Digital cameras come of age

It seems like only yesterday that any "film" shot on a digital camera had to work extra hard to be taken seriously. At first it was a battle for a digitally produced movie to get the same respect as a celluloid film (DV or HD compared to 16mm or 35mm film). Enter George Lucas and changes to the post production industry triggered by an insatiable appetite for visual effects and an affinity for the new color correction/grading tools offered by digital.

The past 7 years have seen a gradual embrace and acceptance of high-definition video formats - even for studio films. Lucas' Star Wars 2 & 3, Michael Mann's Collateral, Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, Mel Gibson's Apocolypto, and most recently David Fincher's Zodiac were major benchmark "films" all utilizing high-definition video to create complete movies that were viewed in theaters across the country. Digital acquisition and production has come of age for Hollywood studios and become a viable option for everyone.

More change is now on the horizon. Inexpensive camera options have evolved from the introduction of the extremely low-cost Panasonic DVX-100 miniDV camcorder which offered the first true 24-frame progressive image. The DVX-100 first shipped in the fall of 2002 and it enabled filmmakers all over the world to work with film-like 24 frames-per-second image capture. There were other 24p cameras, like Sony's high-definition CineAlta HDW-F900, but Panasonic changed the landscape by making 24p affordable for everyone.

We shot Rebecca's first feature, "Coming Up Easy" in the spring of '03 on the DVX-100. It enabled us to acquire 24p images which looked great, but the post-process to keep the whole movie in a native 24p timeline was a nightmare. Most NLE (Non-Linear-Editor) applications only supported 30i (30-frames-per-second interlace) footage, and that made our beautiful 24p footage lose some of its film-rate feel. Several years and NLE application revisions later, and editing 24p is a breeze.

While the introduction of 24p workflows to the masses was groundbreaking, few miniDV produced features ever made it to the big screen. There are many reasons for this, but one factor is the limited resolution offered by miniDV compared to 35mm film or even high-definition video. Even though "digital" has been widely embraced - especially for film festival submissions - there remains a gigantic divide between what makes into theaters (and gets seen) and what independent filmmakers are producing.

The next change in low-cost cameras happened last year with the shipment of Panasonic's next-generation HVX-200. The high-definition HVX-200 has many of the innovative features of Panasonic's much more expensive Varicam, but with this camera they abandoned videotape in favor of solid-state memory recording known as P2. Recording directly to computer memory was a fairly controversial move. Many people have questioned the reliability, longevity, and quality of this kind of acquisition. With the new format, there were some additional hurdles to overcome in the workflow with the camera.

Again, the NLE applications adapted, and now most directly support P2 media. Cinema quality resolution was finally almost in reach of the average filmmaker.

The 2007 National Association of Broadcasters convention held in Las Vegas in April became witness to the crossing of that resolution/capability threshold with the realization of a couple of different camera system approaches from Red and Silicon Imaging.

Each of these systems builds on the idea of solid-state or very small hard-drive based recording from high-resolution cameras. They will enable filmmakers to make use of standard 16mm and 35mm lenses. Using these kinds of lenses lends a whole new toolset to the low-cost/high-quality digital acquisition that had been lacking for most independent filmmakers. Cinematic shallow depth of field which is very difficult to achieve with video lenses will be available to just about anyone working on ultra low-budget films.

Next up the pros and cons of Red One and the SI-2K cameras.