HD For Indies

...so I've been getting slagged over on the Cinematography.net Mailing Lists for some comments I've made about digital acquisition & production. Some of them are good points, and their lashes sting but are lessons well learned. Some of the folks are arguing irrationally (of course _I_ think they're being irrational, and _I'm_ being rational...yeah right) and it's been driving me nuts. I've been discussing on and offline a bunch about the pace of technology in mature vs immature fields, costs as enabling factors, etc. After a lengthy heated discussion with someone, I came to discover they were a student and was miffed about it. I mentioned this to a usual contributor on the site, and out of the conversation came my favorite quote this week:

"A student? A STUDENT? Get out on PLANET BLEEDING, F******G EARTH and then get back to me once you have some dirt under your nails, some mud on your boots, and some scars on your flesh."

...and probably some blood in your socks.

(this was probably inspired by having chatted about Sin City too much beforehand)

....which is good advice for anyone, me most certainly included. I've been crowing about the cost advantages of digital acquisition, and there have been a lot of valid points made about workflows using HD and the perils and missteps involved. So rather than pack for NAB, which is useful but boring, here's some slivers of truth pulled out of my skin after the whipping. Some of this is good info gleaned from others with more experience, some of this is "duh" obvious that I feel needs to be stated for the beginners & dilletantes (like me!). If it's dumb and obvious and in here, it's probably mine.

Here goes:

-staring at a monitor isn't necessarily a good way to direct a film - watch the actors, please. In real time, with your own eyeballs.

-playing back performances on set is not always a good idea - not only does it take time, but if the actors are allowed to see themselves, they'll often dissect their performance to death and leech all the spontaneity out of their additional takes as they try to address particular little issues while they lose the bigger picture of their performance. So play back judiciously, for the eyes appropriate (a highly contextual call)

-the ability to "let it roll" isn't always great for creativity - one good thing about film was that everyone took it very seriously and was very focused when rolling. The whole "It's cheap, let it roll" can often mean a lot of missed marks and sloppy/casual work. Take a few more minutes, get everything right, THEN roll camera/tape.

-time on set IS super valuable - playback steals time

-time on set is incredibly valuable - while HD can require less light in some circumstances, it's lower exposure lattitude and quickness to blow out highlights can mean it takes longer to light your sets, because you're aiming at a smaller acceptable target range than film allows. Want to aim at a tea saucer or a serving platter? It's easier to aim for the target with greater margin of error.

-I made the point that HD lets you immediately check your results - it was countered that properly trained film people know what they are going to get and don't have to check it. Fair enough. But "properly trained people" from the film side are harder to find and cost more. Better trained people work faster, regardless of medium you're shooting with (assuming their experience is with that medium!).

-on bigger movies, the cost savings of HD become less and less of a valid issue, as the percentage of funds saved using digital tools becomes a smaller and smaller piece of the overall budget - big shows don't need HD to save meaningful amounts of money (docs the possible exception)

-maybe, perhaps, the best way to shoot HD is more like a film set's discipline - you CAN check playback etc. if you HAVE to, but otherwise treat it like a film shoot. "Letting it roll" can simply be burning valuable time. Time on set is the most expensive time of your entire movie process - you're paying actors, you're paying grips, gaffers, DPs, etc. etc. etc. Tape is cheap....time on set is most definitively NOT. Let's say you let it roll at the beginning of the day and do 15 or 20 takes of a scene, "because tape is cheap" (and I've spoken with directors of DV films who've done this)...are your actors exhausted and burnt out? Wasn't take 3, or 5, or 9 really good? Were takes 10-15 adding anything new? And more importantly, do you have time to finish the rest of your scheduled pages for the day? Most often HD is chosen motivated by a desire to save money in the budget, not for aesthetic reasons. If your budget is tight, your shooting schedule is certainly tight...you DON'T HAVE TIME to "let it roll", so it's a moot point.

-there were complaints about directors sitting in the video village staring at a monitor and "directing" the actors via loudspeaker, like some soap operas do. This is NOT a good way to get optimal performances from your actors, nor (obviously) good rapport between director and cast. Quality of the image is of lesser concern than quality of the performances. If the performances aren't convincing/compelling, it doesn't matter how perfect the exposure or focus was, or how well continuity was maintained.

-a lot of the points dissing the advantages of HD (let it roll, reviewing performances on set, direction from loudspeaker afar, etc.) had more to do with workflow rather than the quality of the medium itself. They dealt with HOW the technology was used, rather than the innate pros and cons of the technology itself. Some of the complaints of HD - lesser exposure lattitude leading to longer time lighting the scene, for example - WERE innate to the technology and were inescapable. But the "bad workflow" complaints of HD were just that - choices for workflow. I see no reason why you couldn't shoot HD with a film set's discipline and get good results (within the limits of the technology).

-big movies can afford to burn a lot of film, so it doesn't matter as much to them in the overall budget

-HD's niche is in lower budget projects, and not all the time

-a lot of folks kept saying that 16mm and HD cost about the same, and with new stocks like Vision 2, you're better off shooting 16 - but those budgets are usually predicated on doing your HD online on a godawful expensive Avid, and doing tape to tape color correction on a high end tape to tape system. Last year, such systems were many many many hundreds of thousands of dollars machines when I looked around at NAB. (and NO, I'm NOT talking about buying them, just using their price as a basis for what renting them+operator must cost!!!!) There are MUCH more cost effective systems that have 95+% of the image quality, 80+% of the features, and less than 10% of the cost. Unless your needs are extreme, your time very very little, and your budget large, these other options like Final Touch HD are worth looking at. (Plus they can offer you more flexibility in your editorial process, like the ability to edit after color correction is completed.)

-Stuart Willis of biki.net added: the only thing I think is really worth adding to your comments is the standard number of set ups per day. 10-15. 15 is moving VERY fast. 12 is average. setups are different from shots and you can probably get 18-20 shots from 12 setups if you're very good. He also has this posting on working with DV, and said biggest advantage of not paying for post is having the time to get things right. "I once spent nearly a year editing my own 7 minute short! why? cause the story didn't work (i didn't write it :)) and i had to experiment a lot and spend a lot of time thinking. the problem with most amateur productions in terms of editing is that they're done quickly. time is the greatest asset any filmmaker can have. use it." I agree. At least this pulls somewhat back to my side, rather than subbing it all out.

-on acquisition - I got rained on HARD for suggesting that there was a point of "good enough." A lot of film folks said this was typical of videographers who were happy with a "decent" image. I probably didn't explain myself sufficiently - if there's a point, either for film, video, digital, whatever, where you've captured X stops of exposure lattitude, your focus is Y sharp, your color is sufficiently whatever you want it to be...that's good enough. I said that it had to meet yours and your client's needs, and yours had better be more than your client's or something's wrong. Man, I got pounded on for that - some folks interpreted that as "make the client happy and you're done." which from a business perspective is technically all you have to tdo. Beyond that is gravy that only you and a few others care about. The story gets told sufficiently compellingly and gorgeously. Some of the film folks hated this idea and said so. Somebody said that if this attitude prevailed, no progress would be made. Nope. I just meant that once that threshold is reached of "good enough" at an affordable price point, the market opens up for the technology that made that possible. As for the "no progress comment" not true - if there are 2 or 3 vendors making competing products that are all good enough, somebody is bound to try to make theirs less costly, and/or somebody is bound to try to make theirs higher quality for the same price. The buyers are likely to pick the best bang for the buck that meets their personal quality needs, as most buyers always are. So inevitably, somebody will make, and somebody will buy, something that works better. Then the remaining competitors are urged to catch up. See? Inevitable progress, so long as there are multiple vendors not colluding. Basic Business 101.

-there are a lot of people very, very married to what they know and like, and will defend that irrationally, using rational arguments to defend their choice and irrational ones to attack the other choice/s. Most incredibly frustrating. Both the pro-film and pro-HD folks are guilty of this, so beware of "that's what I'm comfy with" biases. I'm trying to do this less, but I'm still guilty of this. But I'm certainly not alone is all I can say. Grr.

-actors on set on a greenscreen have a much higher requirement to "act" than do actors in a natural environment. So far, I haven't seen a well acted movie shot on greenscreen. Then again, all the entirely/most greenscreen movies I've seen (4 I can think of off the top of my head) have been scifi adventures, so subtle/great acting wasn't really a priority for them. It would be interesting to compare those to other similar scifi type films made with sets. But it's such a low number of candidates, it might not be a statistically valid comparison. Or maybe we need to develop better rules for shooting greenscreen movies, and actors overall haven't learned how to act well against them. Time will tell. But reacting to nothing has got to be harder than reacting to something believably.

-working faster isn't necessarily working better, but working faster saves money, and sometimes fitting within your budget is the only way to get it done

-perhaps a hybrid shooting style might be best - directors should watch the actors act and not the monitor during shooting. DP could watch the performance after the fact to verify technical adequacy if there's downtime. Otherwise, keep moving...

-actors need context - if you're shooting greenscreen, do everything you can to let the actors know where they are supposed to be, what's going on around them, establish eyelines, have stand-ins to be roto'd out later
-I once had a creative director at an agency suggest we should shoot all our stuff on greenscreen and put backgrounds in digitally. I wanted to smack him on the spot - pulling good greenscreen keys is timeconsuming and requires skill, and involves a whole lot more besides clicking an eyedropper on the green part

-on running over time on set- talking to an experienced gaffer, he was talking about the checks and balances present in the production industry that aren't present in the visual effects (or gaming) industries. If you've already booked someone for an 8, 10, or 12 hour day and you run over, it's already agreed that you'll pay extra for that privilidge. It's a choice for the filmmaker - don't shoot it and wait until tomorrow, slipping further behind, or shoot it and pay overtime tonight. If the crew is working at a reasonable pace, and you aren't finishing shooting your pages per day, whose fault is that? Probably you or your producers for not setting a reasonable amount of work to be done in a day.

-one of the most common beginner's mistakes is not realizing how long things will take, and having overly ambitious goals in terms of what can be accomplished in a day/week/month - this ends up costing them more in the long run

-three week shoots for indie features are common but brutal, and often lead to panicked last minute re-writes, trying to shoehorn more story into less running and shooting time. And these changes are made in desperate, panicked, hurry. So have a reasonable shooting budget. Your movie will improve for it. Personally, I feel it is a far, far better thing to do something simple and do it very well, rather than attempt something (overly) ambitious and do a mediocre job, or even worse do it poorly . How many late night cable indie flicks have you seen with poor lighting, mushy audio, and rushed acting that could have been so much better with a bit more time and effort? Cut some scenes, cut some characters if possible, do something small and simple well. It'll be more memorable that a poorly done overwrought mess. (Or at least memorable in a good way.) Budget getting tight? Sorry, the winged monkey space battle must go....

-as a practical matter, you raise the amount you've budgeted, or some fraction of that. You work with what you've got money for - you shoot as many days as you can afford and do the best you can. A lot of folks arguing against my pro-HD position slagged on backing off on quality, "producing crap", not caring about quality, etc. Hey buddy, on planet Earth, we got this thing called a budget, and ya gotta do what ya gotta do with whatcha got.

-post, especially digital efffects & sound/audio, are the most likely to get screwed in the budget - if you ran over your budget in shooting, it now comes out of what's left....post production.

-so if you're involved in post, apply all the pressure you can to make sure the shooting budget is reasonable. Common
scenario - unreasonably tight shooting schedule & budget established, it doesn't work, ends up costing more in overtime than if it had been reasonably scheduled in the first place. Post budget gets slashed, because post needs to work with the money left, not the money budgeted.

on money - this is perhaps the most significant, give-me-pause thing I've heard in the last year - if you're going to raise $1.5M for your indie movie, why not raise $1.7 and farm out the post to experienced post folks with high end gear, and not have all the headaches and suffer all the BS of doing it yourself? This was a very, very good point, and depressed me substantially. Why NOT farm it out to folks who know how to do it better than you, rather than have you do everything amateurishly, or suffer all the difficulties involved? The only good response I could come up to this would be to farm it out to someone using all these 80/20 solutions - 80% as fast overall, 20% the cost. Final Cut Pro, Final Touch HD, etc.

-very very few people are technically competent to tackle all of this themselves. And even if they are, should they really be this focused on technical execution rather than the storytelling? Very very few people have the technical proficiency and the storytelling capability to handle both parts...and with the demands of tight budget, no-time indie filmmaking, do you REALLY want to focus that much on technical arcana? In the end, where do you want your energy to go - to the creativity, or the technical cleanliness of the production? Or another way - do you want someone to say "Wow - great story! Great movie!" or "Gee, look how sharp and focused it is, how pretty the colors are." It's all about content. Story first, technical execution later. It takes both to make a good movie, and screwing up either can kill it. But bad story/acting/pacing/editing will kill it faster than some blown out highlights.

-As I posited on the CML list, how often do you hear about some slasher flick "I would have liked it better if the highlights had 5 or 10 percent more detail." For some kinds of movies, make it look as good as you can, but there is a point of "good enough" beyond which returns on your effort are rapidly diminishing, beyond which your time is better spent on other aspects of the movie. Although in response to my question, somebody pointed out Blair Witch...yeah kinda, but it was SUPPOSED to look amateurish as a story point, an active choice.

On a related aside, as for DP's chosing to shoot wildly panning, dark/underlit shots, I have no control over this...although I heard a good story about how theater chains like to turn down the bulbs in their projectors to make them last longer...so it's not all the fault of the DPs! : ) One complainer at a theater expressed dismay at the dim images during a movie to the theater manager who said it's because of DPs...and the guy whipped out his card - HE was the DP and didn't like how dark his footage looked on screen, he KNEW he hadn't shot it like that!

-on technology in general - film is a fairly mature technology - by this I mean it's been around for quite some time, and that a lot of the easy work has been done to refine and improve it. It's pricing and rate of improvement have somewhat stabilized. A lot of progress has been made in the quality of film stocks over the last 20 years - look at older films vs newer ones, it's not just the telecine that's improved. New stocks like Kodak's Vision 2 have done much to improve the look of film, especially when working with Digital Intermediate processes. On the other hand, HD, in terms of affordable, high resolution digital cinematography suitable for filmmaking, is a pretty new thing, arguably less than 10 years old. I got slagged on this for not defining my terms - the F900 (and Varicam) were the first viably affordable, functional, available cameras for digital cinematography in a commercially viable context as far as I can tell. So THAT kind of HD moviemaking - is pretty new, and still has a lot of room to grow. As traditional cinematography was based on film based still technology, so HD cinematography is based on CMOS and CCD based imaging technology often used in still cameras - a newer technology than film. Digital image acquisition is still fairly new and young, and the rate of change in terms of increases in quality and decreases in price are moving pretty fast. If you just chart the rate of progress for each of these in terms of increase in quality and decrease in cost, this gives me confidence that the quality and cost of digital cinematography will advance pretty quickly relative to the progress film technology is making. I think digital will catch up to film's current quality level well within my career (I'm 36), and is already of sufficient quality and cost to make interesting, compelling, commercially viable movies.

-Costs as enabling factors, and critical thresholds in the market...I wrote a bunch on CML about critical thresholds - when digital cinematography gets good enough to make a commercially viable/successful feature film that audience watches and leaves merely thinking "that was a movie, I liked it or I didn't" rather than "Why did that look wierd/different/bad?", that's a critical threshold. And man, I got nailed for that one. Lots of film folks said this was the classic videographer's mistake, squinting and calling something "good enough." I say that's cheating. When you set parameters, let's call them goals or required minimums, and can meet them, that's an important threshold. (Excuse me, this is redundant to something I said elsewhere, what follows isn't).

I tried to make the point that cost is a critical component in this equation, that it has to be affordable, that it has to be viable to make a commercially successful product. Some filmhead responded this was a moot point, "affordable" is a highly variable and subjective thing, that any product could be commercially successful or viable depending on it's usage.

I vehemently disagreed, saying "Technology is meaningless without a price point. Think about the effect of $1 chainsaws in the rainforest, of $200 cars in China, or $50 laptop computers available worldwide. Or what if computers to do animation, high definition editing, and/or visual effects were still $150,000 each?" The "true artists find a way" counter argument starts to fall flat when you proffer "What if paint brushes were $50,000 each? How much art would get made then?"

Just because something is possible does NOT make it commercially viable. And while costs do fall, they don't all fall at the same rate, nor do they inevitably fall to what one might call "affordable" in a given time frame. About the time I was born, it was possible to fly around the world, and it was also possible to fly to the moon. Have YOU flown to the moon yet? WHY NOT? When was the last time you flew across the country for two or three hundred dollars? Technological achievement is meaningless without a price point to make is accessible to a "viable" percentage of the marketplace. If movies cost $10 billion to make, there wouldn't be as many released. If GOOD movies cost $1 million, a whole lot more movies would get made. Woops, they are being made, just not necessarily good ones. Of course, would we have or want to spend the time to see more "good" movies per year...market saturation is another factor in this big equation.

I'm also wondering (no hard data) if the film industry might start suffering from financial pressure - it used to be that motion picture film could amortize it's R&D costs across the much wider base of still photography, both amateur/consumer and professional. Consumer film photography is drying up, FAST. Kodak doesn't sell film cameras in the US anymore. At all. As consumer film sales dwindle, won't this add financial pressure to the motion picture film group? Will this, won't this, imply smaller R&D budgets? Longer development cycles? With a smaller user base to amortize R&D costs, won't this eventually create pressure to start making film prices go up rather than down? This is conjecture, I have no hard evidence to support this other than decreasing film sales to the consumer market. If the cost of film holds steady or starts to rise, if it's competing with digital cinematography tools, which take advantage of digital technologies' penchant for rapid improvements and rapid cost decreases, that only hastens the day when digital cinematography can compete more effectively with film. How long might this take? I don't know, I'd guess (wildly) 2 to 20 years for this to start happening. At what point might, or what if, Kodak were to start selling film at a loss, solely to be perceived as "the high quality choice" used by Spielberg etc., as some other industries have done with decreasing margin products in order to promote the rest of their product line? This is all conjecture, motivated by me wanting digital filmmaking become more prevalent. (At least I can see SOME of my own bias, OK? ; ) )

Is HD the BEST choice overall? I think it _might_ be a good choice for certain types of projects as a budget driven thing, but certainly not all projects. Further research into budgets and end results quality will further illuminate the specific answers for specific types of projects. I'd certainly advocate digital for documentaries needing a lot of footage on a tight budget, for instance. Dust To Glory is a good example of mixed formats in a doc - they used DV for the "need tons of this stuff footage", literally placing DV cameras with people watching the race and saying "shoot'em as they go by!"; they shot HD for a lot of the "hero" footage and interviews, and they used 16mm for their (gorgeous) high speed, slow motion stuff. And for the most part, you don't notice or care much what each segment was shot on - it's exciting stuff. Even more impressive is that it was all edited with a heavily compressed, 14-20 MB/sec wavelet based codec using Cineform in Premiere Pro. But I digress, back to topic....

In a world of open ended budget, film rocks-detail, expressive depth of field, great exposure lattitude, etc.. But film, at least 35mm for sure, is overall a more costly medium to work with than HD. Arguments can be made about 16mm quality vis a vis HD, but the cost arguments are falling down for 16mm-most budgets claiming 16mm & HD are neck and neck were based on traditional high end posting environments, and it's not necessary to rent those kinds of facilities for equal quality from what I've seen so far. Bang for the buck? That's still debatable I think. Or at least I'm not satisfied I know for sure on that one.

Perhaps the best bang for the buck MIGHT be (I don't know, I'm surmising, not positing) to shoot 16mm and do a 10 bit 4:4:4 1080 res desktop based digital intermediate process, using the latest/greatest desktop tools like Final Cut Pro, BMD or AJA cards, SATA or X-Serve RAID storage, After Effects/combustion/Digital Fusion/Shake for visual effects, split monitoring (HDLink/HDP/one2one for pixel level detail monitoring on 23" LCDs, and downsampled SD analog component on calibrated studio monitor for color accurate/critical work), and products like Final Touch HD for color correction for eventual mastering to either HDCAM SR or a filmout. That's what I think is optimal at the moment, I'm sure that'll be tweaked in a week after NAB.

As Dennis used to say, "Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong."

-I'm trying to position myself as a consultant to help those filmmakers that want to take advantage of the technology but not tackle it all themselves. If you want help on what format to shoot/telecine to, what to get, how to set it up, what workflows to use, how to keep your editor running and happy, how to be ready to hand it off to the various people that need to touch/work on the project, that is what I'm offering myself to assist in.

Thanks to all on CML who contributed this feedback, even when it was harshly offered, it is much appreciated. 80+% of what is above is from CMLers, not me.

OK, enough rambling for now.

-ramblin' mikey

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