Workin' on my last segment today. Shot 24F SD most of yesterday, but then Roger Ebert showed up at the filmmaker's red carpet moment (he was dressed casual shooting pictures of Isabel with his DSLR--looked more like a regular fan than a celebrity...pretty cool) and I had to flip the switch to HDV. So I made my post a little more complex because I'm doing the SDI thing with some of the footage, and then cropping and dc'in to DV.

I'll post lots more stuff in a few days.

Darrell, let's talk. I'd like to see some of this stuff worked through Magic Bullet (HD if you have it)

Best,

Barlow

That's what I keep thinking every time I look at the footage. There's no doubt in my mind they were aiming that high with this little baby.

For those who might be interested...

My final segment airs tomorrow night (Sat) at 9pm EST on Sundance. I follow another director named Isabel Croixet who has a movie with Tim Robbins in it called "The Secret Life of Words". Pretty intense drama.

Roger Ebert makes a very short appearance in my piece, so do tune in if you can. It's 24F SD XLH1 again.

Barlow, i droped you an email.
Darrell
FIRST CINEMA PICTURES

Barlow, so recompressing from HDV to DVCPRO actually retains a higher quality image? How can that be? So when the footage aired, how did you deliver it? Straight from the tape or?

Hi Nikial,

It's hard to actually quantify, but the H1's SDI is almost like a super firewire as it spits out a true 1.45Gbs 1080i signal--even from HDV tape playback--that is seemingly oversampled before it's recompressed to DV100. It looks about as good as the original HDV, (colors actually seemed better) but now in an i-frame format, it is much easier to deal with in FCP.

An experiment I'm going to try is recording DV from the SDI output of the camera, and also recording DV to tape. I've heard that you can actually get a slightly better image this way, but who knows? We'll see.

I cut my first piece shot in HDV in a DVCPROHD 1080i timeline. For delivery, I actually made a single DVCPRO HD QT file of the timeline, and then imported into Compressor, cropped for 4x3 (I shot 4x3 safe) and converted to DV. It held up beautifully. Did a Print to Video to a DSR-11 DVCAM deck and that was it. The piece was recaptured firewire into an Avid
and assembled along with the other segments into a final DVCAM master show tape. That's what went to the Sundance channel satellite truck.

For those that might go the SDI route, they will be amazed at how useful and powerful it really is. It's funny to use it just to transfer footage from HDV, but it really came in handy. I probably wouldn't have shot Carlos' segment in HDV if there were no SDI. I didn't want to navigate the choppy waters of the HDV realm with a tight deadline. With DV100, you don't have to conform a timeline and rebuild GOP's, which I knew would slow me down too much. DVCPROHD feels a lot like working with good old DV, but it's friggin' HD!

The thing I liked the most is it's all originated from HDV footage from a MiniDV tape! To look this good AFTER compression makes me feel good about HDV and its ability to create even better looking movies using the XL-H1. Tonight I re-watched "Open Water". Lord have mercy on that footage. If I had to shoot with a Sony VX2000 with its 410,000 pixeled CCD's and aspired to sell the movie for $2.4mil, I would either need Ridley Scott as my director or a miracle.

Now, if we only had some ACTION SEQUENCES with 24f HDV, then we'd be able to wrap up this HDV stigma. I hope the DIGIC processor does good in that. Heath is testing some this weekend.

- ShannonRawls.com