Planet Earth Settings

[jojjoj23]

Which format and fps was planet earth shot in?

 

[Erik Olson]

DVCProHD100, HDCam, Photron and 16mm or DigiSLRs depending. VariCam was the A-Camera for land and aerial photography, with CineAlta doing underwater duty and 16mm high-speed and SLR pulling shots in slow motion and motion SFX.

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[jojjoj23]

did they shoot in 24 fps or 30 fps?

 

[Erik Olson]

The stuff I'd seen on it stated variable rates on the VariCam. I can't tell you what the default normal framerate was.

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[Andrew Brinkhaus]

Overland, didn't they also shoot some of the series in 35mm? I thought I remembered hearing that from the "Making of" special.

 

[Erik Olson]

My understanding is that very, very little was 35mm.

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[boarderjosh10]

is there a documentary on how planet earth was made?

 

[Drew Ott]

I doubt it. During the show they did a ton of talking about how it was done.

 

[IanBJohnson]

I doubt it. During the show they did a ton of talking about how it was done.

...which all adds up to about two hours of "making of" content. That's on the DVD set, not sure about the aired episodes. it's pretty sweet.

 

[atlcHEROKEE]

There was a documentary done at the end of the series, they sat down with the executive producer, and he did alot of explaining on how things were done...It was quite fascinating. If Im not mistaken, they actually had to re-invent some things in order to get the shots they needed......Was absolutely a brilliant series, some of the most beautiful nature video Ive ever seen....

 

[fu-pow]

Any idea on how they did the timelapse shots with the camera moves?

 

[Stone122]

with digital still cameras.

 

[fu-pow]

with digital still cameras.

But how did they get the cameras to move in sync with the time lapse?

 

[Krunko]

had a motor that panned the camera at a certain rate very slowly.

 

[ChipG]

There is an article about it in the November 2007 issue of DV Magazine, most of it was shot on a vari cam at 720p (which looks great on a tv) then upscaled for film print. They also cut out the Panasonic frame rate converter box (used only for the tv series) before the film blow up, it added an extra cycle of compression. There were 9 different camera formats in the series...

 

[John Godden]

The footage in this DVD set is outstanding. Really amazing that any of it was done on digital. Shows what can be done professionally.

Regards
JohnG

 

[ChipG]

I'm in the process of shooting a "Planet Storm" video... Tornados / storms...

 

[Giganova]

If you buy the DVD set which has 5 DVD, each contains 3 episodes, and each episode has a "Diary" which is sort of a "Making Of" ... so in total you get 15 (!) "Making Of" episodes.

They used so many different cameras/formats that it's impossible to keep track of, and they were very creative in building new gear to shoot footage nobody has ever seen before.

 

[ChipG]

There is a book about the making of it called "Planet Earth the Making of an Epic Series" by David Nicholson - Lord

Amazon.com carries it for something like $12

It has different but very good info that was not on the dvd.

 

[Goldmond]

How Cool! I just sat down from watching the first DVD of planet earth and I see this thread. Holy smokes they did an incredible job, 2 weeks of getting up before dawn with a helicopter and a ground crew to get the shots of the African hunting dogs making a kill.