November on Big Screen

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Philippe Orlando

Member
Hello,

I'm a new member on this forum. I already belong to DV.COM.

I was blown away by the quality of November and It's only recently that I learned it was shot with a DVX. I watched the movie on a TV, from DVD source, and of course it was amazing.

Has anybody seen this movie on a big screen? If yes, what do you think of the quality?

How much better would you expect footage from a HD 100 to be?
thanks
Phil
 
Yes I saw it projected in the theater.

Overall, I found it basically fine. It worked. It wasn't as crisp as "Once Upon A Time In Mexico", but it beat the living **** out of "28 Days Later" as far as clarity goes.

It looked good, it looked about like a 16mm blowup. There were some spots where the DV origins brought attention to themselves, like in the hallway going up the stairs there were a couple of times where some clipping on the white wall was discernible. But I'm fairly picky; I doubt most audiences would have noticed or cared.

The only time it was bad (and I do mean BAD) was in the darkroom, where it was all lit by red. It displayed the DV 4:1:1 color blockiness pretty badly, I'm really surprised they even tried it that way. I wouldn't have.

But other than that I'd say that November looked perfectly fine in the theater, the grainy texture suited the film well, and there was enough definition and resolution that we as the (tiny) audience weren't distracted by image quality concerns (like I was during 28DL). There were four or five DVX films released in the theaters last year (like Murderball, which went on to get an academy award nomination, and Mad Hot Ballroom, and The Aristocrats). A DVX can do an acceptable to good job of a film blowup. It's not HD, but it does it very well anyway.
 
I didn't get to see November on the big screen but I purchased the DVD.

I have to say that I was pretty disappointed with the quality. It was much less, in my mind, than the quality of native mini-dv. Given how many processes it went through in post I suppose it's not surprising but there is something ironic about this for me.

Also, the thing that really got my attention was that the 24p cadence had what seemed to me to be some kind of frame blending appearance which made it look more like video to me.

The lighting was very good throughout but I kept saying to myself while watching the film, "this is the camera I use?", it seemed like it was generations away from the original footage.
 
I completely agree with you disjecta. I was very disappointed with the resolution of the picture. The lighting was good, but it looked so.... grainy... I don't know how to describe it. I liked the look of 28 days later a lot better in terms of resolution. And, even DV shorts that have gone directly to DVD have looked better. I don't know, maybe like you said the processes it went through messed with it or something. Anyway, just my .02 cents.
 
I'm with Barry on this one. Apart from the Darkroom scene, which was horridly pixelated (sp?), the movie looked like a movie. Certainly not the super-slick look of Spiderman or Lord Of The Rings, but it looked fine. Which is astounding coming from a $3500 camera and $5 tapes! And most everyone in the audience saw it as a film, not as a video-to-film blowup. Nobody complained, groaned, or left the theater because of image quality.

I'm willing to bet that any of the HDV cameras will produce better, sharper, and clearer pictures when transferred to film, all else being equal, of course.
 
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I haven't seen the DVD so I don't know how the DVD looked. But in the theater it looked completely acceptable. Sounds like the DVD transfer wasn't pleasant at all. Let's not forget this thing won the best cinematography award at Sundance, so I don't know how to reconcile your DVD experience with what I saw in the theater.
 
My opinion has nothing to do with the cinematography which I really liked. I believe it's solely to do with the fact that it was uprezzed to HD for post'processing. It had to go through at least one pass of downrezzing again for the DVD release so, that in itself, is going to be destructive to the footage quality.

Then there is the actual DVD coding on top of that, etc.
 
Yeah, the shots and cinematography was excellent! But, like disjecta said, the process probably screwed some things up.
 
Barry_Green said:
The only time it was bad (and I do mean BAD) was in the darkroom, where it was all lit by red. It displayed the DV 4:1:1 color blockiness pretty badly, I'm really surprised they even tried it that way.
Click to expand...

This has always bothered me a bit... I don't see how this can be related to 4:1:1? The pattern was evident even in pretty uniform areas of color/intensity, where the blend of 4 pixels would not differ from the individual pixels - or from block to block. I mean, the shot was red - the chroma info was fairly consistent everywhere. The pattern also looked more like compression macroblocks to me than colorspace chunking - the blocks were a little too big. It seemed to me like either a problem specifically with reds, or more likely in some interaction between heavy red footage and the DV compression algorithm...
 
Ok

Ok

Well, I've followed Barry in a lot of his posts in many forum and if he tells me he liked what he saw on a big screen, that's enough for me. So this is a hell of a little cam here. I've been thinking about buying it or the JVC HD 100, because like many dreamers I have film transfer in mind, but I think I could use some of the money I could spare by getting the DVX instead of the JVC.
Of course I don't forget that Nancy Schreiber, the DP has something to do in how good it looked.
Thank all of you for your feedback
Phil
 
Well, let's be clear -- the DVX did fine for a standard-def camera, certainly better than other standard-def cameras (like PD150's "Open Water" or XL1's "28DL"). But it's not high-def. High def makes a big difference.

The DVX blowup was acceptable. It was good enough that it didn't detract from the story. But if you're going for a film blowup there are better (but more expensive) choices.
 
Me personally, I just bought a house here in Vegas and I can't afford much right now to fully deck out my production company, but the way things are now, my brother and I were looking at the HVX200 as our most likely candidate for our main tool of choice. But with the RED being so hyped at the moment, new HDTV/computer display standards coming out for 2K-4K resolution, Bluray/HD-DVD format war, new Macs, new PC processor formats, new lense technologies, and the wide release of new software and software versions, things are very muddled.

What does this have to do with November? Well, I saw it on DVD, very cool movie when you know that they made it via DVX100, but the story was pretty "blah". I didn't see it in theatres, but I heard that it showed up very well. The technical DVD commentary was a bit overwhelming though, seems like they did A LOT of post work to get it up to snuff and to do a lot of the lighting effects seen in the movie. But, had they shot on HD or something more, I'm sure things would have been much easier, hence the HVX200. But, with everything going into a transition phase this year, it may not be a good time to buy anything yet, if you don't need it that is.

For film output, any of the HD/HDV cameras will do a good job, don't know about hybrid 30p cameras like the Sanyo HD-1 and JVC's earlier GRHD-1 and HD10U if you're still using/wanting those, but it should turn out better than MiniDV regardless.

The DVX-based cameras, well, they're certainly good to learn on and they're still being used for a wide range of things, especially since they've become so acceptable to the television realm. I like to think of the DVX and other SD cameras in comparison to the way film formats changed, we're going out of 8mm and Super-8 to the realm of 16mm, next up is Super-16 and 35mm. But first we need to get through our 16mm stage, in this case being all the HD cameras. It's just a figurative comparison, not a technical one, so don't harass me about "Whach jew meen 16mm? HD be3ts all dat shtuff! Rezz son Rezz is whatch mattos mosht!", read what I say.
 
I'm just wondering, do you think the director used a 35mm lens on the Original DVX100 to get that image? Or, could that original dvx100 be that good?
 
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