HD For Indies

Updated 6/6/04 (see bottom)

This is of niche interest, but worthy of posting on since I've now talked to 4 people that were planning on making stop motion short movies and were planning on either shooting 8mm film or digital video cameras.

My immediate response:

"Why on EARTH would you do it that way?"

...because that's how they know to do it.

My answer for all 4 was the same - at least consider the possibility of NOT using an 8, 16, or 35mm motion film camera, NOT using a DV or Digibeta camera - use a digital still camera!

You'd need to have manual exposure control and shut off all the auto-everything so you could maintain consistency from frame to frame.

Stop motion is incredibly time consuming - why NOT use a digital still camera? The color gamut is larger, the exposure latitude is greater, the exposure timing is open ended, the resolution is HUGELY higher for a pittance of the cost - want to shoot 2K, uncompressed, RAW format? OK, no problem.

What about software, you say? Just hit up versiontracker.com (on a roll here, no links!) and do a search for "stop motion". For Mac OS X, I got 5 applications, at least 3 were shareware. iStopMotion was the one I'd heard most recently of, so I recommended that twice in the last 24 hours.

So here's what you'd do: Shoot digital stills in RAW format. Either capture straight to the hard drive or to the camera card. Straight to hard drive is best. Be sure your camera supports RAW mode. Google it if you need to. It basically is the raw CCD data, and there are interesting things you can do with that data in Photoshop, there's a plugin to mess with that stuff. It used to be an expensive addition to Photoshop, I think it MIGHT MAYBE be included in Photoshop CS. Dunno. But RAW mode is to digital photography what the incredible exposure lattitude of film gives you in the lab/darkroom in the analog realm. And, it's not even compressed - no JPEG artifacts whatsoever.

But I have thousands of frames, you say, I don't want to have to open up each one in Photoshop!

Fine, I say - Photoshop has a quite conveniently deep batch processing and scripting mode. Worst case, you have to run a batch for each take, since each scene would have it's own particular needs for exposure & color correction.

Think of it this way - if you want to shoot digitally in 2K res, 4:4:4 color space, utterly uncompressed, you're talking about a multi hundred thousand dollar digital cinema motion camera, and a storage system costing many tens of thousands of dollars.

Or, you could, you know, just use a $1000 Digital Rebel or somesuch and get 90+ % of the image quality.

And still shoot snapshots on the weekend, and carry it around in a purse or backpack. Try that with a Dalsa. : )

So you shoot numbered RAW files. (JPEGs work, just not as well)

Batch process'em in Photoshop to color correct, by scene, to 8 or 16 bit TIFF files.

These are, of course, VERY high resolution, at least 2K on a side (that's just a 4 megapixel camera approximately)

Use Cleaner, Compressor, Compression Master or somesuch to batch convert that into a QuickTime movie - use the Microcosm codec if 16 bits per channel (48 bit color)....or leave as numbered TIFF files, that would probably work fine, too.

Use Cleaner or somesuch again to batch that into a lower res, proxy file for editing. Make sure you keep the same file/folder naming and filing structure as the source material.

Take these proxy files to Final Cut Pro and do an edit. Just worrying about editorial decisions at this point.

If you want/need to, get it over into After Effects via Automatic Duck products for careful work, like very high quality pans and zooms, special effects, or floating point color correction via Color Finesse (which is included in the now shipping version 6.5, by the way).

If not, use the Offline trick in Media Manager to swap out for the high res stuff - then change your setup prefs, and render out (slooooow) your high quality master. Not all effects in FCP HD will process even at 10 bits per channel, so beware - you could be processing your results down to 8 bits per channel quality, but still taking up 16 bits per channel amounts of space (twice as much!). Therefore, After Effects, with support for 16 bits per channel, is mo betta for final cookout.

After Effects has a built-in process to handle proxies - you can work with proxies, then render with the full res stuff - even in 16 bits per channel color. After Effects can also handle custom aspect ratios, such as if you wish to process traditional 2K (2048x1536) resolution files at 1.85:1 aspect (or whatever).

Render out your finals from After Effects when you're done messing with it there - congratulations, if you want to go to 35mm film, you have high resolution, 4:4:4 color, 2K (or higher) 16 bit files. That is full on Hollywood quality, assuming your camera and cinematography made imagery sufficient to make the effort worthwhile. So long as you properly cropped and accounted for aspect ration, you're all set. After Effects can do that for you, too.

And all this can be done with simple, low cost, FireWire, SATA, or ATA drives. No mega-expensive array required. If you have one, great. But not fundamentally required.

If you're that serious, just send this enormous QuickTime (or more likely #'d TIFF files, that's what SwissFX and the like wanted the last time I talked to them) to the film-out vendor and you're golden (insert lengthy discussion on color calibration, white point, gamma, etc. here).

Or render a file out to an appropriate codec for the intended tape format you want, throw on whatever media (FireWire drive, DVD-R, series of DVD-Rs), mail it to a post house and have them import that into their NLE and drop it to the tape format of your choice. If you put it in a native codec for their NLE, then you save even more money. See? You don't even have to have your own deck. Easy as pie.

The advantage of the above described workflow is that image quality is kept INCREDIBLY high throughout the entire process, allowing for gorgeous imagery and very fine, smooth looking color correction. And from this Digital Master, you can now sample down to whatever you want. Just for fun, let's say you made 2048x1080 (a SMPTE 372M standard, still can be sent over HD-SDI at at least 12 bits per channel linear not log) frames after cropping in After Effects from your source high res files. This would let you master to 35mm film as well as Hollywood does presently, but also make an HD master (1920x1080 after a little cropping) in D-5, HDCAM, HDV, or other HD format; a file for DVD authoring, and a standard definition video master (that would be incredibly clean and pristine). How's that sound?

Of course, there are other simpler, less complex workflows too - shoot JPEGs, keep'em in labelled folders by scene and take, batch'em to QT movies in the working codec of your choice, etc., kick out to DV/HDV/DVCPRO HD/HDCAM/film whatever.

Assuming your color correction was calibrated, but that's another lengthy article discussing tests etc.

Anybody want me to flesh this out? I'd be willing to, but only if there is some (any) demand for it.

mike@hdforindies.com

UPDATE 6/6/04: Reader Jason Rodriguez wrote in (thanks!) to say this:

"I think the main problem that you'll encounter is soft lenses with the digital still cameras. Most broadcast lenses are very, very good, whereas many DSLR lenses aren't. You'll basically have to invest in Canon "L" series or something like that (preferably the prime lenses) to get good results, because the other lenses will not live up to a blow-up on screen-they're just too soft."