What's digital cinematography?

Digital cinematography is essentially filming motion pictures on digital video instead of film. This is certainly not a new concept: before it was re-packaged as "Digital Cinematography" in the late 1990s it was known for many years as "Electronic Cinematography". Make sure you visit Vidize.com - a new site for video sharing, personal broadcasting and more.

Sony had been trying to market this concept using tube-based analog HDTV cameras since the late 1980s, with very little success. It was not until 1998 when they were able to introduce workable 1920 x 1080 pixel CCD cameras with attached HD Digital Betacam recorders that anybody began to take them seriously.

Around the turn of the last century, several directors, including James Cameron and George Lucas, stated that 'they will probably never shoot on traditional film again'.

Despite this, the overwhelming majority of "serious" Hollywood movies are still shot on film, and more intriguingly, so are the bulk of prime-time US-made television programs and commercials. So on one hand there is a small but vocal minority of indie producers claiming that 1920 x 1080 pixel video is good enough for display on 50 foot screens, and on the other, a relatively silent majority of producers who insist that only 35mm film origination is good enough to be shown on both two-foot TV screens and fifty-foot cinema screens.

It is true that lower-budget, non-cinema-release movies are increasingly being shot with digital video cameras (although not necesarily high definition ones), but the preferred medium for that is still 16mm film.

Sony CineAlta

The CineAlta series of cameras are high definition video cameras geared toward motion picture production. They can shoot at the same 24 frames per second (true 24p) as film and have a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels (1080p) which some say is very comparable (and even superior) to film. Needless to say, this last statement has been viewed with extreme skepticism by many industry professionals, given that some film scanners usefully scan up to 10,000 pixels horizontally, from standard 35mm film.

Furthermore, the main thrust behind the development of 24p origination was that it is a more universal format for television production, since it can be more easily converted to both 25 frame PAL and 30 frame NTSC. The Digital Cinematography application is really only a spin-off of this.

CineAlta cameras (most notably the Sony HDW-F900) record onto HDCAM tapes. However, the CineAlta can only record 1440 x 1080 pixel compressed component video in this mode Episode II of the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy was shot with the CineAlta. Episode III was shot with more advanced HDW950 cameras which can record the full 1920 x 1080 pixels. However, when shooting in the 2.35:1 widescreen format (often incorrectly referred to as "Panavision") only about 800 of the 1080 vertical pixels are actually used.

Mini-DV

Mini-DV cameras have been around for many years and have been used on independent and low-budget films, but are most popular with common consumers. There are too many models to list here but the Canon XL series is used frequently. It was used on Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal, for example. It is important to understand that there are two components to this format: the camera and the recorder, and most of its limitations lie with the camera. Generally, the Mini-DV tape format is capable of recording considerably higher quality images that the attached compact cameras can produce.

One of the first Mini-DV cameras to be used on a feature film was the Sony VX-1000 (predecessor to Sony FX1)which was used to shoot Spike Lee's Bamboozled.

Thomson Viper

The Viper FilmStream Camera has the same resolution and frame rate as a high definition video camera like the CineAlta, but captures an uncompressed video image. (Many earlier model high-definition video cameras compress their images at least slightly.) It was used on Michael Mann's Collateral. The Viper can shoot in extremely low light levels, thus much of Collateral could be shot on the streets of Los Angeles in middle of the night without a lot of additional lighting equipment.

There is no tape format that can handle the data generated by the Viper camera, so images are usually recorded to a hard disk array. This allows the footage to be edited immediately after it has been shot. For this reason, director David Fincher used the Viper camera on a Hewlett-Packard commercial with complex visual effects.

Fincher later decided to use the Viper to shoot his entire next feature Zodiac. Michael Mann will also stoot his next feature Miami Vice on the Viper.

Note: In the prosumer class, Panasonic HVX200 records to P2 chips instead of tape to accommodate its 100Mbps data stream. All HDV cameras record to mini-dv tapes and as such are limited to 25Mbps.

Digital video vs. film

Some notable directors have stated that they have been "converted" to digital cinematography and will never return to using film. Some of them are George Lucas, Robert Rodriguez, David Fincher, David Lynch, Lars von Trier, and James Cameron. However in a more recent interview Lucas modified his stance somewhat, to the effect that: he "would use whatever is more appropriate to the particular project."

Some of the alleged benefits of digital video are:

Digital video allows for films to be shot faster and cheaper
Digital video can be played back and edited immediately
Digital video can record image and audio on the same media
Digital video cameras are smaller than film cameras
Digital video is recorded on a cassette or hard drive device
Digital video is more sensitive than film (i.e. less lighting)

Most films are already edited on a digital system after the developed film stocks are converted to digital video. Film requires a lengthly telecine process to be converted to digital video.

However, after the intital flurry of interest, the use of digital video for motion pictures has caused a backlash among many film enthusiasts. The main argument against digital cinematography is simply that the image quality and 24 fps frame rate has not yet caught up to even run-of-the-mill 35mm film, and that films shot digitally have a cheaper look, or that the footage looks too crisp and "washed over".

Generally, the problem is that despite being re-labelled "Digital Cinematography" cameras, they are still television cameras, and retain all the limitations of television cameras. TV cameras work satisfactorily in totally enclosed sound stages (or TV studios) where there is 100% control of the lighting, which is how the vast majority of the Star Wars and Spy Kids films were shot. However, taken outside into "on location" situations where there is far less control over the lighting, video cameras tend to perform poorly. In this case, any potential savings in stock costs tend to be eaten up by the need for extra lighting equipment to "flatten" difficult lighting situations.

Other issues

Although it is true the "per minute stock cost" of videotape is much less than an equivalent amount of film, in most cases this is more than offset by the cost of the extra monitoring equipment required. In any event, even if the cost of shooting digitally could be reduced to zero, the overall effect on the cost of producing the average feature would be negligible, since film costs normally make up a tiny part of a film's budget. So currently even very cheap "made for cable" movies are nearly always shot on film.

The "instant playback" feature so often touted as a major advantage of shooting digitally, has been available through the "video assist" systems that have been in regular use since the early 1980s. Although this is only lower resolution NTSC video, for the vast majority of monitoring and framing "confidence" applications, it has proven more than adequate.

For anything but low-budget work, there is no particular advantage in having the sound and image recorded on the same medium. Most sound recording is done by specialist operators, usually with their own desk of equipment. Using the image recorder to record the sound as well would involve running extra cables up to the camera/recorder combination.

Although very compact digital cameras are available, none of these produces anywhere near the quality demanded for large-screen film work, and in any event there are also extremely compact 35mm film cameras that produce the full 35mm film resolution and take standard 35mm lenses.

Contrary to what is commonly stated, video cameras are no more low-light sensitive than film. Modern "noise coring" circuitry is very efficient at masking low-level electronic "grain" but this also removes some of the picture information, which is one thing that accounts for the perceived "unatural-ness" of video-derived footage. On rapidly-moving footage the noise coring often fails, giving occasional glimpses of the true low-light performance of video cameras. For precision monitoring when shooting outdoors, a collection of black tents is usually needed, often referred to sarcastically as a "video village". All of this equipment has to be operating even when just setting up a shot, whereas with a film camera's optical viewfinder no power is required between shots, making battery operation far more practical.

The "Digital systems" that most films are edited on today are in fact "off-line" editing systems. The "wild" film segments are transferred rapidly and inexpensively at normal NTSC resolution onto a computer disk, and all the editing decisions are then made on the computer screen, to produce an on-screen-edited "NTSC resolution" version of the project. By means of special codes automatically burned onto the film when it is shot, an automated machine then duplicates the project on film by cutting up and splicing the original negatives. (This is very similar to the way most television programs are post-produced, using almost identical equipment, except that the original camera tapes are edited, instead of the original negtives). Most films today are thus edited and duplicated much the same way they have been for the past century, but using computers to streamline the process.

More recently some post-production has been done by scanning the film and carrying out all the editing at full resolution on a computer, and then transferring the resultant digital files directly back onto film to produce the master release negative. This is the so-called "Digital Intermediate" process. However at present it is so expensive that it is normally reserved for projects that require a lot of digital manipulation, such as science fiction and fantasy films, or large-budget films where the cost is not such an issue. For more cost-conscious projects it is only used in the scenes that actually require it, which may make up only a very small part of the whole film. However costs are continually falling, and there is little doubt that this will eventually become the standard technique, but this has not happened yet.

Credit: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia