This week we spent preparing for our first weekend of shooting.
I've got some comments to pass along about how to work with the talent,
especially if you're crew. We've also made our lives more difficult by
not having put more time into preproduction. Everything is connected,
from Producer to production assistant. Things go all bass ackward if
you don't communicate .
We're going to be using a Panasonic HVX200, which is an HD camera that
has many benefits over the camera we've been using up to now, the
Panasonic DVX100.
The first thing is that the menu controls and switches on the outside
are mostly the same, so the learning curve is limited to working with
the media. The HVX can record to tape, but only standard definition. To
record high definition you record to solid state memory cards, called
P2 cards. Here are a few reasons on why HD is a better format:
Disadvantages include:
In this episode I take a shot at explaining the difference between HD
format and HDV format and frankly I don't think I made anything clear.
It's useful to know, but not critical, so I'm going to lay it out here.
If you need to know more, do some research on your own, otherwise, skip
the next three paragraphs.
HD and HDV are capture formats. They're good formats for compressing
data so you can fit as much data as possible on what ever medium they
require, HD requires P2 cards, HDV can use MiniDV tapes, same as for
standard definition. Both HD and HDV record the same resolution, and
for all I've been told, the same 4.2.2 color space. Standard definition
video records in 4.1.1 color. What qualifies as high end digital
video, approaching film quality, is 4.4.4 color. I don't need to
explain how it works, it's enough to understand that the capacity to
capture all the available color is limited as you move from film, to
HD, to SD. By the way, film is a poor second to the color capture
capability of our own eyes.
HDV cameras are less expensive than HD cameras for the reasons already
mentioned in the advantage list above, real slow motion, etc. HD is
easier to edit immediately after capture compared to HDV due to the
different compression formats they each use. HDV captures footage in
groups of 15 frames, called GOP - Group Of Pictures. The first frame
contains all the picture information inside the frame, then each frame
following that contains only those pixels that have changed. Take a
picture of a wall with HDV and the first frame contains all the info,
each of the following frames have no new information and so have no
additional data. That keeps the file size down so it will fit on the
the tape. If a person or even a fly moves through the frame every frame
that records changed information has to record it, because it's not on
the first frame. But only the pixels that changed need to be recorded.
And thats fine until you need to edit the video. Then you find you
can't cut inside the GOP sections, they're like a single unit. To get
past this problem you need to convert the digital video to an
intermediate codec that reconstitutes each frame, completely restoring
the data to each frame. This of course makes the files larger, but
that's the price you pay for editing this format on a digital nonlinear
editor like Avid or Final Cut Pro.
Next week we shoot the bar scene Saturday and Sunday.
