Why HDTV production is making film shoots a thing of the past
By Bob Burnett and Dan Bailes
Bob Burnett: I used to always shoot public service announcements and TV spots on film. Sometimes, marketing and advocacy programs too.
After spending 90+% of my time working in video it was great to have projects where shooting film was possible. By its very nature film offered a different perspective to approaching a shoot and a "look" that made the captured images seem very special and different.
Of course film shoots offered moments where the magic would be momentarily interrupted, like the time the assistant camera person was changing mags, dropped the just-shot one which popped open (he also forgot to tape the mag closed) exposing the previous four hours of set-ups and shots.
Never mind those moments—in fact, forget them—because they aren’t going to happen again. Given how the landscape of work has changed I doubt I’ll have the opportunity to justify using film again. The new generation of video cameras (High Definition as well as DV) has put a serious crimp in my ability to rationalize using film on shoots. And I’m not alone. I see so many things on TV that were once shot on film now being shot on video.
Screenshot from GVI's production "Great Schools By Design" for the American Architectural Foundation
But what about those wonderfully unique qualities only possible when shooting film that in the past made video look a far distant second place?
Let’s review a few basic points of where we are today:
Aspect ratio? Not a problem, video now shoots flawlessly be it 16:9 or 4:3. All it takes is a quick, menu driven adjustment to make a change.
Shutter? Got it. Video has an adjustable shutter making 24p frame rates somewhat replicable.
Video’s electronic image replication versus the deep, lovely irreplaceable nuance of film’s image exposure? Well…yeah…we all know about that but depth-of-field adjustments, inclusion of "grain," color correction and pulldown "filmlook" manipulation are all basic "drag and drop" tools in editing now. Just think what Photoshop is capable of doing in still photography (be it film or digital) and the same broad range of possibility is happening in video editing and color correction.
Screenshot from GVI's production "Stop the Aerial Hunting of Wolves in Alaska" for Defenders of Wildlife
Dan Bailes: I grew up with film—first as an assistant cameraman (circa 1970) and later as an editor. I learned all about 16mm ECO reversal film (ASA 16)—if you didn’t know how to light back then you’d end up with a shiny figure surrounded by darkness. Then came the faster reversals—but with all that grain. Man, when Kodak rolled out 16mm negative it created a revolution. Finally "Big Yellow" had created something to rival the ever-growing incursion of video. Or so we thought at the time.
I loved editing film—namely hour-long documentaries or political spots. For me it was the perfect medium. I learned how to develop a deep memory to keep all those shots in my head. I devised little tricks to make sure my tracks stayed in synch to the picture and developed a complex filing system using film bins, vault boxes and hundreds of two- and three-inch cores for all those trims and outs.
I learned how to pre-visualize effects like fades and dissolves and mark the film with grease pencil so the negative matcher would set up the a and b rolls correctly. (Those days, after you were done with the creative editing, you had to match the negative to the original and send it to the lab for timing to get the contrast and color balance just so. Then you’d review the first answer print, call up the lab with changes and hope the second or third answer print would get it right.)
I devised workflow systems for my assistants (I almost always had at least one assistant) so I could spend my time on the creative side while they managed the mechanics and filing. And it was a great way for them to learn editing. But the best part was it was all very physical, as I’d get into a rhythm: view, judge, stop, pull down the roll, mark, cut, splice, and push on to the next. I got so I could work as fast as I could think. Pure heaven.
Of course, as we all know, nothing lasts forever. Video soon took over and made editing a nightmare. Wonderful non-linear film editing became locked into linear and ugly video. And God help you if you wanted to lose a shot half way through the edit. You had to go down a generation until pretty soon you could barely read the window-burned timecode on the smeary VHS dubs. Staying calm and developing the patience of Job became just as important as lining up great shots to tell a story.
Thankfully, all the visual sense I developed as a film editor helped. And I often worked with footage shot on film and "dumped" (great word, that) to tape. Then along came the next innovation, non-linear computer-based editing, and with it the death of film editing.
My first experiences working with (computer-based) Avid’s Media Composer were mixed. With computers, if you don’t carefully label and file your work, you’re lost. And you have to spend all that time logging and importing the picture and sound elements. I’ve worked on projects where more time was spent on capturing/digitizing the media than on the creative process. Back in the days of film editing, three to four months was standard for editing an hour-long television documentary. Now, for a lot of cable TV projects, three weeks or less is more the rule. So instead of presenting polished, thoughtful work, the first draft effort is typically what goes on the air.
In the old days, the path to becoming a film editor required years of working as someone’s assistant. You had to know so much about the entire process to do your job right—often the editor would direct the lab finishing process as well as the audio mix. Now editors often do their own Avid-based digital color correction and audio mix.
I must admit, editing today is truly amazing. The programs developed by Avid and Apple allow you to do just about anything you can imagine.
But the biggest downside to all this innovation is that we’ve lost the training ground that went with film editing. As a newbie, you’d typically work with ten or twenty editors over the course of several years before you developed the expertise to call yourself an editor. What a great way to learn. There’s nothing like that today.
It seems like every technological advance is constructive and destructive at the same time. Yes, some things are easier and the barriers to entry are constantly lowered. And the tension between innovation vs. the expertise that comes from experience will probably always be with us.
But for me, what is most important is the content. Understanding what you are trying to say and deciding how you want to say it. Then, it’s just a matter of using the available tools to get the job done. Whether its art or artifice, all this technology is just a means to an end. Making the pictures tell a story is still the most important thing. So for me, I’ve learned to keep my eyes and ears open and to look for inspiration where ever I can find it.
Bob Burnett: Our aim here isn’t to be depressing or to wallow in some great, lost era of film—it’s just to present our small slice of how we’ve seen things change. Instead of bemoaning the changes, Dan and I are excited to be producing videos for use on DVD as well as on the web—where image quality is vastly improving and in many cases our stories are reaching a wider audience and having greater impact than in the past.
________________________
Bob Burnett (Creative Director) and Dan Bailes (Senior Editor) work together at GVI in Washington, D.C.
I stepped away from filmmaking and videography several years ago. The whole film -vs- video dust storm was well under way at that time and the first variable frame rate video cameras had just appeared. Among the primary reasons I fled was the increasingly oppressive techie nature of the whole filmmaking process. The rapidly waning film-vs-digital debate in photography pales compared to the similar debates that rage with the 24/30 photos-per-second crowd.
So this post gave me the deja vu chills.
Posted by: Ken Tanaka | Tuesday, 12 February 2008 at 11:23 PM
Most of this is true (I am a cinematographer that shoots film as well as video), but you cannot change depth of field in post.
One of the biggest compromises in video is the loss of shallow depth of field. The mini-DV cameras of today have 1/3" chips. Betacam-sized cameras (broadcast field cameras) have 2/3" chips. 35mm motion picture stock film is even bigger (24mm x 15mm-ish - it is 4 perforations of 35mm film as the film is run vertically... then cropped down to 1:1.85 aspect ratio).
The problem with the small ccd chips is similar to small chips in point and shoot digital cameras: EVERYTHING is in focus. To get a wide angle field of view on a small chip you need an absurdly small focal length (about 3 or 4mm on a mini-dv camera) Hence, super depth of field.
Some innovative people have invented a video lens adapter that focuses the image from a motion picture camera's lens onto a spinning ground glass the size of a 35mm frame. The video camera then records the image (with all of its 35mm optical effects glory) as rear-projected onto the spinning ground glass. (The glass spins to blur out the texture). Shallow depth of field is back - at the cost of about 2 stops of light.
While you can use a blur tool in photoshop to knock out the background in a still... it is incredibly hard to track the effect in a moving shot.
Posted by: George | Wednesday, 13 February 2008 at 01:07 AM
"Back in the days of film editing, three to four months was standard for editing an hour-long television documentary. Now, for a lot of cable TV projects, three weeks or less is more the rule."
Three weeks! I wish I was so lucky. The last time I did a half an hour TV documentary, we had to do it in 24 hours _straight_. And it was done on Beta, none of your fancy digitising, tons of audio and video tracks, fades and crosswipes...
Fortunately, my editor was a guy who studied editing on film and he knew what he was doing.
I do agree with you on content. So many people doing TV nowadays don't have a slightest idea about even the basics of directing, cannot work with their cameramen to get interesting footage, have no sense of rhythm and, particularly, have no wit or sense of humour.
Posted by: erlik | Wednesday, 13 February 2008 at 02:17 AM
What a great article.
It opened my eyes to read that "Back in the days of film editing, three to four months was standard for editing an hour-long television documentary."
I suppose the only way to judge what has been lost and what gained, is to fast-forward 10 years from now to see what editors with no film background have learned to do.
Posted by: David Bennett | Wednesday, 13 February 2008 at 04:57 AM
The bonus is video's accessibility to that talented group of people who were/could have been left out of the picture by the sheer cost of using film.
Posted by: Imants | Wednesday, 13 February 2008 at 05:49 AM
George---to clarify the depth of field point. It's become much easier in the Smoke/Inferno editing world to change depth of field--and I was mostly thinking of interview situations where it's not tough at all to do...as you said tracking is much more difficult. That said, we tend to light and shoot it right in the field to create to capture the shot we want and very rarely find a need to correct in editing.
Posted by: Bob | Wednesday, 13 February 2008 at 09:07 AM
I take two major thoughts away from this interesting then-and-now look at film/video:
1) Whether you're shooting stills or motion pictures, in this time of mature digital technologies the choice between film and digital is largely governed by output intent.
For web videos and HDTV broadcasting, digital HD is good enough, just as digital shooting has become good enough for typical photojournalism, event shooting, and home consumer uses.
Meanwhile, film lives on where the output demands it: IMAX movies, a significant-but-shrinking proportion of feature films, large contact prints for fine art, etc.
Film will soon fall out of use completely in motion pictures, though - much sooner than it will in still pictures. IMAX is already starting to launch their digital projection solution, and that's arguably the most demanding output intent in common use for motion pictures.
I only hope that some of the smaller boutique film manufacturers - who aren't dependent on large-scale coating production for the motion picture industry like Kodak was - can remain alive for those of us shooting stills. Digital still has a few hills to climb before it can match a 20x24" contact print.
2) In both motion and stills, digital technology is pushing more and more of the creative decisions to the end of the process. A digital film-maker can create pans and tracking shots that the camera never executed, composite scenes together, etc. For digital stills, the same welter of options awaits the savvy Photoshop user. Just fire up a plug-in and choose from 400 different classic film stocks, post facto. The days of holding the creative result in your mind and crafting every decision you make with that result in mind are falling away.
If there's anything this piece makes me miss, it's not film itself, it's the way film necessitated a sort of creative "architecture". Orson Welles and Ansel Adams were not so different, and the way they worked was very much shaped by the nature of the process required by film. Planning was fundamental to the realization of a complex creative vision.
Digital is leading us to an approach more akin to collage than architecture. Gather lots of raw data, and make all the creative decisions later. (Often under the pressure of a post-processing deadline that ironically leaves very little time for creativity)
I don't necessarily find any fault with that approach, but I do hope that we'll continue to see some brilliant iconoclasts approach image-making as architects - shaping their entire workflow in their mind before they ever fire the DSLR shutter or take off the HD lens cap. We have them now...will we have them 50 years from now?
Posted by: Jonathan | Wednesday, 13 February 2008 at 07:06 PM
I wonder if in the future we will have forums, web sites and perhaps even psychotherapists occupied with people who try to come to terms with the fact that cars will run on electric power rather than gasoline and the subtle differences around it.
Imagine, Gas vs. Electric flame wars... something to look forward to.
Posted by: Dirk | Wednesday, 13 February 2008 at 09:36 PM
What has DV done for the production industry? It has given tremendous opportunity to people who were locked out by the expense of the technology, and the skill set needed to get seriously involved.
It has also diluted and atrophied the talent pool, reduced rates, driven down budget expectations in all departments, and generally created a staggering amount of really bad, really cheap looking, cartoony stuff, created by people calling themselves directors of photography, who had never heard the term three years ago, and couldn't light their way out of a wet paper bag.
There is no free lunch.
As far as film or video goes, it pretty much boils down to taste.
Posted by: JBrunner | Friday, 15 February 2008 at 10:47 PM
I'm not sure you can convincingly change your depth of field in post production that easily. Simply blurring the background is not the same at all. Things get progressively blurrier as they get further away from focus, it's not just in-focus vs out-of-focus, there is a whole gamma between the two.
A z-depth like map, combined with gradients and software that simulates the geometry and curvature of the blades can give you a somewhat bokeh like effect, but most of the time it pales to the real thing.
I'm not saying it can't be done, I just don't think it's that trivial.
Posted by: Pedro Estarque | Saturday, 16 February 2008 at 11:18 AM
Here's what I don't miss about film production:
1. Sweaty hands in changing bag in August.
2. Trying to get loop set just right on a finicky Eclair ACL.
3. Having the bearings seize up in your Steenbeck flatbed the night before your scheduled mix.
4. Crappy B&W mix prints (because your color workprint is so chopped up there is doubt that it will make it through projector.
5. Hauling around a Nagra IV recorder along with an extra set of twelve D cells "just in case."
6. Anything involving negative cutting, including the toxic fumes.
7. Having an entire shooting day's film destroyed because it broke in the soup at the lab.
8. A hair in the gate.
9. Having your film element "cleaned" before telecine, and coming back dirtier than before.
10. High speed cameras that sound like chain saws.
11. Finding your beloved "Mitchell movement" has put a new set of sprocket holes in your just-shot film.
12. Going to the lab for a color timing session only to find the entire answer print is green.
13. Not having the right color correction filter.
14. Moviola flatbeds that decide on their own that sync is optional.
15. A PA who sends your exposed stock to a lab in NY (instead of Hollywood) because that was the address on the extra camera reports in the ditty bag.
16. Shooting your animation and forgetting to put the platen down for a frame.
17. Having your producer make a picture change after you have locked picture and sound before your mix.
19. Ordering "Dust Off" by the case.
20. The seemingly endless transfers of your Nagra tape to mag stock.
21. "Coding" your film and mag.
22. Optical tracks.
23. Filing your trims.
24. Having your "core" drop out before a screening.
25. Trying to find the one magazine amongst twelve that is putting intermittent scratches on your neg stock.
26. Cinch marks.
27. Trying to color-correct a bad CRI. Or a bad IP/IN.
28. Having the lab ask you, "Are you sure it was vaulted here?"
Shall I go on? :)
Posted by: Jim | Monday, 18 February 2008 at 05:51 PM