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Artistic Limits of different codecs into RAM
I am a film student in high school. The curriculum requires that I produce a paper and I would like to do it on the way different codecs influence a cinematographer’s decisions. The goal of the essay is to link the technical side of things (my passion) to the artistic side (the requirement of the program. If anyone out there believes that there is a better investigation I am open to suggestions.
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5 Replies
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People don’t really “choose a codec” based on artistic decisions. It’s not like choosing different film stock. Artistic decisions are made with camera choice, lenses, lighting etc. Codec choice is based on whatever camera you’re using, budget, and other workflow related decisions. Some codecs are higher quality and some are not. A higher quality codec will provide a cleaner image and be easier to color grade, do chroma keying and things like that. But again it’s not like an artistic decision. It has more to do with the camera and the overall workflow, like choosing to shoot on a RED camera vs. HDV. Each one uses it’s own respective codec, but the codec itself not really the basis for artistic decisions. Nobody’s ever going to say “Hmmm, I could shoot RED but I think I prefer the look of HDV for this shot.” It doesn’t work that way.
There are times when lower quality video can be used for artistic decisions (like “28 Days Later”) but that has more to do with the camera than the particular video compression format used.
Sean
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That seems to be esoteric indeed however I need sources for that. Pages upon pages could easily be made up about that however what do you think I would pull as sources?
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While I understand what you are getting at, I have seen quite a few articles saying that allowing us to shoot in DVCPro, HDV, etc allowed us to do this, that, and the other thing.
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[Ian Liuzzi-Fedun] “I have seen quite a few articles saying that allowing us to shoot in DVCPro, HDV, etc allowed us to do this, that, and the other thing.”
In my opinion, that is mostly BS driven by manufacturing marketing dollars. A crappy consumer camera in the hands of an award winning director of photogrphy, with a feature sized lighting budget behind him will look great regardless of the codec used.
You’re focusing too much on the technology and not enough on the art.
Mark
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I get that quite often however I see it quite differently. Nonetheless I do need to compare something and as I have already stated, the technical end is my passion. Some of it is BS but if you know the technology well enough then you can see where the people are coming from. Many a time I do penetrate through the manfacturer’s fog however sometimes I know they have a point
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