I read something in American Cinematographer about 2 months ago about a D-20 shoot in the UK. I think it was a music video.

Thanks loads for that Cyril! You're right: the Feb 2006 issue of American Cinematographer (the one with Munich on the cover) covered a Music Video shoot on page 76. Here are the details:

• Artist: Jeffron
• Track: "Dance"
• Director: Tom Bridges
• DP: Robin Holder
• Focus Puller: Iwan Prys-Reynolds
• Gaffer: Stein Stie
• Camera: Arri D-20
• Camera supplier and contact: Bill Lovell [Arri's world-wide product manager] @ Arri
• Lenses: Zeiss Ultra Primes
• Chroma subsampling: 4:4:4
• Locations: Attica (night club in London) and a soundstage
• Production company: Split Image
• Post-production: Split Image

Apparently Holder first saw the D-20 at the British Cinematographer Society (BSC) show at Elstree.

If I do an article on "film style" high def cameras then I'd love to interview the crew on this project.

Does anyone know of any other projects shot in the UK on the D-20 or other "film style" digital cameras? Anyone got any insights on the post workflow?

Hmm... on p24 of the Spring edition of Sony's "Producer" magazine is this information about a Nestle commercial shot on the D-20 and recorded to HDCAM SR

Prod Company: Feel Films, London. MD = Nick Hirschkorn. Set up in 2004.

The raw 4:2:2 8-bit/channel video was edited on Final Cut Pro by Keith Mottram and on-lined on Shake.

Apparently Arri Media has invested in 22 Sony SRW-1 / SRPC-1 HDCAM SR compact portable recorders. I guess they must have at least that many D-20s, right??

I'd like to step in at this point to show off by saying:

I USED THE D-20!

Ooh yeah!

I made a short film last year ("Caged") which was largely shot on an SR3 but we had a one day studio shoot with the D-20 as well. I do hope you're all ever-so jealous.

:D

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Stephen
^{www.redcamera.net}

Wow, that's very impressive! How did you get hold of a D-20? Don't those things rent for like £3,000 per day?!

That makes me very enthusiastic. I'm producing a short at the moment and on Saturday we had a bit chat about which format to shoot on (probably two SR3s). I (slightly sarcastically) suggested that we should contact Arri about using the D-20 but it seems that you've actually done what I was joking about!

How well did it intercut with the super-16mm? Did you have any problems in post production? What format did you record the output of the D-20 onto? HDCAM SR 4:4:4?

Wow - if you used it last yeah then I guess you must have been one of the first people to have every used it in the UK.

Thanks,
Jack

Quick reply as I'm off to a scoring session in a minute:

1) Old Chinese Proverb say "'tis not what you know, 'tis who you know". We had it for free :)

2) We recorded out to an SRW-5000 HDCAMSR deck (only in 4:2:2 though). It was all in studio so the trailing cables were not an issue.

3) It looks gorgeous. However, the SR3 footage is B/W and push-processed to give it a real grainy/arty look. The D-20 footage is currently being graded to match.

Post again later.

Bye.

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Stephen
^{www.redcamera.net}

Does anyone have anything to say about the 'new breed' of uncompressed digital video cameras, such as the Thomson Viper FilmStream. I know Fincher has been using the camera on Zodiac, I'm pretty sure this is the first feature film to do so. The camera outputs at about 700mb/second. If this is the way digital production is headed, surely it means a whole new set of problems for post production by tripling the volume of data. Although it must look spectacular.

Yes, the "high-end high-def" market is getting pretty interesting. I think there are 4 "bands" of HD camera at the moment:

band 1
At the cheapest end, you've got HDV (Sony Z1, Canon XL-H1, that JVC camera etc) and the low-cost DVCproHD camera the HVX-200.

"band 2*
"Pro" HD ENG-style cameras like the Sony-F900 and Panasonic VariCam that cost in the region of £60,000.

band 3
High-end ENG-style cameras like the Sony-F950 and Thomson Viper. Both these cameras have been around for several years. Quite a few films have been shot on these cameras. I think the first was Episode I of Star Wars which was shot on a Panavised F900. Collateral was shot on a Viper and 35mm I believe.

DPs tend to dislike these "ENG-style" cameras for a number of reasons: they're damn complex to set-up, they've got low-res viewfinders, they can't take 35mm lenses and they've got sensors significantly smaller than 35mm film (giving deep depth of field).

band 4
"Film-style HD cameras* like the Arri D-20, Panavision Genesis (which "Superman Returns" was shot on), Kinetta (not released yet), RED (still in development) and the Dalsa Origin. All these cameras are very new. I think "Superman Returns" will be the first feature to use one of these "film-style" digital cameras.

I believe all the cameras in bands 3 and 4 are capable of outputting very, very high datarates. In fact, almost all the cameras listed above can output "uncompressed HD" in one form or another. For example, the Canon XL-H1 has an HD SDI output.

Full uncompressed 2k runs at about 344 MBytes/second and full uncompressed 4k runs at about 956 MBytes/sec. I think you have two options for recording these huge datarates:

1. Record the RAW, uncompressed data onto vast RAID arrays.
2. Compress using Sony's HDCAM-SR (1920×1080 4:4:4 at 800 Mbit/sec) or a wavelet recorder. Or compress using the Cineform codec (which might be wavelet based?) which then allows you to edit 1920×1080 4:2:2 on a beefed-up home PC.

So yes, these vast datarates do pose problems for post houses but the problems are solvable and are intimately related to the problems of Digital Intermediates. Soho is one of the world-leaders for DIs, I believe.

There's quite a lot of information about Cameras and Formats over on the Movie Making Manual WikiBook

I recently read a technical paper by Silicon Graphics on the future of storage and data transfer and they see a requirement in the next ten years for storage solutions that can take PETABYTES of data and have significant transfer rates to allow people to work in real-time on these large files.

I've also read some info on tests scanning Kodak Vision 2 stock at 6k and post-processing at this resolution. Apparently it is workable if a touch slow at present. There are actually film scanners that will handle 6k - but it takes at least 2secs per frame, which means digitizing rushes takes days! But it is feasible and, in time, will become easier and more common as technology improves.

The issues with "Digital Film Cameras" go beyond resolution and dynamic range though. Digital is traditionally a replacement for analogue - but film isn't analogue, it's not even electronic, so replicating the "look" is somewhat problematic. The likes of George Lucas argue that the common cinemagoer can't tell and doesn't care - but I can tell and I care! And just because Joe Public can't quantify a difference doesn't mean they can't perceive it.

My own feeling is that "Digital Film" is not anywhere near being a replacement for the real thing - but it is complementary and if you respect that video has its own style and look then you can create projects around them (a la Rodriguez).

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Stephen
^{www.redcamera.net}

"My own feeling is that "Digital Film" is not anywhere near being a replacement for the real thing - but it is complementary and if you respect that video has its own style and look then you can create projects around them (a la Rodriguez)."

I agree. Although I would be a bit more enthusiastic about "digital film". I think it's getting very close to being good enough.

Do we need 6k? As I understand it, 4k projection looks lots cleaners and sharper than 35mm anamorphic projection... so do we really need 6k or even 8k? I suppose it might be nice to supersample (i.e. sample at 6/8k and then down-convert to 4k electronically).

There's an argument that if you shoot the highest res possible then downsample, the image somehow retains something of the quality of the higer res. Although "resolution" doesn't actually apply to film as such, it is known that 35mm film produces something in excess of a (comparative) 10k image.

So in Digital Intermediate terms, you're already "downsampling" by scanning at 6k, then downsampling again to project at 4k (although virtually all digital projectors in cinemas are currently only 2k!)

But like I said, film isn't digital and it's not electronic so the exact comparison is impossible to make - a projection print would probably only rate at about 2k, but it somehow retains information that a digital projector doesn't. The print looking "cleaner" and "sharper" does not necessarily equate to "better" - hence the comment about differentiating bewtween being able to quantify and perceive.

An example would be that I saw Attack of the Clones both as a standard (film) print and as a DLP projection - the film print was actually more pleasant to the eye, but I don't know why exactly.

It doesn't help that the human eye is still largely a mystery :)

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Stephen
^{www.redcamera.net}

"There's an argument that if you shoot the highest res possible then downsample, the image somehow retains something of the quality of the higer res."

Yes, it's to do with spatial sampling frequencies and the Nyquist limit. It goes something like this:

When converting an analogue signal into a digital signal, you cannot hope to capture any frequencies above 1/2 of your sampling rate. Indeed, if you don't filter out these high frequencies before digitisation then they'll digitise as noise. You can help "fix" this problem by "oversampling"... i.e. by sampling at a higher frequency than you plan to record at (this is quite a standard procedure in modern digital audio applications).

The WikiPedia article on the Nyquist frequency explains it better than I can.

So: it's a well-observed fact that "oversampling" is a Good Thing. So yes, sampling at 8k for a 4k post-production workflow would be nice. Likewise, shooting HD for an SD finish also has advantages.