When Marc Pingry pitched from his boat into Seattle's Mont Lake Cut with one of only two existing Sony high-definition camcorders perched on his shoulder, the television producer's heart sank. It wasn't long before his boat, body, head, and camera followed.
"First I got hit by one wave, then another and I was under," says Pingry. "I had to decide whether to save myself, save the camera, or save both. But I just couldn't be the guy who lost two HD cameras in three months."
So Pingry, who had lost his company's lone HD camera, valued at US$350,000, in Pennsylvania's Youghiogheny River earlier in the spring, struggled to the surface, put the camcorder on his head and swam for shore. When he landed, he handed the waterlogged camera to the Sony development team that asked him to test it, shook himself off, and crossed his fingers in hopes that they could repair it. "As it turned out, the Sony people fixed it, so I got to be the hero who saved the camcorder instead of the goat who broke it," he now says.
While the Federal Communication Commission, Congress and broadcasters are only now getting around to grappling with the complexities of making high-definition television available to the general public, Pingry and his team at KCTS, Seattle's public television station, have spent the past decade working with HD equipment in anticipation of the day, now fast approaching, when digital television becomes the standard. Although he does some independent productions, most of Pingry's work has been for KCTS and NHK in Japan, which regularly work in HD format. He and his team also do corporate videos.
A consummate true believer, Pingry has doggedly shot HD even though sets aren't available in the US. He simply loves the picture. He thinks it's beautiful. He's convinced that HD will become America's home standard, and he's been out trying to prove that the equipment that's been available to date, which is about as portable as four small refrigerators, can be used as cheaply as Super-16. Now that Sony's camcorders are scheduled to hit the market at a competitive $90,000 a pop, and sets are about to be rolled out, he feels vindicated.
"It's really exciting," he says. "These camcorders'll open up a whole new range of shows that can be shot on HD." In fact, besides KCTS, three other companies - HD Vision, Rebo Studio, and the Sony Pictures High Definition Center - are now regularly shooting HD productions.
Because landscapes are perfect subjects for HD's sweepingly clear pictures, Pingry and his team, which produced a KCTS series called Over America, shoot a preponderance of aerial footage. Moreover, until now the equipment has been so unwieldy that it was easiest just to strap it into a plane or helicopter and not mess with moving it around on land.
"As much as possible, our attitude toward shooting on this equipment has always been that we should use it like we would a high-end Beta cam," Pingry says, referring to the portable industry standard. "It's a challenge."
What Pingry views as challenging and presents to the producers who hire him as all in a day's work, others would view as downright foolhardy. His conversation is peppered with tales of the time he forgot to fasten his seat belt and risked slipping out of a helicopter onto the pinnacle of the Empire State Building, or the time he flew out in the bright sunlight to shoot some California landscapes and returned in the fog, only to have the pilot look across the twin-engine cockpit and ask him to shout if he saw a mountain looming in the windshield.
But even when a shoot seems safe, the risks run high. During a corporate video shoot this spring, the helicopter Pingry had contracted to fly him over the river caught one of its skids on a wire. Pingry, the pilot, and the helicopter plunged into the water just above the Youghiogheny's boiling rapids. Pingry and the pilot escaped, but the camera and the helicopter did not.
"I'll ask the pilots to do just about anything," he says. "I'm a shooter. I want a good picture. I figure it's up to them to tell me what's too dangerous."
