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Shot film with Panasonic dvx100a
Hi, Guys wanted to ask one other question. I shot my feature film using the the Panasonic DVX100a, but instead of using the adapter to shoot 16×9, I used the letterbox mode in the camera (not the sqeeze mode). My DP told me that he had spoken to a guy that does dv to film transfers in LA and that he told him that although you lose resolution that is not a big deal for projection on a big screen. Do you agree with that? That has really worried me alot. After all the work put in to this film and then that it doesn’t project well. From the dailes or tapes the image looks great on a monitor. But my question once again from your experience will it project well? We did use lights and lit everything very well. We also used a wide angle lens in some scenes.
Antonio
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12 Replies
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Hi,
It will be fine. Have your transfer house bump to HD first, if it needs any sharpening, that can add some at this stage, then roll off to film out. Since you are already finished filming, don’t worry about it. Get it cut and just worry about making the story make sense.
Best,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
Antonio,
Jan is right regarding your cutting your story. I am a firm believer that every experience should be a learning one.
1. You DP was wrong. You lost vertical resolution by shooting in letterboxed mode. Had you shot in squeeze or with an anamorphic adapter you would be using all of the tapes information to record both extra resolution and pixels. By shooting letterboxed you basically recorded black pixels where you could have recordeed picture information.
2. An HD transfer to HD looks better when it is shot anamorphic because it retains the aspect ratio of HD. Now you are in a position of having to further “blowup” your image to fit the HD frame.
3. HD does not add “sharpening” to your picture. If anything it will look softer because it is being blown up as much as you can possibly want to blow it up now. HD bump ups do not fix problems, usually they enhance them so going to HD without proper color correction in the 2K cineon film space will is preferred.
4. Get a good film house in your area to consult with you on your workflow next time and unless your DP has been through the process and can show you results, then you should come up with a Digital to Film workflow before you shoot your next film.
I do not want to rain on the party but there is much to learn in your experience and you can achive better results with good planning. The way you shot it is the least optimal workflow with DV.
David
Peace and Love 🙂
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K. David. Cool. I was aware of the adapter and so on. My DP was concerned about Glass on Glass and we would be wasting the good lense of the camera which is a Leica lens.(German lens, I believe) Also we had heard from a number of people bad things about the adapter. I heard that Century Optics is coming out with one for the DVX100b? I actually projected some footage today. It looks good. My objective with this film from the onset was to take it to festivals and to try to market it to a channel like the women’s network.I don’t have grandiose ideas about transferring to film.
I do agree with you about going up to HD is not going to help. Your film will always be in the format that it was shot in. Now in terms of the squeeze mode that you mentioned as far as I know there is no difference in resolution from Squeeze mode and letterbox. My other option would have been to shoot in normal mode (4:3) and get all 480 lines.
Yes, I agree with you next time I will use the adapter. It’s funny though, I shot my first feature with the canon GL1 and got good results. Looking at this footage from the DVX100a and comparing it to the footage from my first feature I must say that the DVX looks way better even in letterbox. And the Canon yields 525 lines of resolution.
Finally I think thats why sites like this are very helpful because there is so much information out there and sometimes its very hard to distinguish fact from fiction.
Antonio
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Antonio.
Here is the difference. If you shoot 4X3 you are going to have to cut part of the picture off to fit into a 16×9 frame. When you shoot letterboxed you are shooting 4×3 but you are chopping off the top and bottom of the 4×3 rame. When you shoot squeeze (or with the adaptor) you are putting a squeezed image to the full 4×3 of the tape. I am shooting a film like this now. So when you go to project a squeezed image in it’s correct 16×9 aspect, then you are getting the full resolution avaiabl to you.
I shoot stuff in squeeze mode. There are a few advantages to this over the glass.
1. The gass is heavy and if you add a matte box and filters it is a lot of wieght to add to the camers
2. You loose at least a stop with the glass in place.
3. It is not a zoom through, so you loose a lot of the range of your zoom lens.You here a lot in here about ‘shoot with the adapter, it’s cleaner, etc. I find it has more disadvantages than advantages. Frankly the DV color space and tape format barely warrant the use of the glass. The was on oversight with the original 100a that you could not shoot in squeeze mode while in 24P mode. This was corrected with the B. The solution, tell everybody to shoot with an $800.00 piece of glass.
If you shot some side by tests between the glass and the squeeze you would quickly se the advantages or disadvantages of both.
David
Peace and Love 🙂
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This is how it was explain to my dp. Check this out.
Q1) “My MiniDV or DVCAM camera does not have a “real” 16×9 CCD in it … I hear that the 16×9 is “fake” and I shouldn’t use it at all”
A1) Not entirely true. While a “true” 16×9 CCD is better than “interpolated” 16×9, the “true” 16×9 cameras are prohibitively expensive, and really overkill in many ways. Like the gameshow, your image chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link. In the world of MiniDV and DVCAM, the weakest link BY FAR is the fact that the image data is 4:1:1 encoded and has a 5:1 lossy compression ratio (in essence that means that 80% of your image data is thrown out, and only a portion of that makes it back into the final image).
Thus, the weakest link (in terms of image loss) you need to be most concerned with is the amount of useable image that gets on tape.
Here’s an interesting way to look at it:
If you shoot in 4:3 but you’re intended output is HDTV at 16:9 or film at 1.85 (or letterbox NTSC), then the pixels that you throw away to crop for one of these formats are the EXACT SAME pixels that get thrown away from the CCD when you work in the “interpolated” 16×9 mode of most cameras. The huge difference is, that when you work in 4×3 and crop later, you are throwing away pixels AFTER the major 5:1 compression stage, with the end result being that 25% of your valuable data space on the TAPE is unused. (note that it can be worse than 25% – since the DV codec is fixed rate, if a high detail object (like a tree) is in that 25% unused image area it could soak up more than 25% of the available dataspace. YIKES!)
Thus, if you are going to end up in either 16×9 or 1.85, the exact same pixels of the CCD will still end up in the resultant frame, but if you shoot 16×9, those pixels are interpolated across a significantly greater data space and the result is a superior image.
FIGURES TO NOTE:
A 4×3 image cropped to 16×9 uses only 75% of the available pixels of the CCD and only 75% of the available data space on the tape.
A 16×9 “interpolated mode” image presented in 16×9 uses the EXACT SAME 75% of the pixels of the CCD as above, but has the advantage of using 100% of the available data space on the tape.
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There is also this guy that shoots on the Panasonic dvx100a in letterbox mode. He makes nature films. Check out his site:https://www.pinelakefilms.com/faq.html, I think he does a great job. On his page he has a questions and answer section and he explains from his experience the pros and cons of shooting with the anamorphic adapter. He also has a way to improve the letterbox image using a particular program that also allows him to go into true 16:9.
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If your goal was to create a film print- the letterbox mode is essentially throwing away a good part of the frame that would have been useful to you. That said, you can still make a totally usable film print. That also said, it’s really not needed as most film festivals today are happy to project on video. That said even more, a film print is only required for a major wide theatrical release which with all respect sounds like that is not in the scope or intention of this project.
So you are one step backward but probably several steps forward. At this point I’d recommend making sure the film is the absolute tightest edit and best it can look on video. And then research which festivals might accept the kind of movie you made.
Noah
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PS- it’s a bit of an urban internet legend that by shooting letterbox you somehow trick a camera’s compression into giving more data bandwidth to the non-letterboxed portion of the image. The difference is neglible at best.
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Thanks, Noah, I think that the best thing will be for Panasonic to come out with a camera with native 16:9. I guess the DVX100C? I know the DVX200 has native 16:9. But some of us still prefer to work on regular dv. As you know when you go up to HD the expenses go up. Especially in Post.
Thanks for all the advice its been helpful. Thanks!
Antonio -
Uhh, antonio,
the 200 does work in regular DV. it can record to a DV tape without issue. So it is a native 16×9 camera that works in DV.
Also, based on how it was explained to your DP, he interpreted the pot wrong. It is plain as day from that post that you should be shooting with squeeze or the adapter.
i’m outa this one!
david
Peace and Love 🙂
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