HD Myths

Lighting, you can shoot without lights

You can shoot film without lights as well; it looks as bad as HD without lights.

Lighting is about giving shape to an image, shape that you want, shape that helps to tell the story.

Lighting is about manipulating your audience; it’s not about getting a stop.

It’s cheaper

This is probably the biggest lie of all, it always fails to take in total costs, and of course if you only take a partial view of costs then you can bias figures any way you want.

Total cost means including the cost of having cast & crew standing around whilst you look at a large monitor and adjust the image.

Total cost means including the cost of having cast & crew standing around whilst you light or flag parts of the picture so that HD can handle them instead of dealing with them in post.

Total cost means including lost overseas sales because it’s not on film.

I can go on for a long time on this topic but I won’t

Speed, it’s faster to shoot on HD

Oh really? Is it faster to shoot docco style with an HDCam than it is with an Aaton which is half the size & weight?

If you compare drama production then is it faster to have to set up a “video village” of monitors etc. every time you move location? And if you aren’t using a “video village” to control and monitor the image as you shoot then you run into the problem below:-

Flexibility in Post,

Film is much more flexible in post this is because there is so much more data available to manipulate.

If you’re going to take advantage of post manipulation of the image, and this can be as simple as altering the colour or “look” of the image, then you need data to manipulate, you don’t generally have that with HD. HDCam starts out with 1920 pixels of original colour information and after the compression systems are finished with it you have 109 pixels left! With film you have a minimum of 1920 pixels to manipulate and if you want more then you simply scan it at a higher resolution, the data is there on the film!

You want 4000 pixels? Not a problem!

And let’s get this clear compression is not a benign thing, it throws your image (data) away, it just junks a huge part of your picture, and you have no say in which part is thrown away! It was all decided long ago by an engineer, do you trust an engineer to make artistic choice’s for you! These are the guy’s with tweed coats and pocket protectors!

There is an uncompressed HD camera available now, the Viper, it’s great but it requires a recording system that is not shooting friendly. There are improvements coming, but they’re not here yet.

There are a number of new cameras coming, but they’re not here yet either.

And I haven’t even started on the disadvantages of a monochrome viewfinder or the problem of only being able to see what is IN shot rather than what is about to come into shot.

Things are changing, NAB in Las Vegas saw some very interesting cameras being shown, competitors for the Viper, some more expensive and bigger, some smaller and cheaper.

They still don’t have the exposure latitude of film but they do have other advantages.

However, right now, and that’s when I’m working and spending your money, film is more flexible and ultimately cheaper.