Jumping a bit forward into one of the major productions snags we hit. The HVX has a sweet spot to maintain maximum resolution. The resolution begins to degrade above 5.6 or so (maybe a little higher). I do not fully understand the mechanisms why but I beleive it has to do with wavelengths of light and the small aperture of a 1/3 inch chip camera. Nonetheless, I made a rule that we would not shoot above 5.6 so that we could maintain maximum resolution for a film out process later on.

To maintain proper light levels I had a full arsenal of Tiffen ND filters on hand to slide into the matte box. If the light levels rose above 5.6 I could bring them down with ND filters. Seems correct - doesn’t it? Until we hit our snag.

Anytime we used ND .3 we were fine. The ND did its job and we noticed nothing strange. However, at a particular location, we needed to use the ND .6 filter. It just so happens this location was the same location that our video tap cable was beginning to go and we were monitoring on the green channel only for much of the time (the HVX component connector is terrible). Not having a spare cable on hand we moved forward.

The cable occasionally worked in full color and at one point in the afternoon the script supervisor noticed a color shift. The white walls has a pinkish tint. The green towels were dark magenta (yes, magenta). However, skin tones seem unchanged. The pink shift on the walls was more pronounced in the highlights. Our shoulders slumped as we wondered at what point in the day we slid the filter in place or when the issue started. Luckily, in retrospect, the sequences were all consistent within themselves so we did not lose any footage to this issue.

But the question still stood. What was causing this bizarre and seemingly selective color shift. We spent about a half hour checking over the camera. We could reproduce the issue by sliding the ND filter out and then back in place - the issue was clearly linked to the filter. However, the in camera .9 ND filter did not cause the same shift. So either it was the Tiffen filters or it was the interaction of the Tiffen filters with the HVX.

Move forward a week and we were shooting on a bright sunny day in a bathroom with large windows. We had put ND gels on windows before but this was the first time the intensity of the sun required 1.8 of ND to get it in balance with the interior lighting. After 2 hours of putting up gels we looked at the monitor. Holy smokes - We could not believe it. The light coming throught the windows was now tinted pink. Pull the gels off and it was white. So again, either it was the roscoe gels or it was the interaction of the gels with the HVX. We had to move on and therefore we had to block off the windows and frame them out of the shots. By manipulating the action we managed to get great footage even with this limitation. But the question still remained - Why was this happening?

In posting this issue to many message boards lots of theories came up. People asked about white balance. When the problem occurred we white balanced both before and after the gels/filter was used to no effect. We could white balance to the pink area but the rest of the frame would have been green. Perhaps a camera with a paintbox could have overcome that. We were also asked about the quality of the gels and filters. Roscoe and Tiffen are not top of the line but it is reasonable to expect a good color balance in their materials.

The best explanation I could get was that there is no true ND material. It is only ND relative to the chip or film emulsion that is picking up the light through it. So the internal HVX filters have the proper colormetry and do not cause a color cast. But other materials colormetry will differ and therefore can introduce a color cast.

Here is a thread on DVXuser I started about this issue. It does get a bit heated between another user and myself - but there was a lot of great ideas and input from other people.

Morals of the story. Do not assume ND is truly ND at high amounts for your camera. Always have a spare monitor cable on hand in case the primary dies. Finally, even test the small obvious things such as color temperature when using ND filters.

We made the decision very early in preproduction to utilize an all digitial end to end workflow. The technology is in place to support this but it is bleeding edge so we really needed to create the specific steps we would be following. Moreover, we needed to make sure to test it in a pseudo production environment making sure to work all the kinks out.

There are a few obvious advantages to a digital workflow. Most notably is the lack of tapes to track keep a hold of and log. We would shoot our entire feature without touching a single tape (not including the documentary camera). The other notable advantage is that your footage is already digitized, logged with timecode and available to an editing system. While this is true, of course the immaturity of the technology really forced us to figure out how to make the footage immediately available.

Ok - enough with the preamble. Here is the workflow we implemented.

- 4 gig P2 card is loaded into the camera and given a reel number to put on the slate. The card is formatted clean.
- The first shot is slated with the reel number and the shot number identifying the reel.
- Shoot until card is full. For us this amounted to about 10 minutes of footage.
- Pull card and call for new reel. Runner takes card to loader. Loader takes full card and hands off usable card.
- Card is loaded into camera, formatted and the next reel number is put on slate and announced to the script supervisor.
- Loader offloads the P2 card to 2 identical harddrives at the same time. Offload time is the same for 1 usb drive as it is for 2. The bottleneck is not the drive or usb speed.
- Loader then burns the P2 footage to 2 DVDs. This results with the footage being on 2 hard drives and 2 dvds.

Unbreakable rule: We could not force the loader to hand off a card until the footage was verifiably on 2 different locations. It could be the 2 hard drives or the dvds. But until there was redundancy we would have to hold waiting for the offload. This occurred only a handful of times out of the 250 reels we shoot for this film when we were allowing the actors to improvise for entire P2 cards worth of shooting.

The question arises - is 3 locations excessive for the footage. The answer is yes - probably could have done with 2 hard drives and 2 dvd but we wanted location redundancy as well. At the end of a shoot day, one drive and one set of dvds would go home with me and another with the loader. If there were a fire or other problem at one of the locations we would still have a backup of footage.

Reviewing shots on set was relatively easy. We could access any reel on the hard drive with the Panasonic P2 viewer and view the clips. We went through 4 sets of hard drives over the course of the shoot (4 pairs). This meant that on a given day we did not have all the footage with us. This presented a problem when we needed to review a shot that had occurred a long time ago. At times we knew we needed to match a particular shot so we pulled the dvd to bring to set. However, there were times where the workflow left us without a shot we would have liked to review. In retrospect, perhaps one set of hard drives should have traveled with us.

To really get a look at the dailies we loaded the clips into Avid at our editing suite. This allowed us to search easily through the clips, output full resolutions frames and clips for inspection and let us try some sample edits. The key thing is that all of this was available to us without digitizing a single clip (although we did need to copy the clips onto our media drive). In addition, the script supervisors notes immediately matched up with the shots. Every shot is a separate file so cross referencing her notes with the timecoded shots was straightforward.

I will cover working with Avid and P2 footage in a later entry.

Low budgets - they make you make choices and they make you think carefully about the mix of equipment necessary for a shoot. This, of course was the situation we were in (as most productions are). We knew that we were working within the following parameters:

- Very tight shooting spaces (NYC bathrooms)
- low budget
- could not comprimise quality - this meant quality over substance (more about this later)
- Very small staging areas for equipment

The first problem I addressed was how we would light rooms with dimensions of 8 feet by 6 feet (a normal NY bathroom) and still be able to shoot in every direction. This required us to get the lights off of the floor. Autopoles by Bogen provided us a solution to this. A note here - autopoles are intended to be used vertically and are not meant to hang in a horizontal position so I cannot recommend this technique to anyone else and you are working at your own risk if you use it. Nonetheless, for small units, autopoles provided us a perfect solution. We could hang lights where every we wanted in the bathrooms without worrying about camera angles. Not only did this give us flexibility in hanging the lights but we were able to set up between shots quicker since the lights tended to stay in the same place.

Our grip complement included the following
- lots of maffer clamps (actually superclamps) to clamp lights onto the autopoles, shower doors, medicine cabinets, and anywhere else we could.
- Light stands for the times when we needed a light on the floor
- c-stands, flags, scrims and other lighting controls - Fast flags are a great space saver since you can put flags, scrims and silks on the same frames
- full compliment of gels - theatrical colors for effects but lots of color correction blue (CTB) to match outdoor lighting and some CTO.

Lighting
Pro-lights - We were deciding between Lowell pro-lights and Arri Fresnels. The obvious choice and advice we got was to use the Arris. We decided against the Arris and cost was only a minor reason. Pro-lights take up about half the space of a comparable arri. This proved to be important to use when putting lights up on an autopole. We needed the couple of extra inches of filming space over the actors heads. In addition, as controllable as a fresnel is, the pro-lights “fresnel like” shadow was just a little softer making it easier to control in the shoebox size rooms we worked in. So pro-lights became our staple light.

Floros - We had a kino miniflo 9 inch lamp kit. This was a lifesaver any time we need a little fill, an eyelight, or a very localized light source. As expensive as this kit is, it is worth every penny. I highly recommend that everyone puts one in their kit and keeps 2900K and 5500K tubes on hand for any situation.

We also used a flolight FL-110 - this is a 2 tube fixture with surprising output and punch I think due to the mirrored surfaces. This was a great fill light in the office scenes and proved invaluable in wide open low key scenes such as at our party scene. It helped bring up the general fill level to good levels for proper exposure.

Open faced - We had a full compliment of open faced lights from 250 watts to 1000 watts. The were very useful on the larger sets and also helped in creating both nightime and daytime ambience.

Chinese lanterns - We had a set of multicolored chinese lanterns with 100 watt lamps which were useful for some lighter fill as well as interesting practicals in the shots.

DIMMERS - Invaluable - you must have as many dimmers as lights you plan on using in a setup. They save time allowing you to adjust each lamp exactly how you need to. I suggest a high quality rheostat dimmer (they dont buzz). Make sure you stay within the wattage limits of the dimmer (you don’t want to start a fire). I recommend the handmade dimmers by Walter Graff. They are very well made and worth the price.

Camera Support
- Primary support was the Cartoni Focus head with 2 stage legs. The Focus head is truly amazing at the price point. Super smooth pans and tilts with fully adjustable drag. The head is truly solid and holds the camera very tightly. The legs had a mid level spreader which was fine most of the time. The only issue was when we had the legs straddling something that was higher then a foot or so - the spreader would get in the way and we would need to use apple boxes to raise the legs.

Kessler Crane - we used the 8 foot version mounted on a pro-vista tripod. I do recommend the kessler - I do not recommend putting it on a pro-vista - it just wasnt sturdy enough so I had to fight wobble in the legs. The crane allowed us to do some really great moves and string together shots. Only issue was that we had to lighten the camera up and take it off the rails and remove the mattebox. The extra weight actually started to bend the camera tray - though when lightened up it worked great.

Fig rig - This was our most used and lifesaving support. Such a simple device allows so much movement. For those that have not seen one, it looks like a steering wheel with a mount for the camera in the center. It could easily handle the full rig (rails, ff, mattebox etc). When mounted I was able to move the camera into places it otherwise would have been impossible. The wider radius on the camera due to the wheel’s wider shape smoothed out camera shake. This allowed us to let the camera “breathe” but not shake. We could keep it alive but not bring attention to the camera shake. In addition, we were able to turn to the fig rig when time was short since it allowed us to move the camera from shot to shot very quickly. The biggest downside of the fig is the need to support the weight with your arms - it get tiresome very quickly and long shots would begin to have some shake near the end. Rest often when you use the fig rig - hand off the camera to your assistant between shots.

Dollys - the most used dolly was our skateboard dolly on pvc pipes. We could get away with this again due to our space restrictions. NY bathrooms didnt allow us a run of more then a few feet. The office bathrooms gave us a little more distance (up to 10 feet). We also used a spider dolly for our party scene which allowed us full 20 foot curved runs. This dolly was rented from Able Cine Tech for a surprisingly good price.

Camera gear
Rails - We used Red Rock Micro rails and baseplate as the center of our rig. To line up our mattebox we also needed one of their shim kits which was relatively easy to install.

Follow Focus - We begged and pleaded to get one of Red Rock Micro’s Follow Focus Units (pre release) but they just werent ready. Initially we purchased a Cavision FF and a geared ring for the HVX. However, the pitch on the gear ring couldnt match up with any of the gears on the Cavision. After a week of trying to solve the problem we had to send the unit back. We turned to the indie-focus. This is a low cost friction based solution. The focus wheel pushes up against the HVX focus ring and turns it using friction. It was surprisingly stable and, although there was about a 2 degree range of play in the control, we were able to hit our focus marks very precisely. The unit sits VERY close the the iris control so getting my finger in there was a challenge and I had to occasionally put the unit back to make an iris adjustment.

Mattebox - We used the Cavision mattebox and french flag 2 stage unit. It was adequete but didnt perform great. The screws and nuts were constantly loosening so we were always repairing the unit. It was a good enough lighting control without excelling.

Filters - We had a set of ND filters (.3, .6, .9). The HVX performs best (resolves most) under 5.6 so we used that as a hard limit and I had these filters on hand to keep us in this range. However, ND filters and gels proved to be problematic with the HVX - but this is a subject for a later entry.

To really be comfortable with our choice of technologies and camera we needed to put it to a real test. We needed to test different combinations of camera settings and different types of shots. Then by transfering the test to 35mm film and projecting it on a big screen we could approximate how it would look to a viewing audience.

There were a number of concerns that we were addressing going into this test. We planned on shooting in 720P (for reasons I will get into later). Our worry about this was how well it would translate to a 35mm film size. Would it be pixelated or smooth? We also wanted to see how motion from the camera shot at 24 frames per second would translate to film. Would the motion be rendered properly? What about the speed effects (over and undercranking)? We also wanted to push the camera in all directions - highlights, shadows, gradients etc. In constructing the test we tried to cover as much as we could. Finally, this would also be a test to see what the workflow would be to get the footage from camera to the big screen.

Postworks NY - a wonderful postproduction house helped us with the test. We were able to put together 2 minutes of footage. They then tranfer it onto film using a CRT process and a laser process. They were particularly interested in footage from this camera because it was so new and they wanted to make sure they knew their side of the workflow before a full project fell into their laps. All we had to do was give them an Avid timeline on a hard drive.

A great big thank you is due to the folks at Postworks for all their help with this test.

To say the least - the test was a smashing success - the camera did everything we wanted it to do. Here is my account of the test which I posted to DVXuser.com:
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Hello all,

We recently conducted a film out test with footage from the HVX. A very special thanks to Postworks New York for their incredible help and expertise. I promised to report back the results so here they are.

Footage:
The footage was all shot in 720P mostly with chroma +3, detail -3, coring +3, master ped -3 and cine-d

OVerall Impressions:
WOW - amazing, truly film like. The footage truly stood up to the blowup. Looked amazing.

Film process:
Postworks was nice enough to print it using a CRT process (cheaper) and a laser process (more expensive). They both looked great. But the laser process

looked much better (and it should for approx 20K more for a feature transfer). THe CRT process was slightly soft and contrasty. At first I was concerned that the filmout was soft. But it turned out the be the process. The laser process was sharper but still soft enough to hide the video edge. It looked really good - and from the ideal distance (something like 2.5 times screen height away) it looked to my eye like film.

NOISE:
Here is the hot issue - and once and for all - IT IS NOT AN ISSUE. The noise was unnoticable - looked like film grain. Major motion pictures I see at theaters have MORE noise then this test did. If you are worrying about noise - stop worrying. If you are overlighting and then bringing down in post - it is unneccesary, a waste of time, and can lead to not having the final look like you expect. There simply is not a noise issue. Everyone in the room agreed including the folks from postworks who see this stuff all the time. The sky shots were clean - shadows were clean. Any noise “grain” looked very uniform. Lets put the noise issue to bed.

Color, Motion:
The colors were rich, sharp but not videoish at all. They looked very close to how we expected. Motion rendition was very filmlike and smooth.

Gamma:
We tested both cine-d and cine-v. Cine-v is very contrasty and pushed the blacks very dark. Cine-d and its wide latitude really helped smooth it over. I liked cine-d much better - and noise was still not an issue even though that is the “noisiest” setting. It was recommended by postworks to not crush blacks in the camera since you will lose info in doing that. They can always crush blacks in post during CC - although if you wont be doing extensive CC then you might want to do it in camera.

Over/undercrank:
Overcranking for slow motion worked wonderfully - very smooth and again - filmlike. Undercranking for fast motion was another story. It was very juddery. We used a 180d shutter for this - prob needed 270 or so shutter for smoother motion.

I was sitting in the viewing looking for issues - looking for reasons to be upset or things I needed to fix. Of course if you look close enough you will find something - but believe me. It looked great. Of course this is all my own opinion and others might differ. But I felt great coming out of the viewing.
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We decided on the following settings after the test: 720P with chroma +3, detail -3, coring +3, master ped -3 and cine-d.

Why did we decide to shoot at 720P? A number of reasons came into play. First of all storage - we would need far less storage for the footage and each P2 card would hold much more footage per load. Editing and reviewing would be more difficult if we chose to shoot 1080P due to the needed processing power . 1080P does resolve more, but only about 15% more so the tradeoff in storage and power needed didn’t justify it.

Cine-d has gotten a bad wrap for adding noise to the image. It does add noise but in a fairly uniform way that feels very much like film grain. Cine-v does have less noise but the contrast ratio is so high that I felt the noise was amplified - or at least the perception of noise. The wider latitude of Cine-d gives a bit of a perceived gradient to the (possibly increased) noise which makes it less obvious.

All other settings were decided on by viewing different combinations under different circumstances balancing the need to have enough chroma and to reduce the video edge of the image.

One of the first choices I needed to make for this production was which format we would be shooting on. It is really a fantastic time to be a DP on a low budget production as there is so many options available at lower price points. But as always, we are slaves to the specific requirements of our project - and if we disregard them we might be making a big mistake.

Film - the age old question and argument. We are making a film that we expect to be a hit so people always seem to say - shoot it on film. Film, film film. Bah - you should shoot on film if your project warrants it, if you will be using the advantages of film and if your team’s skillset matches that. Film looks beautiful - no question. It has greater latitude. 35mm allows great control over Depth of Field. But that should not preclude looking at the wide range of digital choices available to filmmakers.

The end of 2005 welcomed in a wide range of lower cost High Definition Cameras. Most of the players came to the table - Sony, Canon, JVC and Panasonic were the leaders pushing their technologies. The DVX100 from Panasonic has always had a great track record for independent filmmakers and many of us are comfortable with its design and features. But I just didnt think it could stand up to a 35mm film blowup. Recently, “November” starring Courtney Cox was released - it was shot on the DVX with cinematography by Nancy Schreiber. While she did a wonderful job pulling great images and style from the camera, I just felt it still looked like something in standard def pushing the limits of blowup. SD just was not an option for a project this large.

We had to satisfy these project requirements:
- VERY VERY small locations (all bathrooms) so the equipment needed to be compact
- Digital workflow - My skill set is based in the digital world so I knew I could support this end to end.
- Highly compressed timeline. We needed equipment that we could use quickly and move from shot to shot in the smallest time possible.
- Bleeding edge. There still is a stigma attached to not shooting on film. I wanted to avoid that by being on the bleeding edge so that we could generate interest from the technologies used.

So film just was not an option. The cameras are larger and heavier (for the most part). There would be a film workflow which would require us to add people with skillsets to manage the day to day operations of a film shoot. We would not be able to truly monitor the footage which would slow us down since we would need to be more precise in measuring light and angles to reduce the risk of mistakes. And film, while a beautiful medium, is not cutting edge (I guess it wouldnt need to be since film would remove the stigma altogether).

We had to also rule out the 2/3 inch HD cameras (cine-alta, Varicam etc) because of the larger footprint. Losing another 10-15 inches of space in these small locations just wasnt an option. As it was we had to make huge compromises in shootings angles to keep everything on location. I challenge you to take a look at a standard New York bathroom and imagine putting lights, cameras, sound, and then actors in it - every inch becomes as valuable as gold.

I assumed that most of the sub 10,000 dollar HD cameras would perform in the same range - one might be better in one area while another is better in a different area. Truth be told, I am a big fan of Panasonic products. In addition, the HVX200 seemed to have a winning set of features. It could record in 720P, 1080P, variable framerates and would have a similar winning image that we all loved in the DVX.

The P2 tapeless workflow also intrigued me. The thought of being able to shoot without labeling tapes and keep all of our footage on a set of hard drives was amazing. It was a perfect meld of the film process of changing magazines and the digital ability to “shoot more”. The P2 cards allowed us 10 minute “magazines” and made us think just a bit before hitting record as opposed to the limitless feeling of digital tape. Having 2 cards and a part time loader really make it a more filmlike workflow. I will get into the specifics of our workflow later.

But, the big question was, would the camera perform? And what settings would we use? Well, the only way to know for sure would be to test different settings and then transfer to 35mm film and project it on a big screen. One thing I truly believe in is testing equipment and workflow fully. So many times I have read about issues people have had with the HVX and other cameras that could have been solved ahead of time by testing and practicing a workflow. Never work out the kinks on set. So with the help of Postworks NY we performed a full filmout test. In my next post I will detail the test and the results. As you can probably guess we were very happy with the camera’s performance.

And here it begins. American Standard is a truly independent film and as such we has many restrictions to work within. But we also had the freedom to shoot the film as we wanted to.

In this Journal I want to let all the DPs and techies into the inner workings of our shoot from the technical side. We made many decisions based on our budget, timeframe and type of project. The film was shot on the Panasonic HVX200 at 720P in a completely tapeless workflow. This was a new and untested camera when we received it. We needed to design a workflow based on this camera, P2 technology and a scaled down crew.

I conceived this project about 5 years ago with the director, Josh Abraham sitting at a bar at the Ground Round in Binghamton, NY. In trying to think of a completely new take on the 20-something story I came up with the idea of shooting a film from the “other side”. That is from the point of view of a fly on the wall in the bathroom. This would require an intelligent audience to piece together the story they would never see. It would also require clever writing to keep it from feeling contrived. We never wanted to just put characters in a bathroom when they could be having the same conversation outside. In addition, we wanted a cast of 20 characters to populate this world without the 90210 syndrome (that syndrome is when you feel that the whole world consists of only the characters you know).

Flash to a year later and the script was written by Josh and Jason Kucharsky (fellow producer and other writer). It was clever but alas was just a first draft.

Flash to 4 more years later - or just a year ago - and the script was an extremely tight comedy with intersecting story lines having all the elements of a mainstream and cult comedy. Now it was a script worth producing. I contacted Josh and Jason on behalf of my production company SLM Production, owned by myself and Lauzanne Nel. I was looking for a relatively easy straightforward script to produce. “American Standard” seemed like a good candidate. All interiors, reasonable sized cast, easy situations to photograph - clearly it could be done on a very low budget in a short time period.

Well - I couldnt have been more misled. The thing is we chose a script with over 20 characters, over 30 interior SMALL locations and a set of intersecting stories that relied on subtlety. In addition, since all the locations were bathrooms, it would be important for us to make all locations look very different from the moment we entered them and keep the recognizable. We needed to customize our workflow, equipment, crew and mentality to the set of unique challenges this project presented.

In this journal I would like to recount the sets of challenges we came up against both as a producer, but most of all as a Director of Photography. In giving our creative solutions you will get a sense of how we solved problems - and perhaps some of your will use these solutions in the future.

This was an extremely successful shoot. Our workflow was nearly flawless and due to the amazing talents of our crew we have created beautiful footage, great comedic acting and a story worth telling.