Technical details on The Nines
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As promised-slash-threatened, here’s a not-brief write-up of some of the technical aspects of making The Nines.
The movie is made up of three distinct sections, each of which was shot in a different format. That was always part of the plan. The movie is really like three short films back-to-back, and each of them needed its own look and grammar.
For Part One, my hope was to shoot HD. Even as I was finishing the script, I’d begun a conversation with Mike Curtis at HD for Indies about the potentials and pitfalls of various cameras and workflows. In case you ever doubt my the extent of my geekery, check out the four pages of flowcharts I made to map out the process we came up with: nines_workflow.pdf.
Mike was a big help in letting me talk through, and think through, my goals and priorities in the technical details of shooting movie. But how much of his advice did we end up using? Almost none.1 As it turned out, we didn’t shoot HD at all.
I really thought we would. But our d.p., Nancy Schreiber, quickly convinced me otherwise. She’s no Luddite — she’s won awards for her digitally-shot features. But when she visited our main location, with its vast expanses of glass, she made it clear that any savings we would have gained from shooting on HD would be lost by the extra time and expense it would take to control the light.
So out went the plan for tethered cameras and hard drives. Instead, we shot two sizes of film, and standard-def video.
How we shot
For Part One, we shot Super-16, a format that’s come roaring back with the introduction of great new stocks by both Kodak and Fuji.2 The cameras are solid, and the workflow is straightforward. There are downsides: negative dirt (the white blotches) gets gigantic when blown up to full size, and it has all of the hassles of film (loading, storing, nightly film drops). But I suspect we’ll continue to see indie features and television shooting on Super-16 for some time. It’s a great image for the price.
For Part Two, we shot standard-def 24p video, using mostly the SDX-900.3 Why not HD? For starters, this section is meant to be a reality show, so we didn’t want it to look too much like film. But the main reason was Nancy’s experience shooting the Lisa Kudrow show The Comeback. With all its detail and resolution, HD can be pretty harsh on actors. That’s why Nancy chose to use standard-def on both The Comeback and our movie.
It was the right choice: sharp but not harsh. It’s a great contrast from the Super-16 in Part One, and still looks solid when projected on the big screen. In fact, I’d push any no-budget indie to keep 24p SD in the mix, particularly if it’s mostly people talking. Resolution is over-valued.
Part Three was shot the most conventionally, using 35mm. However, we shot 3-perf rather than 4-perf.4 It’s a significant cost savings, and since we knew we were never going to cut negative, there was no reason not to use it.
I sort of buried the lead there, so let me put that last sentence in context. We knew we were never going to cut negative, because on a practical level, there was no negative.
Yes, the film had negative, and it was stored in boxes at the lab, but we knew we were never going to touch it again. And the original videotapes from the camera were dutifully labeled, but will never be put in a deck. That was the decision we made quite early in the process: no matter what format we shot on, our “masters” would be the HDCam tapes we got back from the lab.
The Super-16? HDCam. The 3-perf 35mm? HDCam. The SD video? Up-rezzed to HDCam.
Editing
Picking one format made post-production vastly simpler, because it made no difference what something was shot on. The Avid ingested everything off the HDCam tapes, completely oblivious to what form it began its existence.5 loves Avid, and he has an Oscar nomination. So I deferred to him. And you know what? Avid is great, too. Motion picture editing is clearly benefiting from having two strong competitors in the field. Note that HDCam decks are expensive to rent. We couldn’t afford to keep one for the run of the show, so we just got one as needed to load in footage.
Did we make some mistakes? Yes. We built the show as true 24p, when we should have chosen 23.976, which would have made hooking up inexpensive monitors much simpler. But I felt some vindication upon learning that $100 million movies were hitting the same snags we were.
In terms of visual effects, almost everything for the movie was handled on HDCam or D5, with a lot of lower-res QuickTimes emailed back in forth to show work in progress. Producers’ screeners were simple DVDs.
After a few months of editing, when it was finally time to output the movie from the Avid, we rented the expensive D5 deck. From that point on, that tape was like our negative. We would clone from that for color-timing and other work. (Once color-timing was done, that D5 became our new negative.)
I’m skipping the various formats we used for sound, because it was honestly over my head. Suffice to say there was always some way to make this frame rate link to that frame rate, although I always time-budgeted an extra hour whenever we had to deal with something other than pure picture. My advice to filmmakers is to make sure that your post supervisor, sound designer, editor and composer get friendly, and let them sort it out.
The DI
In an earlier article (“Digital filmmaking and the paradox of choice”), I argued that all the great new tools available to filmmakers can cause a kind of paralysis, where a surplus of options means nothing gets decided. I was determined not to fall into that trap, which is one reason why we front-loaded a lot of the color correction in the movie.
Basically, every movie goes through color correction twice. The first time is when each day’s work is processed into dailies. It’s called telecine, and the goal is to get the video footage looking somewhat like the final film, so that you get a sense of it while editing. In conventional movies, the initial telecine isn’t a make-or-break step, because the “real” color correction will happen later, working off the original negative footage. (Either a conventional timing, or a digital intermediate. (DI))
With our film, the dailies were our negative, so we decided to get them very close to the final look of our picture in the initial telecine. That’s actually counter to a lot of opinion about what you “should” do. Many experts will tell you to keep your negative fairly neutral in order to allow yourself the widest latitude down the road. The problem is, you’re just pushing back the decision process, and you pay for it. Literally: telecine is a relatively fixed cost, while the hourly rate of a DI room can kill you.
So Nancy and I picked our looks for the three sections off of one day’s test footage. As you can see from the trailer, one section (Part Three, the forest exteriors) is aggressively desaturated, and that was decided in the initial telecine.If I’d changed my mind a few months later, we could have rescanned the film, but it would have been incredibly costly. By locking down our decisions early on, we could spend our time in the “real” DI tweaking and perfecting, rather than trying huge and costly experiments.
Out to film
For Sundance, we screened off HDCam (a dub from the D5). The movie looked great on a great projector, less so on a lesser projector. We had decided early on that we weren’t going to output to film until we had a distributor, in case there were changes we had to incorporate. (There weren’t, except for logos and company names.)
The last few months have been a process of getting a 35mm release print ready. One of the labs referred to this as a “reverse-DI,” but it’s not really the reverse of anything. It’s the complicated process of trying to calibrate chemical film stocks with digital color look-up tables. I’ve pretty much stayed out of it. The first pass I saw was close enough that I felt certain Nancy and the colorgeeks would nail it.
In most markets, The Nines will project off film, though we may try to use digital projection in certain theaters. The foreign distributor has agreed to use the more expensive Premier (aka Vision Premier) stock for our Venice Film Festival debut — it’s more vibrant, and truer to digital version. Whether or not the U.S. release gets the pricier prints depends on how many quarters are rattling around in the shoe box come late August.
Having seen both the video and film versions, which do I prefer?
I’m honestly much more familiar — and comfortable — with the digital version, so I’m a terrible judge. The film print adds a tiny bit of grain in Part Two, which unfortunately undercuts a little of its video-ness. But on the whole, the film-out looks terrific, and is much less dependent on the quality of the projector. (Why not see both, he asks, trying not to sound greedy.)
I’ll happily answer any other technical questions in the comments. At least, those for which I know (or can plausibly fake) an answer.
- Actually, Part Three workflow is pretty close, but we never dubbed down to DVCProHD. ↩
- We shot Kodak, who did very well by us. Thank you, Kodak. ↩
- Two other cameras did some pinch-hitting: the DVX-100a, and my tiny Xacti camera, which is technically HD. ↩
- Literally, the film has fewer sprockets. Here’s [an article](http://www.digiconform.com/3perf/3perf.html) that explains the difference. You can safely skip the second half, because we never needed to match feet and frames because of our HD post workflow. ↩
- We were an Avid show. I am huge Final Cut Pro guy, but our editor ([Doug Crise](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0187954/ ↩
Articles
August 8th, 2007 at 8:22 am
That’s a lot of technical detail. From the trailer you definitely made the right choices. I loved the look. Here’s hoping I get a chance to have to make those decisions. I’ll definitely link this.
August 8th, 2007 at 9:33 am
John thanks for all the gory details. Much appreciated.
August 8th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Great writeup. Thanks a lot.
“I argued that all the great new tools available to filmmakers can cause a kind of paralysis.”
Much agreed. I read “10 mistakes..” posted on HDforIndies and it made me like a scared child huddled in the corner.
August 8th, 2007 at 9:39 am
For the preview screening you did at Raleigh, was that digital projection or the film print? Looked great!
August 8th, 2007 at 10:26 am
In terms of budgeting, where did the decision to shoot Super-16 instead of HD put you?
I’m practically a student filmmaker, so shooting HDV is far cheaper than purchasing film stock. But once you push to anything more sophisticated (Varicam, film for distribution) how does the price break out?
August 8th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Fun Joel (#4):
That was the HDCam tape you saw. We haven’t screened the print for anyone yet.
Erik (#5):
You got the crux of it: “HD” is such a broad term. It can refer to anything from consumer camcorders to Panavision Genesis monsters. For what we were trying to do, the difference between shooting Part One on Varicam or Super-16 wasn’t that significant.
Once you get above truly threadbare production budgets, it’s surprising to realize that the film and processing line item isn’t a huge percentage of your overall money. We spent more on the rights to one song than we did on film stock.
August 8th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Like those above me I too would like to thank you for giving us the gory technical details, without diving into too much minutiae. Do you know of anyplace else that I could find similar write-ups about other film, or even television, productions?
August 8th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
John –
Thanks for the reply, John (or Mr. August, if your prefer). I’m excited to see how Part One and Part Three turn out, visually.
If you don’t mind me asking a followup or two, I’ll try to keep it simple.
How did you watch dailies? I know location shooting was extra tricky for this shoot, since you needed to film in a certain order, so how did you manage three formats consistently, especially when you can’t project 3 perf 35mm?
And following up, was there any problem with generation loss in the initial transfer to HDCAM? HDCAM SR has a nice color profile, but there will still be some loss in color data, and less importantly resolution.
Also, thanks for tossing the Geek Factor 8 stuff our way, when I know you’re very busy. I’ll give you a hand and reply to Kevin for you, to sweeten the deal.
Kevin J (#7) –
IMDb actually keeps some threadbare info on the shooting formats used by television and movies. For example, you can see that Scrubs shoots Super-16, and then transfers it to DigiCam for it’s master, essentially identical to the way that John shot part one of “The Nines”. You can also see what camera’s they use (Aaton XTR), and what their final format is (NTSC).
Course, John is a bit more detailed.
August 8th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Hey John–
Thanks so much for all the tech geek goodness. Just wanted to chime in based on my experience editing a very low-budg gay horror movie my friend Sean Abley (the movie, SOCKET, premiered at Outfest and the Philly G&L fest last month, with more screenings to come).
They shot the movie with the DVX100a with the anamorphic lens attachment (so the image is optically 16×9 and squeezed onto the 4:3 chip). The DVX is a great cam– I’ve shot a bunch of music videos and commercials with it. But the SOCKET folks are hearing from potential distribs that they’d much much much prefer to buy movies that are shot HD. And by “prefer” I mean they pay more.
So for any no-budg peeps out there reading, I have to respectfully, mildly disagree with the SD recommendation (unless you do it like John & Nancy have, which is smartly, and mixed the SD up into better acquisition formats and mastered to a decent HD format.
The lowest anybody should probably go in order to maximize the distrib buck at this point may be with the Panasonic HVX200 cam. The thing has tiny 1/3″ chips so you really have to watch the light for the DOF, and it also has a chipset resolution of only 540 lines that’s then magically morphed to 1080 (and it looks very nice on a 1080 monitor). But, it’s relatively cheap to rent ($5200 to buy), and you do need a dedicated “data master” on set to download the footage from the solid-state P2 cards.
(I’d also advise avoiding HDV, but that’s me.)
Of course, if you have the budg for S16 or a Varicam or a Sony 900, go for it– they’ll all make wonderful images.
Thanks again for the tech details John!! Looking forward to seeing the print.
Dave
August 8th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
The Nines is probably an exception to the norm; Not many are intentionally looking for a standard def look. Normally, I can’t think of a single reason why anyone wanting to shoot digital wouldn’t shoot HD in 1080 24p.
The Panasonic HVX200, big brother to the DVX100 you had could’ve easily fulfilled that role and done a much better job (quality wise) than the SDX900. People like that cam ’cause it’s 2/3″ but besides that it’s inferior to the HVX200 in just about every way. Especially when the HVX is a $5k cam.
I suppose you could argue that DVDs are standard def…..but not for long.
August 8th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
Kevin J (#7):
For my money, American Cinematographer is the best place to read up on the geeky details. They talk a lot about the decision process. They sometimes gloss over some of the editorial details (understandably), but it’s not hard to infer what happened between shooting and color timing.
ErikH (#8):
We watched dailies on DVD, though the editor did screen some footage at the lab during the first week. The lab provides a limited number of DVDs, so the production office staff burned duplicates on cheap (honestly, crappy) DVD burners. It worked, mostly. DVD dailies have become the norm: they’re portable; you can skip through them easily; and you can quickly cue up a shot on set.
I don’t know about the generation loss with HDCam. We stayed on D5 (4:4:4, if I’m not mistaken) for everything cut-and-mastered. I can’t think of any situations where we were copying one HDCam to another. (Doesn’t mean we didn’t.)
Dave K (#9):
All good suggestions. I seriously geeked out on hype over the HVX200, and while my assistant Matt has used it for shoots, I’ve never touched one. Nancy recently shot with the HDX, the high-def version of the camera we used, and had a similarly good experience.
In terms of picture, what distributors mostly want is a really good-looking image, and I’d argue that the specific camera is a relatively small part of that — the musician is much more important than the instrument. No one is going to buy or not buy a movie strictly because of the camera it was shot with.
August 8th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
John–
Totally true. What I was talking about is the distribs seem to be insisting on HD now, and seem to pay more for it… but it all of course comes down to story and lighting and acting and all those things that make movies movies. :)
But when I’ve been asked, especially in the past year (as Blu-Ray/HD-DVD threatens to take off and the distribs are trying to “futureproof” their content), I tell people not to even consider SD under any circumstances, unless, like in the portion of THE NINES, there’s a specific thematic reason/look (like a mock-doc).
That HDX (and now the new HPX) are sweeeeeet cams. Though, if you’re looking int hat range, and not to geek out even further, but you have GOT to check out the Red camera… I saw the Peter Jackson movie at NAB and it blew everybody the heck away.
And in weirder synchronicity, I just saw my TiVo was grabbing GO from one of the pay channels. The work does live on, don’t it?
Thanks again! Dave
August 8th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
Thank you so much for this in-depth post on the technical specs of your movie. I love American Cinematographer and write ups like this because it really shows the numerous different workflow options out there. It just goes to show that there are many ways to skin a cat.
I’ve used the HVX200 with the redrockMicro 35mm adapter, which allows you to shoot with 35mm still lenses or cinema lenses to achieve the shallow DOF that normally comes with more expensive cameras. It can be quite cumbersome at times (inverted image, more light, etc.), but once you learn how to use it, it can produce great film-like images at affordable prices.
Looking forward to seeing the movie.
August 8th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Adam (#10):
I’ll stand by what I said in the article: resolution is not always your friend. With identical lighting, an actress of a certain age may be better served by SD. That’s why The Comeback shot SD when it could have easily shot HD.
I think you’re falling into the pixels-trump-all trap. I know it’s tempting to compare raw numbers. But an SD camera with great lenses may serve you better than an HD camera with lesser glass.
August 8th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
John:
Excellent recap, and a good thing for writers to start learning. Maybe one day I’ll put out an article on how telecine actually works (it’s oddly fascinating…at least…to me…).
Even though I love HD, I’m going to be shooting my movie this fall on 35mm. And why?
Cuz the freakin’ Genesis system is now more expensive in a lot of ways than a standard 35mm package (it’s the cameras themselves that kill ya now). I feel like I’m going backwards, to be honest, but there are still advantages to emulsion, and you’ve pointed a few out.
August 8th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
I don’t see it as a pixels thing. I own an HVX200 and I’d pick it over the SDX for several reasons having nothing to do with res: 32 gigs worth of P2 cards aboard (32 minutes of 1080 HD – hours of SD footage), better colorspace 4:4:4 vs 4:2:2, and variable frame rates to name a few.
I’ve got a 35mm adapter and shoot with the same glass you probably did. Oh – and my cam is about $15K with all the stuff (matte box, follow focus…etc) compared to about $30K for that ‘ol dinosaur.
Craig – Why the hell do you need a Panavision Genesis to shoot your film? Rent an F900 instead. I did last shoot. $2200 per day, another $1200 per day for Zeiss Digi Primes. You don’t need the Genesis. I don’t even know what your project is and I KNOW you don’t need a Genesis.
August 8th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
In your article you mention HDCam. Do you mean HDCam or HDCam-SR?
Also, why have D-5 as part of the mix? Once your using HDCam(-SR) I don’t see the point in switching to D-5.
HDCam-SR will do 4:4:4. I could be wrong but I don’t think D-5 can do 4:4:4 under any circumstances.
August 8th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
Now that I’ve looked at your flow chart, I see you were using SR @ 4:4:4.
August 8th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
One point that I don’t fully understand (maybe ’cause it’s five in the morning), but did you do your cut in full-resolution uncompressed HD? No offline? I don’t think you could have used HDCAM codec because I’m pretty sure it’s proprietary to Sony’s XPRI-systems and to use HDCAM in Avid you have to either transcode it into Avid’s own HD codec or use uncompressed. From between the lines I can read that preserving pristine quality wasn’t the first thing on your list so I’m guessing the former.
I’m just sayin’, most people (everyone) do an offline in SD resolution (or 720p nowadays too) for maximum flexibility then an online in uncompressed HD. From what you’re saying I’m understanding that you did not have a separate online session, but did everything on one computer. Am I missing something?
It would be great if you could shine a little light on this… unless we’re going on geek factor 10 already :)
And yes, Final Cut Studio all the way!!
August 8th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
**ck, sorry about that. Should have taken a look at the pdf first…
I’ll get mi coat…
August 8th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
Adam (#16):
I know you mean to be helpful, but it strikes me as arrogant to lecture two feature directors when you have no appreciable credits. For a studio feature comedy in 2007, you shoot Genesis, or you shoot 35mm. Craig is shooting 35mm. Done.
Tom Corwine (#17):
Reminder: the flowchart was the plan we had going in, not necessarily what we ultimately did.
I’m hugely unqualified to talk in any detail about colorspace and tape varieties. What I can say is that the vendors we dealt with (EFilm and Laser Pacific) used different tapes for different purposes, and that the screeners (HDCam) were made from the D5 master.
Aquafox (#19):
We didn’t cut HD. We didn’t have the hardware (storage and processing power) to make it practical. Instead, we used some proprietary Avid codec, and linked up to the HD footage later. It was an offline/online situation, but it mostly just meant renting a deck to input our footage.
Now, just 12 months later, I’m sure we would have cut something like HD (again, an Avid variety). But I honestly don’t think it would have made a noticeable difference in the final product. The editing process is mostly about timing, and the lower-res proxies give you a pretty good sense of it.
August 9th, 2007 at 1:22 am
As always, your selfless information from a world that a lot of us are working hard to become a part of is indispensable. I own a DVX100a (the kind Nancy used on “November”) and have used it on several projects and have been eyeing a HVX for a while…but after your comment (“I’d argue that the specific camera is a relatively small part of that — the musician is much more important than the instrument. No one is going to buy or not buy a movie strictly because of the camera it was shot with.”) I think I’ll stick with what I have for a while and focus more on the “Final Draft” of things, instead of the “Final Cut”.
Thanks again, RTA
August 9th, 2007 at 1:25 am
Just wanted to thank you for writing down the details John. Having only shot SD, it’s interesting to get a look inside the Film/HD process. Really appreciate it!
August 9th, 2007 at 4:56 am
Oy, all this information makes my head hurt. I haven’t read the Paradox of Choice, but I agree with the premise. I think your geekery helps you in this regard since it makes learning a lot of the gory technical details a bit easier. Well, if not easier, perhaps less intimidating.
I also agree with your take that resolution is somewhat overrated. On a more basic consumer level, compare people’s photos the next time you go to a wedding. Everyone has their digicams with various resolutions, but a printed photo from a 4 megapixel camera shot by a decent photographer will make a better print than the photos shot by someone who just bought an 8 megapixel digital SLR because they had some money to spare.
August 9th, 2007 at 7:35 am
Great info here John. Thanks for including us all in the process. BTW, I’m really diggin’ the poster.
August 9th, 2007 at 9:14 am
Wow, thanks for these details, John.
Is anyone else out there watching On the Lot? If you can get past the horrible mistress of ceremonies (I can’t keep my eyes off her breasts and/or shortness of skirts, and I’m a straight female), it’s fun to see what each of the writer-directors come up with in a week’s time. I really wish they’d show more about the process, though — how long do they usually take to write the script? and can we see some of that agony? (I would imagine they only have 1-2 days to think of an idea and commit it to paper in time for the actors to memorize lines.) How do they choose their actors each week (who decides gets who)? How do they work with the DP for lighting and other decisions? I’d also really enjoy seeing more in the editing room.
August 9th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Hi John - You may be over this post already (sometimes when I don’t check the site for a bit things really crop up!) I read the flow chart (whew!), but was wondering if you could elaborate on: “We built the show as true 24p, when we should have chosen 23.976, which would have made hooking up inexpensive monitors much simpler. But I felt some vindication upon learning that $100 million movies were hitting the same snags we were.” Was curious what snags you originally hit, how you figured out how to fix the problems, and (if you dare) which studio films were hitting the same blocks.
This is my kind of Geek Alert.
August 9th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Dara (#27):
Someone with a faster propeller than me will probably have a technical answer, but here’s my short version on the “true” 24p versus 23.976 issue.
Film is true 24p. So you’d think that would be ideal. The problem is that the video equipment you’re hooking up to is expecting 23.976. I don’t know if that’s drop frames or some other reason (again, slow propeller), but the way the math works out, you’re almost always better off at 23.976.
You can hook up a box to convert one to the other, or use a special monitor, but it’s costly. If we’d used 23.976, we could have used any HD set we bought at Best Buy for playback, which would have been sweet.
August 9th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Hey guys–
The reason that NTSC video is 23.976 is because NTSC color video was configured not at 30 interlaced frames per second (or 60 fields per second) but 29.97 interlaced frames per second.
Now, why would anybody do a frame rate of 29.97 and not just 30 you ask? (Or those smart Europeans that have their systems at 25 fps flat.) Well, it comes from the fact that when engineers were figuring out how to make B&W 30 fps television color and still have color broadcasts register on B&W tvs, they found they could add the color information but it interfered with some frequency or caused another issue… unless they ever-so-slightly slowed down the frame rate from 30 fps to 29.97 fps.
And in doing so, they screwed all editors forever. Now, terms like “drop frame” and “non drop frame” as well as the minute slowdown that has to happen to every feature film that’s transferred to NTSC video.
It’s totally annoying of course, but there it is. One would think that in the specs for HD which were debated for years they would have figured a way around this. HA! (And HA! again I say.) NTSC HD (if that’s even the term for HD that runs in North America and Japan and parts of South America) runs with the superannoying slowdown, at 29.97 fps. (Or at least one of the predominant HD configs does– there are two that are used by broadcast nets, 1080i at 29.97fps and another 720p at 60fps… which I believe is really 59.whatever.)
I honestly cannot believe I remember this stuff, but I do. It’s a curse.
August 9th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
I think SD is a mistake if outputting to film, but if the story is compelling and warrants it, then I guess there are exceptions. I’m looking forward to seeing the up-rezzed footage on a big-screen. Incidentally I think shooting RAW and making it look however you want in post is the way to go. For example, Zodiac looked awesome (shot with Viper Filmstream). John, ever heard of RED? They’re going to change everything. http://www.red.com
August 9th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Actually, I was trying to be helpful. Me small, you big. I get it. Whatever.
August 9th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Craig shoot with the Red One. You’ll be able to buy the camera yourself. :)
August 9th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Dave K (#29) summed it up nicely. Baiscally it has to do with the B&W to color transition and keeping B&W equipment compatible.
See the Wikipedia article on NTSC.
Also, the Wikipedia article on chroma subsampling for those interested in the whole 4:2:2 vs. 4:4:4 thing.
August 9th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Dave K (#29) summed it up nicely. Basically it has to do with the B&W to color transition and keeping B&W equipment compatible.
See the Wikipedia article on NTSC.
Also, the Wikipedia article on chroma subsampling for those interested in the whole 4:2:2 vs. 4:4:4 thing.
August 9th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
John,
I was hoping you could talk a little bit about ratios and why you would choose to shoot in one or another. On IMDb (I don’t know if this is correct) it lists THE NINES as being in 1.85:1. Why choose that as opposed to something wider?
And is how much the budget is/was available? Thanks.
August 9th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
John,
What Super-16mm film stock did you use from Kodak?
August 9th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
I enjoy watching all the excitement over the RED camera. I truly hope it’s great and successful, but really, it’s a camera, Mysterium sensor notwithstanding. A movie shot with it will not be magically awesome.
I wish grips got this excited over new c-stands. (Really! They have double the tip-less-ness!)
Daniel (#35):
1.85 made the most sense given the material. For Part Two, a reality show shot any wider wouldn’t be as believable, and I didn’t want to pillarbox an entire section. I love 2.35 in general. (Go was that, on Super-35.)
I will say, however, that the film is not entirely at this aspect ratio. One small section plays at a very unconventional ratio.
Dave K (#29):
I’ve already forgotten. Those numbers make my head hurt.
August 9th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
“A movie shot with it will not be magically awesome.”
Right – but it will give smalltime indies a tool that absolutely blows the doors off a genesis – Panavision wanted $25K per week when I called to rent the (overhyped) genesis – The RED is going to be about $45K with lenses…to buy.
Solid state storage, 4K resolution, 100fps overcrank. Bargain.
August 10th, 2007 at 4:23 am
People should absolutely be watching RED. Once their team works out the kinks with that camera it will be a contender in the digital domain. Steven Soderbergh is shooting his next two feature films using the RED camera. I think Soderbergh is a filmmaker that’s done it all: the mega multiplex movies, the DV feature with name talent and the low-budget independent that launched his career. I would say he has some clout.
August 10th, 2007 at 5:43 am
Hey John
Another great blog post, and nice one sheet!
Though I disagree, grips/sparks DO get excited by new c stands and the like – I know, I’ve seen it! (joke – how do you give a grip nightmares? Open up a truck full of opened c stands and ask to straighten them out).
Funny how people think some gizmo is going to revolutionize the industry. It doesn’t make catering etc any cheaper, that’s for sure! I’d still rather shoot 2 perf or S16 than any electronic medium unless the story called for it to be shot on video. The cost of film isn’t the biggest budget headache some seem to think it is.
Hope ‘Nines’ gets a UK distribution deal ;)
August 10th, 2007 at 9:40 am
It’s not the cost of film solely. I have shot a lot on 35mm. It’s the cost of laboratory developing, telecine, color timing and a host of other goodies that you pay for when shooting film.
35 will always be around and probably be the medium of choice for the bulk of films out there, but it is pricey, no doubt.
August 11th, 2007 at 9:07 am
Hi John! Thanks for the mention, and it is fun to see that flowchart now, what, almost two years later? Things continue to change, and rapidly (like you mentioning you might cut in HD now, but it wouldn’t affect the quality of the final result).
-mike curtis, hdforindies.com
August 12th, 2007 at 9:21 am
Thank you a lot for giving us the good technical details. Enjoy it.