in terms of shooting but in terms of telecine and postproduction. The fact is, the state of the art in HD vis-à-vis color correction and visual effects resides squarely in the non-real-time realm. Film-to-tape transfer equipment like the Spirit Datacine routinely runs at only six frames per second. Visual effects in Inferno (at 2K resolution) take four to five times as long as D-1 images in Flame. As a result, directors, producers and production companies will soon be looking for real-time alternatives. Sony Hi-Def, of course, has one-a real-time, high-definition transfer suite. The only catch: The color-correcting tools at the moment have room to grow.
Which brings us back to our friends, the old-school DPs, the ones who prefer to project dailies instead of squinting at them on the Avid, the ones who spend the extra time necessary to perfect the light and composition before exposing film. I know it sounds impractical, and even old-fashioned, in this era of crushed contrast, power windows and digital composites, but you must remember a critical fact: There are no existing real-time HD facilities with anything more advanced than an old-fashioned film chain. And trust me, the old-school guys know all about those crummy old film chains-they spent a lot of time figuring out how to produce imagery that could withstand them. So if you figure in the price of a few additional shooting hours, the cost will be more than offset by the time saved in post. Think about it, one extra shoot day vs. four to five weeks in Inferno. Or the price of a timed work print and a day of real-time film-to-tape transfers vs. four or five days of 6fps Datacine. Last time I checked, time is still money, and we’re still on the clock.
I hope that these sentiments will not be misconstrued as merely mercenary. My goal is to provide young directors and budget-driven production companies with fodder for discussion as they move into the HD world. We are all about to make the same technological leap. I just think that the old school has a lot to teach the new and that the current state of the art in HD will make an excellent venue for a lesson or two.
