Digital video is smashing the celluloid ceiling.
Synthespians and other high-concept f/x have hogged the attention in Hollywood's digital evolution, but the curtain has also gone up on a new generation of digital video cameras, which is great news for the indie filmmaker. Inexpensive consumer models like Sony's miniDV cams are the secret behind both below-the-radar Net flicks and critically acclaimed feature films. Thomas Vinterberg's indie hit The Celebration, for example, was shot using a PAL-format Sony that retails for less than $3,000. "It's not about the format anymore," says Mark Stolaroff, postproduction and finance director for Next Wave Films, the Independent Film Channel's microbudget feature greenhouse. "It's about what aesthetic you want to shoot given your resources. A one-chip camera just makes Vinterberg's movie tick."
Of course, commercial success still requires translating the director's vision into 2,000-foot reels of celluloid for distribution to theaters, but in the last few years, digital video has begun to leave increasingly larger pieces of traditional film production on the cutting-room floor. The time-honored, time-consuming flatbed editing station is becoming a luxury item for celluloid chauvinists, and even the industry-standard Avid is getting squeezed from below by desktop editing systems. As emerging filmmakers are finding out, seeing digital from the get-go serves the bottom line. DV also puts the digitools in the hands of every would-be Wim Wenders, whether their sights are set on the studio-friendly festival circuit or the independent film channel called the Internet.
The Big-Budget Indie
Seasoned filmmakers are choosing digital video for reasons that are as much aesthetic as monetary. DV, for example, handles different light conditions much more easily than film. For his feature-length documentary Buena Vista Social Club, Wim Wenders shot between 100 and 150 hours of footage with a rented digital Betacam - the Sony DVW-700 - and two consumer-level cameras that use the miniDV format: a palm-sized Sony DCR-PC1 and a larger DCR-VX1000. By using low-profile miniDV cams, the German filmmaker could capture the everyday lives of Cuban musicians without the distraction - or expense - of hauling around a big production crew. The director of photography didn't require lots of lighting equipment, and his subjects were at ease. The crew brought plenty of videotapes, so there wasn't the same pressure to conserve film as on a traditional set.
"Wenders was standing outside this Cuban recording studio with almost no light, just hanging back, letting people be," says the film's editor, Brian Johnson. "Being an old film guy, I was skeptical at first of making a feature on digital video, but the format carried us through."
Though the same miniDV cameras are available in the United States, Wenders chose models that use the European PAL format, which is more convenient for transferring to film than the NTSC format used in the US. PAL has 100 more lines of resolution than NTSC, and its 25-frames-per-second speed is closer to that of film, making it easier to sync individual frames. A number of Stateside productions are now boosting their image with miniDV cameras from Europe.
While a lavish production shot on traditional film might use 15 times more footage than makes it to the screen, Wenders' virtually unlimited DV cache allowed him to shoot roughly 100 times more than he aimed to use. Brian Johnson calls winnowing down the footage for Buena Vista "one of the hardest things I've ever done."
The amount of footage aside, the editing process was fundamentally the same as for any feature film: nonlinear offline editing on an Avid system, followed by final online postproduction.
First, the miniDV footage is transferred to digital Beta, a high-end format compatible with postproduction equipment. Fed a compressed version of the digital Beta footage, Avid tracks the time code for every frame of video. While the movie's editor arranges scenes on the onscreen timeline, Avid sequences the time codes, making what is effectively a digital blueprint for the final movie. (This nonlinear process is called offline editing because typically the Avid never actually touches live footage.)
Finally, Avid spits out a small file called an edit decision list, or EDL, a rundown of which piece of footage should be cut and where; this, and the original digital Beta footage, are loaded into a high-end online editing suite.
In Wenders' case, online editing was done at Encore Video in Hollywood. The EDL was fed into an Axial, basically a workstation that controls the suite's various tape decks and mixers to create an edited master tape. The master then went to a telecine bay, another special tape-to-tape deck at which a colorist adjusted the onscreen hues. Titles were added at a third online bay.
Back out on digital videotape, the completed Buena Vista Social Club - to this point an all-digital production - went to a transfer company to be burned onto film. Most movie theaters and film festivals haven't bought expensive digital video projectors yet, much less pure digital projection systems, so they can accept media only in the form of big old cans of celluloid.
The Big-Ambition Indie
The breakthrough of DV is the accessibility of quality," says Bennett Miller, whose The Cruise tracks a motormouthed tour guide around New York City. "You can keep the film digital throughout and create something worth blowing up to 35 mm."
Miller shot the entire movie solo on a Sony VX1000; the Cruise crew of one was made possible by a camera so small that Miller could simply carry it along like any New York tourist. "The size of the VX1000 contributes to its ease of use and its inconspicuousness," he says, noting that another DV production, The Saltmen of Tibet, used a small digicam to elude the attention of Chinese and Tibetan officials. "With film, you'd need a boom microphone and a DAT audio recorder, and you'd have to change reels every 10 minutes," he says. "Besides, film is heavy."
Audio, says Miller, is a big part of DV cinema. Sound quality has to be on a par with what moviegoers are used to, since the image quality still looks a little different. Some filmmakers record on a separate digital audiotape recorder, syncing soundtrack to image later. Miller chose to use the camera itself as the recording device. With the right attachments and equipment, he was able to realize professional sound - all the better to capture the brilliant yammering of his subject, Timothy "Speed" Levitch.
"My microphone cost as much as the camera," Miller chuckles. He bought an attachment for the Sony, the BeachTek 160, which provides balanced inputs, along with a high-quality Lectrosonics wireless setup and a Sennheiser microphone. The result speaks for itself. Onscreen, even though Levitch stands a good dozen feet from the camera in one scene, you can hear loud and clear every detail of his argument with a bus-company dispatcher.
Miller shot more than 80 hours of footage for The Cruise. He transferred all the miniDV tapes to analog Beta SP using a rented DVC PRO video deck. Then he offline-edited the film himself on an Avid suite rented for eight months for about $20,000. (While Avid dominates the professional market for offline editing systems, cheaper suites from Media 100 and Pinnacle Systems are also popular with independent filmmakers.)
Most of the remaining postproduction duties for The Cruise took place at New York film boutiques: Spin Cycle Post helped edit the sound and Sound One mixed it. Then, with Avid's EDL on floppy disk and the stack of Beta SP tapes in hand, Miller mastered the final film to a digital Beta tape at Sony Music Studios. Once the film was in good enough shape to show investors, he secured the financial help to bump the work up to HDTV tape and put it before the electron-beam recorder for film transfer at the Sony Pictures High Definition Center in Culver City, California - the same facility Wenders used for Buena Vista Social Club.
The Big-Basement Indie
With today's advances in speed and memory, it's possible to do online editing on your desktop, bringing the entire film into the computer in its highest quality before editing. Any hard drive that runs at 7,200 rpm can handle the 3.7-Mbps flow of information from camera to computer. And many computers ship with 10-plus Gbytes of memory on the hard drive. Installing a FireWire card in the back of your PC requires nothing but a screwdriver and a pair of clean hands. Or use the FireWire already on a Macintosh G3 and start moving footage from the miniDV tape to your hard drive. Since digital video uses about 13.5 Gbytes per hour of footage, you have space for about 40 minutes of film on a healthy drive.
But you're out of luck if, like Bennett Miller, you have more than 80 hours of digital video: That kind of footage would take an impossible 1,000 gigs of hard-drive space. "Not even Bill Gates has that kind of storage," quips Miller. One solution is to whittle down footage to the scenes likely to be used before capturing it with a computer. Many filmmakers, like The Trouble With Perpetual Deja Vu's Todd Verow, edit in 20-minute sections, piecing the whole thing together seamlessly on the camcorder at the end.
Apple's Final Cut Pro, Digital Origin's EditDV, or Adobe's Premiere make desktop film editing as straightforward as word processing. Final Cut Pro lets you edit anything captured on hard disk with simple drag-and-drop moves. One effect, called Chroma Key, is like a stripped-down bluescreen, letting you relocate foreground images by making the background transparent. Another pulldown from the effects menu lets you create professional titles and credits. The last step in the process, rendering, is basically a one-button operation that weaves all the layers together, applies effects, and produces a finished digital file. The computer can then spit the film back out to your camcorder through a FireWire connection.
On Digital Origin's EditDV for Windows, faster software means less rendering time than on the Mac. A PC running a 600-MHz chip - say, the AMD Athlon - will boost your speed further.
Scott Stewart is working on a film adaptation of the Raymond Carver short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." He used a PAL-format VX1000 camera for principal photography, and he has already captured all his footage into a 350-MHz Power Mac. The QuickTime movie files almost fill the four 16.8-gig ProMax hard drives he installed. Stewart plans to edit with EditDV and then use Adobe After Effects for compositing. He wouldn't bother with Premiere, he says. "I'm not into the word-processor style of cut-and-paste editing. I like the traditional feel of a flatbed editing machine you get from EditDV."
While indie filmmakers increasingly exhibit their work on the small screen of the Internet, even those bound for the big screen can leverage the Net. Peter Broderick of Next Wave Films (www.nextwavefilms.com) filters through movies on the Web and those sent to his office as proof of concept for a film. If Next Wave likes what it sees, it'll pay up to $100,000 to have the footage color-corrected and transferred to film. From there, the burgeoning Bennett Miller is off, as The Cruise's "Speed" Levitch puts it, into "the frantic chaos of this limitless universe."
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