I'm back! I certainly hope y'all weren't holding your collective breath… So much for keeping up with the Blog during production. It was a pretty extraordinary show, honestly. The production ran smoother than any of us imagined it would and we had a truly extraordinary cast and crew who rolled with our style beautifully.
At the end of the day, we wrapped production in 11 days, rather than 12 and – at current estimate – about 5% under budget. Considering what we were shooting and the extra money that we wound up putting into the film that was previously unaccounted for – that's a pretty amazing feat. We wound up spending more than 10% of the budget on extras for our crowded locations, an expense we never planned on. Even with that addition – we still came in slightly under budget and under schedule – a fact that I'm pretty darn proud of (of course if the movie eventually sucks, we'll look like idiots for going too fast and too cheap, but we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it…)
There's so much to talk about regarding the production and I'm a little lost as to where to start. I guess the first thing to address is the fact that we didn’t shoot in the new AVC-I format; instead we shot in DVCPro HD. Part of that decision was based on the realities of the post-production requirements of AVC-I, and part of that was based on erroneous information that we received just prior to shooting.
I received the HPX3000 from Panasonic on Friday afternoon, February 1, while at the same time, my co-DP, Jayson Crothers, was at Birns and Saywer in Hollywood prepping our second HPX3000. Friday was a chaotic day – or last full “business” day before we started shooting on Sunday evening. As a producer, my hands were full with coordinating the last minute details and prepping for a start in just a little over 48 hours. Friday was quite crazy and I didn’t have a chance to work with the camera at all. On Saturday afternoon, Panasonic was kind enough to set us up with “P2 Guru” Hal Long to walk us through the camera and the P2 workflow. Most of the aspects of the HPX3000 are identical to the HPX500, so I was fairly familiar with the form and functions of the camera. It was the workflow information that was quite eye-opening to me. We knew chances were very good (probably 90% certain) that we’d be working with Final Cut Pro in post. The requirements for P2 workflow with AVC-I were a bit sobering. As Hal explained, Final Cut Pro does not support the AVC-I format. Instead, we’d have to transcode to Apple’s ProRes 422. In order to work with ProRes 422, we’d need an Intel-based MAC, and further, an 8-core Intel G5 running Final Cut Pro 6.0.2. Right there, that ruffled my feathers. As a producer of the film, I knew that our pool of available editors would be limited, to say the least, for the budget range we were working with. Out of the pool of editors in the business, we needed those that were available for our project, that could do it in the budget range, that would work well with the material and director (each attribute limiting the field further) and then we’d need one with an absolute state-of-the-art system to cut the film. A quick poll of the six editors that I knew determined that only one of them had a system sufficient to work with the ProRes 422 format. Those were scary odds. It would mean that our pool of editors would be considerably limited and I wasn’t comfortable with that.
The erroneous information that we received was that transcoding AVC-I into ProRes 422 would increase the file size by 3-4 times. We were already estimating a need for 6 terabytes of drive space for triple-redundancy of the estimated 40 hours of footage (20:1 shooting ratio with two cameras). Now we learned that we’d need an additional six to twelve terabytes for the ProRes 422 footage. This was an expense we just couldn’t afford. In actuality, as I learned after we wrapped the production and I had a chance to work with the AVC-I format a bit in a separate test, the file size difference is only about 25% (ProRes 422 files are about 25% larger than their companion AVC-I files). The sticky thing, even though we decided not to use AVC-I based on this information and we elected, instead, to shoot DVCPro HD, we still needed an additional 2 terabytes of space to “render” the DVCPro HD files into QuickTimes for Final Cut Pro. If we had shot AVC-I, we would have needed 125% disc space requirement to transcode the AVC-I to ProRes 422. So for our 2 terabytes of original footage, we would need an additional 2.5 terabytes of drive space for “rendered” ProRes 422 files.
After leaving that session with Hal, both Jayson and I went away with our respective cameras to do some testing. Night had fallen by the time I got home and I set up the camera in my living room (certainly not a first for me, I have a very patient wife…) and began testing. I started by zeroing out the camera and doing an ISO test and I was absolutely horrified to discover the camera’s base ISO is 250…
I almost cried. Here I was, less than 24 hours away from a feature where we’d be shooting all nights in bars and clubs, shooting 102 pages in 12 days with nearly no lighting package and my camera was a 250 ISO?!? I was dead in the water.
I started manipulating the camera. Playing first by raising the gamma level to a .4 as opposed to .5. This, in turn, lifted the overall gamma level and gave me some more sensitivity. From there, I strengthened our blacks a bit and switched to a 270 degree shutter. I chose the Cinelike2 Gamma setting on the camera as it had the most “filmlike” curve without clipping the highlights and without giving me a truly flat image (as FilmRec does)
. Jayson and I had already discussed working with a 360 degree (off) shutter, an idea that was suggested to me by Russell Carpenter, ASC after discussing his work on the film 21, which he shot with a 360 shutter on the Panavision Genesis. That earned me an additional stop of light moving from a 250 to 500 ISO. From there, the gamma adjustment to .4 bumped us up to a base ISO of 640 – a MUCH better place to be for the project I was undertaking.
We set the gains at 0db, +3db and +6db. I never went above +6 as it was just too noisy in the blacks for me. We very rarely ever shot beyond +3 and most of the film was shot at a 0db of gain.
Filmlike2 gave us a latitude of 8 stops (+2 stops over and +5 stops under).
I still wasn’t entirely sold on the capabilities of the camera for what I was going to be putting it through and – at this point in the testing – wasn’t sure what AVC-I would give me over DVCPro HD. It was about 2am when I saw actress and friend Amanda Bolten online. She and her friend, Jon Hart, a fellow actor, had just come home from a night out and I shanghaied the two of them to be test models for me in the dead of night. We hopped in my car and did some driving around Los Angeles with no lighting. The results were truly extraordinary and reaffirmed that I had made the right decision in going with the HPX3000 – in spite of my trepidations earlier in the evening.
Above are image captures from the late night shoot. If you click on them you'll open up full-rez captures of the DVCPro HD footage. These shots were done with a gamma of .4, CineLike2 gamma curve, +6bd of gain and 360 degree shutter. My meter would not read an exposure in most areas of the car.
More to come!
All the best,
Jay Holben
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Previous Blogs:
10/09/2007 Who is This Guy?
10/12/2007 The Camera Conundrum
10/16/2007 The Digital Seduction
10/19/2007 Why I Teach
10/23/2007 More Detail on 24p
10/26/2007 DV101 Continued: Polarizers
10/30/2007 Spooky Digital Photography
11/02/2007 Smoke and Fog Part One
11/06/2007 Smoke and Fog Part Two
11/09/2007 Film Look: Widescreen Part One
11/13/2007 Film Look: Widescreen Part Two
11/16/2007 Film Look: Widescreen Part Three
11/20/2007 Adventures in Lighting
11/20/2007 First Time DV
12/03/2007 Choosing the Canon XL2
12/07/2007 DV Expo Follow-ups Part 1: More on the Doc Filmmaking Panel
12/11/2007 Electricity 101
12/11/2007 Electricity 101: Part II
12/18/2007 Electricity 101: Part III
12/21/2007 Electricity 101: Part IV
12/18/2007 Making a Hand Dimmer
01/04/2008 Electricity and Shopping List
01/08/2008 Color Temperature
01/15/2008 Location Lighting Part I
01/18/2008 Location Lighting Part II
01/22/2008 Exposure Part I
01/25/2008 Exposure Part II
01/30/2008 Moving into Production