HDV, the DVX, and filmmaking

rbilsbor

rbilsbor

Well-known member
Well, with Sony's 3CCD HDV camera announcement, everyone's certain to start debating which is better for filmmaking: DVX100 or Sony PD-200HD (or whatever they call it). This is going to spark debates on which is better? Spatial resolution (HD) or temporal resolution (DVX)? Because the HDV spec, quite intentionally, does not contain room for 24p. I feel like before these threads really get going I want to throw in my two cents for those people sitting on cash waiting to jump into the DV filmmaking game.

I think we can all agree that 24fps film, as we know it, is what we're going for. The temporal resolution, the spatial resolution, the depth-of-field, the latitude--it's all great, but prohibitively expensive. Many of these things we can mimic with DV, but it's difficult to achieve the same results for far, far cheaper without compromising. So, oftentimes we can pick a few key elements of film to go after, as all of us DVX users have done: temporal resolution. But which is more important, temporal (24fps) or spatial (resolution) resolution?

Soooo... for users of this board, as HDV cameras start coming out, the REAL question is: is true 24p (DVX) superior to 1080i deinterlaced into 24p? 1440X1080 is five times the resolution that 720X480 is, something that puts it a lot closer to film's ~2k resolution. So there's always a quality loss when converting 60i to 24p, but when the source is that much higher quality...

Also, will everyone just buy a PAL version of the HDV cam? Suddenly 25fps HD converted to 24p is pretty damn appealing if you're shooting anything meant to go out to film or any large-venue projection...

I love the DVX, but the reason I bought it is not to do all the music videos, commercials, etc. I've done but to hopefully be able to use it for a low-budget independent film. Once you start thinking about HDV with a homemade mini35 adapter on it, you can really start salivating (as I'm sure the Magic Bullet folks are, as HDV doesn't have a 24p standard and their deinterlacing process becomes relevant again)...

But my real point is directed at those potential camera buyers lurking around the forums trying to figure out that perrenial question: buy now or wait? Let me say that the worst thing anyone thinking about buying a camera can do to themselves is to go into a holding pattern. In the past 4 years I've owned a PD-150, a DVX, and a 100A, all sold on ebay for very little loss--about $500 each time. So get a camera in your hands and start shooting!

Think about movies like "Full Frontal," "The Idiots," "Dancer in the Dark," or "28 Days Later," all movies that would have aesthetically benefitted from a DVX, even though it wasn't available at the time: when you think of them you remember the storyline, the acting, the characters, and your own emotional attachment... and nowhere in your "feelings" about a film are your thoughts on the fidelity of the image. We can judge all we want on the visual CRAFT of the film but many times (especially today) it has little bearing on the quality of filmmaking (watch Pearl Harbor, for example).

So shoot with reckless abandon and know that after you're done and you take away all your invaluable lessons learned from the experience, your next project will improve tenfold--from your own experience--as well as from the new cameras available! All of us, no matter how experienced, learn something from every project, and it's great to know that as we get better, so too does the technology to compete with the "big boys." Thanks for listening and keep shooting,

Ryan
 
Re: HDV, the DVX, and filmmaking

The down side to a program like Magic Bullet is that it takes sooooo long! someting like 24 hours for 5 minutes!
 
Re: HDV, the DVX, and filmmaking

I come from the music world, and all the arguments we're having today about technology were very up-to-date in the sonic realm back in the early 90's.

Due to the huge difference of requirements in terms of storage and power between sound and image, we, musicians and sound engineers, were able to face this kind of dilemma around 1988. At this time, it became reasonable to think about buying cheap samplers, mixing boards, synths and set up our home studios. Digital technology was about to free us from the big bad companies sucking our blood. This was a promising time.

What about today ?

Thanks to digital technology, Techno and Hip Hop have become major hits, new talents have emerged... But artistic freedom ? Is it easier to achieve in 2004 than it was in the sixties or the seventies ? Is music globally better ? Did the home-studio-wave sweep the big business mafia ?

I don't think so. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the Majors are holding the business in a more merciless hand than ever before.

And guess what : the best musicians on the planet would sell their mother rather than their old Stratocasters, Jazz Basses or MiniMoogs. Why ? Maybe because these instruments are unique, because they carry a dream in a way modern instruments can't.

DVX can become a 21rst century Stratocaster because it too carries a dream.

I love my DVX because of its unique touch, not because it's the most sophisticated camera. I love my DVX because, for some mysterious reason, it arouses so much passion that we are thousands to spend hours of our precious time on this site, exchanging our opinions. I love my DVX because of its limitations : they oblige me to think about the meaning of the images I want to film. I like limits, they're the milestones of my creativity.

Digital Video can help renewing cinema — the way hand-held 16mm cameras were the weapons of the emerging New Hollywood, back in the late 60's — but it's no guarantee against mediocrity ; it's no shelter against greed ; it's no protection against meaningless images. Owning the brand new perfect tool (prefect for the next three months, until a more perfect one comes out of the big business lab) will not teach us how to tell beautiful stories. I hope I'll be disciplined enough not to drop my DVX before I've learned how to tell a beautiful story with it, and achieved it several times. There will certainly be better cameras in the years to come, with more definition and more features, but what ? If a film is good with today's technology, won't it be anymore when HD prosumer cameras will have overcrowded the marketplace ?

Don't get me wrong here : like most of us, I love technology. But I don't want to be its servant. Quite a difficult challenge in our consumer world. But isn't one of our duties as artists to fight against this pathological, hysterical addiction to new products ?

I think this addiction poisons our souls and makes our planet a mess. I think this addiction, in the end, is all about money becoming more and more an obsession as it's becoming less and less a concrete reality (the abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction...)

"The things we own, Tyler Durden said, they end up owning us." I'll just try to remember this and choose the things I consider worth owning me : my drums, my Mac, my DVX. No less, no more.
 
Re: HDV, the DVX, and filmmaking

:D

If that doesnt make you want to make films right this second I dont know what will. Except maybe that vampire chick.
 
Re: HDV, the DVX, and filmmaking

An Artist,

I couldn't agree more. That's why I'm saying, to those people weighing the camera choices, if you want to get into filmmaking, don't wait for The Next Big Thing--get a camera today and start shooting. I wanted to make that point becuase a few years ago, I won a VX2000 for a music video I did, and I sold it in hopes of finding something better. Pretty soon I bought a PD150 because it wasn't worth waiting for something better, and I think that's a valuable experience--I wouldn't trade the time I spent learning with that camera for anything.

That's why I brought up the films I did, to say that experience and ability is more important than fidelity, and what stays with us after a film (and what inspires us) has little to do with the technology, chemicals, and circuits inside a camera and post process. Rashomon is one of my favorite films of all time, yet the image quality of the DVX far surpasses it. DV's deep focus that we're trying so hard to defeat is similar to Citizen Kane's, yet no one's achieving that. But I am excited because the more lenses and options that are available to us are simply more brushes in a painter's arsenal, and HDV is another canvas. 28 Days Later (hard to mention that in the same paragraph as the last two) is a better movie because of the texture of DV. More options are better, but they're not means to an end in and of themself.

The problem, I think, with all of this technology--and I'm guilty for spending the first half of my post on it, which I'm sure people started reading and misinterpreting--is that it's far easier, and far more passive, to sit around and read about the latest gizmo and speculate about great it will be, than it is to sit down with a piece of blank paper and a pen. It's one of the reasons we spend so much time on forums, just like it's one of the reasons we spend so much time watching TV.

But no one can deny that so much is available to us at a more accesible price than it ever has been before. This is why we love the DVX, and it's a blessing and a curse. These days, if we see 100 films a year, 95 are technically proficient and 10 are any good. So we know where the challenge lies. Now that we have this technology, let's take comfort in the fact that we have it and pick up a pencil (and eraser)!
 
Re: HDV, the DVX, and filmmaking

I think 28 Days Later thus far might be the single most important film to filmmakers at our level. A film shot on DV and it blew people away. This wasn't an artsy, experimental film. This was a film that appealed to the masses. All shot on a $3000 DV Camcorder.

Sure, they had Prime lenses attached to it and lighting support and all of the other fluff that typically follows a major production but it showed that people like us can go out and make a film.

We can spend days on end toiling over the next big thing or designing a homemade 35mm adapter in hopes that it just somehow might make us better filmmakers; but without the art all that is, is nada.

It is an exciting era in filmmaking and Im glad I get to be a part of it without mortgaging my house or maxing out 15 Crfedit Cards to make one.
 
Re: HDV, the DVX, and filmmaking

wow!

i see in this forum the most amibitious men and women who've ever touched a DV cam. i see all this potential, and I see squandering...an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. advertising has us chasing cars, clothes, and HD cams - working jobs we hate, so we can buy **** we don't need.

we've all been raised on TV to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

ok, so i had to paraphrase fight club as well. love that movie! anyhow this subject's posts are some of the best ones ive read here and i love the stuff you guys have wrote. although im sitting at my computer desk now at my "real" job, when i should be doing actual "work", i totally want to grab my DVX and make something instead of sitting here wasting away!
 
Re: HDV, the DVX, and filmmaking

Sigh

YEs, we must all 'work' for a living. A few of us are in better positons than others in actually 'working within the industry' at some level; other's sitting at a desk in a job where they just want to beat the person in the next cube. Me? I have my own start up company not at all related to film (Pre-employment background screening) but...

I hope this gives me an opportuntiy to pursue what I really want to do. I definatley have some freedom being my own boss.

Love the FC quotes! "But we won't"
 
Re: HDV, the DVX, and filmmaking

[quote author=Anartiste link=board=news;num=1079989897;start=0#3 date=03/22/04 at 17:51:11]I come from the music world, and all the arguments we're having today about technology were very up-to-date in the sonic realm back in the early 90's.

- snip -

"The things we own, Tyler Durden said, they end up owning us." I'll just try to remember this and choose the things I consider worth owning me : my drums, my Mac, my DVX. No less, no more.[/quote]

Anartiste, very well said. I too come from the audio world. It sounds like we both came up through the same era in music making, early 90s (I won't sell my old Ludwigs either ;).

The thing I remember when I started making my recording studio/services available to other musicians was all the talk of technology. Talking to people who owned big studios with big clients. They would constantly tell me, and other newbies, that if we didn't have THIS piece of gear, or THAT technology or THIS latest piece of Pro Tools tripe that there was no way I could EVER make a go of it in the "REAL" business of music recording.

I almost believed them, then I asked them how much debt they were in. . .

To a man, the people who possessed and lectured me on technology were in debt such that they had to take lucrative projects they didn't really want, at the expense of working on their OWN projects which they truly loved but abandoned. The technology owned them, and worse, it kept them from doing what they loved. In the ensuing years I watched one of them sell off bits of his technology to pay for his daughter's surgery, others' studios folded and some are still in business doing quite well.

I took another route. I bought the best pieces of gear I could afford by paying cash. Much of it was "last year's model." None of it was especially technologically advanced. With that gear I MADE RECORDS. I recorded my own bands. I worked with clients I WANTED to work with. And guess what, by doing that, I have gotten to a point where the work I've done is in the stereos of people I NEVER would have DREAMED would be listening to my music (I play in and was paid for four months to record a band managed by Celine Dion's management company - no lie).

The point isn't to brag. The point is that had I listened to people lecturing me on technology and saying that I couldn't make good recordings, or even GREAT recordings, with "last year's gear" i would never have been in the position I'm in. I never would have shared my love with the world, I never would have been able to meet some of the best people I've ever met, and I never would have LEARNED it by DOING it. And my mom never would have gotten to see one of her favorite performers in Las Vegas :)

I've decided to apply the same principles I learned from audio production to filmmaking as well. I'm learning by doing, and doing on the best possible pieces of gear i can. A DVX, some cheap lights, a home-made dolly, and the invaluable ability to do what I love or what REALLY piques my curiosity. Even making this "boring" infomercial has been a great learning experience and has given me ideas on what I would like to improve in my filmmaking.

Ultimately, filmmaking like audio recording, is storytelling. The technology helps, but it won't make a bad story a good one.
 
Re: HDV, the DVX, and filmmaking

this post has given me the warm-fuzzies. you guys make me excited to log on every day and read about our shared love for this camera and for the art (and business?) of filmmaking.

to add to the film quotes:

"say hello to my little friend..." a dvx-100
 
Re: HDV, the DVX, and filmmaking

haha great quote... shoot, it's going to drive me crazy the rest of the day, what movie is that from?
 
Re: HDV, the DVX, and filmmaking

"All I have is my balls and my word; and I don't break em for nobody"

Same movie
 
Re: HDV, the DVX, and filmmaking

Right, well, I figured that was it. Been awhile since I've seen Carlito's Way.

Just kidding. Last time I saw Scarface it was on network TV, so it was about 5 minutes long (including adbreaks).

Anyway, Anartiste was saying that the same thing has been happening in the film industry that happened in the music industry, and I think that's a valuable lesson to look at; everyone has this technologically-enabled dream that may or may not come to pass. Read a good short article on this today at Digital Cinema:

http://www.uemedia.net/CPC/digitalcinemamag/article_7024.shtml

Indy Realities

By Brian McKernan

Mar 8, 2004, 16:43


"On an independent level, digital production is everywhere," states John Manulis, CEO/Producer at Visionbox Media Group. "But in a mass-market, commercial way I think we're going to see digital presentation become part of the fabric of the entertainment world faster than digital production will. The economic incentives of digital presentation are so much stronger for the studios-as distribution entities-to take advantage of, especially now that Digital Cinema Initiatives is getting its act together."

Manulis knows digital filmmaking. As a co-founder of the "creative incubator" that is Visionbox (see www.visionboxpictures.com) he's had a direct hand in guiding many high-quality digital films through to completion. These films include such critically acclaimed titles as Tortilla Soup, Falling Like This, Teddy Bears' Picnic, and Charlotte Sometimes. His reference to the progress being made by Digital Cinema Initiatives (the consortium of seven studios devising technical recommendations for digital production, post, and exhibition) reflects his perspective as an entertainment industry insider. I first interviewed Manulis for the December 2000 issue of Digital Cinema; I recently had occasion to speak to him again. I asked him what Visionbox has learned since then in its mission to empower digital indy filmmaking.

"In the course of making our own films we became aware that there's a whole integrated suite of services missing out there in the independent world," he responded. "People asked us to step in and help them with their projects, so our service business evolved. This includes physical production, the packaging, finance-consulting, sales, marketing, distribution-consulting, and postproduction."

In addition to expanding its consulting services, Visionbox also gained valuable lessons regarding indy film financing. "Digital is still something people would rather not do unless it's an absolute necessity for getting a movie made," Manulis reveals. "In dealing with both international and domestic markets we found it was a bit of a miscalculation to think that there was going to be a big appetite for the under-$100,000 kind of product. We learned that it's just as hard to make a movie for $100,000 as it is for a million or ten million dollars. At a certain point everyone realized that to make a movie that was deliverable and salable to world markets, there's a lot of time and expertise that has to go into it, particularly when you're working with digital." Sobering words, perhaps, for low-budget digital indy filmmakers, but Manulis' comments are based on experience. He warns against marketing hype as well. "The marketing pitch by equipment manufacturers that says: 'Pick up a camera, anyone can make a movie' just isn't reality. The fact is that 'just anyone' can't just make a movie. You need expertise and experience or you have to do an awful lot of testing and workshopping on your own to acquire such experience. This doesn't diminish my enthusiasm for what digital formats offer, it's just that there's...more to filmmaking than getting a digital camera.

"Another thing that we haven't seen-and it was something that a lot of people were predicting-is a change in the hegemony of the theatrical distribution model, or the studios' involvement in that," Manulis adds. "However little it costs to make a film on a digital format you still have to get it out to an audience and you still have to buy the marketing that gets the public to know you're there. I question whether in fact digital cinema's going to change that situation. I don't know that we've found the model that proves that your visionary, low-cost independent digital film will be successful just because it's been made."
 
Re: HDV, the DVX, and filmmaking

Right, well, I figured that was it. Been awhile since I've seen Carlito's Way.

Just kidding. Last time I saw Scarface it was on network TV, so it was about 5 minutes long (including adbreaks).

LOL LOL LOL

Tks for the article!
 
Re: HDV, the DVX, and filmmaking

A good reminder. Very comforting. Thanks to sheer us up, rbilsbor ;-)

What changes with the digital era is not the market place, but the fact that we, self-proclaimed artists, have now the possibility to practice, practice and practice our craft, and that this practice will only cost us the price of our cassettes (we can even re-use them in case of extreme poverty :-/)

My point here is : let's not dream about conquering the world before we learn how to make decent films.

Most of us will fall on the way, whether they film in DV, HD, 35mm or whatever format we can imagine. It's just the darwinian reality of cinema. They'll fall not because they'll lack financial means, but because they'll lack discipline, boldness, patience, full dedication to their art — the ingredients of talent.

And if, by an improbable circumstance, we succeed in making a great film, the planet won't stop spinning. Even extraordinary, a film is only a film : life in two dimensions. And because cinema is all our lives should not make us over-estimate its power.

We'll not change the world, we'll just make our viewers' hearts beat stronger for a couple of hours.

No big deal, but necessary.

Personnaly, I'll be happy if I achieve that two or three times in my life. To see an audience sobbing, to hear it laugh : this gift is rare enough to be very precious to me.
 
Re: HDV, the DVX, and filmmaking

Whenever I start lusting after the latest, greatest gadget, I remind myself about how great it felt to observe a whole party of 200 or so people grind to a halt, hearing them laugh and watching them cluster around several TVs that we had set up to show a technically pathetic half-hour short I had produced in a single week.

I had prepared this video to be background noise, expecting that nobody would even pay attention to it. But the story and the character performances just happened to capture and hold an audience of 25-35 year-olds. This 42-year-old had connected to my follow-on generation in a way that I don't think I will ever forget, and it was all about content, not the technical excellence of the medium.

That being said, I am thrilled every time we pick up the DVX100 and shoot new material. I simply can't understand the moaning that some people made when the 100a came out. I've got access to a camera which will challenge my storytelling skills for years to come, and I am very appreciative!

Will I drool when Sony or Canon or someone else comes along with a clearly superior camera? Sure, but the uniqueness of our beloved Panasonic camera is that it fills the sweet spot we inhabit so effectively that it fits like a well-worn pair of blue jeans, and I will be reluctant to dispose of this fabulous tool when the time comes.

And I have to say that I'm very pleased to be a part of this enthusiastic DVX100 user community. Many people here have exceptional talent, and serve as inspiration to the rest of us. That is what Art is all about, right?
 
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