Digital Acquisition now rivals Film

DoP Robin Holder and editor Keith Mottram, discuss their experiences working on a recent worldwide TVC spot for Nestle. Published in the October edition of High Definition Magazine, this article highlights the significant advantages in shooting in HD and capturing to disk using DeckLink HD. This is a great ‘User-story’ from a DoP’s perspective.

Seven thirty in the morning and I’m standing outside the catering bus in Richmond, blowing into a hot cup of coffee. Rumours are circling around “Apparently we’re using a new type of camera” I hear more than once and there are also mutterings that we are shooting on HD – these are not the conversations of a happy crew.

This was a commercial shoot for Nestle cereals and would be going out worldwide. Coupled with the fact that the commercial featured child actors (so no gate checks and 40 minute reels were a bonus) and the fact that we’d be doing multiple pack replacement (no stabilisation issues – fantastic news).

Set-Up

The cinematographer was David Johnson, an incredibly skilled and experienced director of photography (his credits include the features Aliens vs Predator and Resident Evil) he didn’t seem to be fazed and the crew got on with setting up the first shot. The colour temperature was set, the SRW1 was set to record at 25fps and we were ready. The shoot was in a large kitchen and the lighting was predominantly Kinoflos with a couple of Arri 5k’s blasting some light from the room behind. We recorded at 4:2:2 using Arri's D-20, the software is still not available to do 4:4:4 on the SRW1, but as this was going to finish on SDTV this wasn’t a problem.

I sat outside with my Powerbook looped into our little video village, next to me sat the video assist with an SD feed coming out of the SR1 into a DVcam deck – we didn’t want to review the SR masters on set. The agency obviously loved the clean feed they were seeing on the 24in monitors and we were blessed with some nice last of the summer weather.

We turned over and shot the first take. It worked; the skeptics were beginning to be silenced. We all knew then that this was going to work, the picture looked exactly how we wanted it – there was no grain and there was the same quality that we would demand from a 35mm shoot. I could tell immediately that the cuts would or wouldn’t work (I was on the shoot as editor and effects supervisor) and cut in between takes on Final Cut Pro.

Problems?

So what were the problems? There must be some I hear you cry. Firstly there was initial confusion over the fact that the camera started and stopped the SRW1, this was a small issue and didn’t lose us too much time. There was a fair amount of cabling between the camera and the video village; this is something that is often cited by film purists. In this instance the video village was necessary, we needed the agency off-set so there had to be a cable for their feed. We wanted to view takes on set so that negated a BNC from video assist to another SD monitor on set and as I mentioned before I added to the cabling by having my powerbook wired in. This was however shoot specific, the only cable we had to have was to the SRW1.

The only other real problem was there was a small delay when switching from 25p to 60p. This was due to the fact that Sony menus are not the easiest of things to negotiate – something I’m sure many of you are familiar with.

Hi-speed was interesting, the results were good and this was the only footage we played back on the day, the ability to see the high speed footage playing back at 25fps was a bonus and as we had the audio fed into the SRW1 we could even hear the first AD sounding like, well like someone who speaks very, very, slowly!

So that was the shoot, we finished on time without any disasters and we’re now in post. As I mentioned before this was an advert for multiple territories and so there are a number of pack replacements. I digitised the selected takes in at 4:2:2 HD via our Blackmagic HD card and cut the ‘off line’ in FCP. This was once again a painless process and it was great to be able to blow shots up and do significant moves on the footage with no noticeable quality loss.The agency and director loved watching the edits on the HD link equipped Apple cinema display. I am now preparing to send the shots to Shake (via the awesome simplicity of FCP5 and Shake 4’s integration) and then the job will be complete, bar some digital colour correction. So there you go, a high end commercial made to the standards of a full 35mm shoot without leaving the digital realm. In my opinion a new standard in film acquisition has been set and it doesn’t surprise me that Arri are the company to have done it.

Re-published in part from © High Definition Magazine.