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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Freedom of Digital Video

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In this chapter

The Flexibility of Digital Recording Versus the Expense and Constraints of Film
Digital Features: A Brief History of Directors Who Chose Digital Production over Film

Film is expensive. Shooting a feature-length—or even a short—film means spending money to purchase film stock, paying to process the film once it's been exposed, and then spending more money to create and distribute prints after a film has been edited.

Video, on the other hand, is both flexible and affordable. You can shoot, edit, and output your project for a fraction of the costs of working with film. Unfortunately, for many years, analog video was just plain ugly. While film offered remarkable depth and clarity of color, video images were flat, had harsh edges, and colors that didn't look natural. Film was the only medium suitable for people aspiring to cinematic excellence. Even audiences with no technical background could differentiate between video and film, because video simply didn't look as good. When Happy Days stopped shooting film and started using videotape, lots of people in the audience saw that something had changed, even if they couldn't identify what it was. To many viewers, video equaled cheap production and only film signified quality.

Until recently, the most selective film festivals, awards competitions, and theatrical distributors considered only work shot on film. Because of the expense, however, film production remained beyond the reach of many directors. As a result, many good ideas never made it to the screen, and many great video projects never made it to an audience. Independent producers pined for a medium that would let them shoot film-quality images for the cost of shooting video.

Enter the digital camera. In the mid-to-late 1990s, filmmakers discovered affordable mini DV cameras that captured surprisingly high-quality images. These cameras, such as the Sony VX1000 and Canon XL-1 (Figure 1-1), fell into a relatively new category of products known as

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The Flexibility of Digital Recording Versus the Expense and Constraints of Film

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Digital video is, without any doubt, a flexible medium. From the way you shoot to the way you edit and store your footage, digital video offers a tremendous number of options. Digital video is, in fact, so flexible that it's changed the way people make movies.

Digital video tapes are widely available in lengths of 6 to well over 120 minutes. In terms of both price and sophistication, digital video equipment ranges from consumer categories to high-end professional uses. The most widely used format is mini DV, found in both consumer camcorders and prosumer equipment. The mini DV format is often abbreviated as simply DV, in part because it's so prevalent. Other digital video equipment and tape formats include DVCAM, DVCPRO, and Digital Betacam. These more sophisticated formats use differently formulated tapes and record increasing amounts of information, resulting in more detailed images, but you can still do great work using mini DV equipment.

On a recent summer afternoon, I went to my local art house multiplex, the Sunshine on East Houston Street, to see Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. While waiting in the lobby for the next showing, I learned that director Bruce Sinofsky was in the theater having an informal Q & A with the audience from the earlier show. I showed the usher my ticket and asked if I could go in to hear the director. He said no. When he wasn't looking, I walked in, found a seat, and asked Sinofsky how the project would have been different if he and Berlinger had tried to shoot film. (Before working on Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Sinofsky and Berlinger achieved great success as documentary filmmakers with Brother's Keeper in 1992 and Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hills released in 1996, both of which were shot on film.) Without hesitating, Sinofsky answered that had he not used digital video, his film "would not have been possible." He and Berlinger recorded everything that happened, and later, selected only the most powerful material to include in the final product. This would have been too cumbersome and too expensive to do with 16 mm film. On his way out, he gave me a promotional guitar pick with a graphic from Metallica's latest CD on one side and the logo for his film on the other.

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Digital Features: A Brief History of Directors Who Chose Digital Production over Film

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When digital video cameras first became available, people who were already shooting analog video flocked to the new technology, but film-oriented directors remained hesitant. Years ago, I went with some friends to see The Cruise, a feature that garnered significant attention on the festival circuit as one of the first projects shot and edited using entirely digital equipment. Everyone I went with liked the movie, but one friend (who to this day is still a particular devotee of 16 mm film) looked at us afterward and said, "You know, it's still video."

Even in an all-digital context, many filmmakers doubted the quality of video in any form. Cinematographers earn a living by making the world look good on screen, and many were reluctant to trust a DV camera if it meant risking their reputation on an unproven technology that might not produce the greatest possible image. Film is, above all else, a visual medium.

One of the first filmmakers to use DV in a large-scale documentary was Iara Lee, who used DV equipment to shoot interviews for her 1998 film Modulations, which explored the world of electronic music. To produce Modulations, Lee shot interviews with musicians, producers, and DJs around the globe, then combined the edited interviews with observational footage shot in clubs, at concerts, and at other venues. Lee is highly conscious of the importance of quality images, and had shot her previous work Synthetic Pleasures entirely on film. In Modulations, she used digital video to shoot her interviews and shot her observational sequences entirely on 16 mm. Lee's films are strikingly visual in their approach, and they're fun to watch because of her innovative use of styled imagery.

Shooting DV interviews allowed Lee to save considerable sums of money. On-camera interviews require a director to shoot far more footage than what winds up on screen in the finished product. Often, only minutes of an hour-long interview make it into the edited version, and many interviews get nixed altogether. Lee filmed hundreds of interviews for

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Chapter 2: Digital Cinematography

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In this chapter

Aspect Ratio
Anamorphic Video
Frame Rate and Video Standards
Video on Your Computer, Pixel Aspect Ratio
Why It All Matters in DVD Production
Swing-out Monitor, Viewfinder, or External NTSC Field Monitor
Working with a Viewfinder: Color Versus Black and White

Working in film and video is by definition a technical process: a filmmaker uses the technology of cinema to realize her ideas and share them with an audience.

As a filmmaker using digital video, you have a significant range of technical options. While these choices and details may seem overwhelming at first, they're important to think about because each decision ultimately shapes the outcome of your film. The choices you make while planning and shooting a film determine the options available in postproduction, and choices in postproduction either limit or expand your distribution options. A solid understanding of digital filmmaking's nuts and bolts can go a long way toward helping you achieve your creative vision.

The first step is defining the technical standards for your project. This section provides an overview of aspect ratio, frame rates, and video standards, and addresses the impact each choice has on the final version of your production.

It's no secret that a television screen is a different shape than the screen in a movie theater. Both are rectangles, but the traditional shape of a television is closer to square, and a movie screen is significantly wider than it is high. The technical term for the difference in shape is aspect ratio, which means the proportional relationship between width and height. Traditional forms of video use a 4x3 aspect ratio, and widescreen video uses 16x9. Figure 2-1 shows examples of both.

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Aspect Ratio

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It's no secret that a television screen is a different shape than the screen in a movie theater. Both are rectangles, but the traditional shape of a television is closer to square, and a movie screen is significantly wider than it is high. The technical term for the difference in shape is aspect ratio, which means the proportional relationship between width and height. Traditional forms of video use a 4x3 aspect ratio, and widescreen video uses 16x9. Figure 2-1 shows examples of both.

Figure 2-1: The photo at left appears as a 4x3 image, and the photo at right is shown at 16x9. Even though they depict shops on the same street corner, the difference in aspect ratio produces markedly different compositions.

A 4x3 aspect ratio means that for every four inches of width in a screen, there's a corresponding three inches of height. For example, a television screen that's 20 inches wide would be 15 inches high. Screens conform to standard aspect ratios so that images maintain their proportions on any television set. Regardless of whether you watch your favorite TV show on a large or a small television screen, the width and the height of the images scale together in proportion. If they didn't, the effect would be like looking in a funhouse mirror: images would be stretched out of shape and distorted, so Fat Albert might look fat on some screens, but appear quite fit on others. Because programming is created and displayed at uniform aspect ratios, images are proportionally resized from screen to screen. Theatrically released films and widescreen video formats use aspect ratios that are very different than the television screen. These formats are almost twice as wide as they are high, which enables filmmakers to capture a much larger area of action in a single frame. Widescreen formats allow a director of photography to compose striking panoramic landscape shots and big-screen action sequences—for example shots of cowboys riding across the screen through the Badlands.

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Anamorphic Video

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The most widely available and most affordable format of digital video is mini DV, which uses a native aspect ratio of 4x3. This doesn't mean, however, that all video shot on mini DV will only work on a 4x3 screen. Many people, including Nancy Schreiber who shot November, use higher-end mini DV camcorders that offer a true 16x9 recording option to affordably shoot widescreen digital video. 16x9 video recorded on one of these mini DV camcorders uses a process called anamorphic video. To record 16x9 on a mini DV tape, a properly equipped camera records video using a 16x9 chip, and then slightly distorts the aspect ratio to fit the widescreen video into the mini DV aspect ratio. When anamorphic video is played back on a compatible monitor or editing system, it expands to its intended dimensions and displays as proportionally correct 16x9. A number of prosumer cameras have a good quality 16x9 setting, which enables a filmmaker to record 16x9 as described earlier. These include the Panasonic AG-DVX100A (the newer version of the camera Schreiber used), the Sony DCR-VX2100 (the updated version of the camera Kate Davis used to shoot Southern Comfort), and the Canon XL-2 (the contemporary version of the camera Daniel Baer used for The Hotel Upstairs).

Many less-advanced mini DV cameras offer a lower-quality 16x9 mode, which simulates widescreen footage by simply cutting off material from the top and the bottom of a 4x3 frame to create what looks like a letterboxed image. The result of these faux widescreen settings is lower-resolution video—it's just a 4x3 frame without the top and the bottom portions of the image.

To test whether your mini DV camcorder records anamorphic media, set it to 16x9 mode and look through the viewfinder while you're recording. If the images take up the full frame of your viewfinder and appear slightly stretched, your camcorder is recording anamorphic media. If the image appears with blank space at the top and the bottom of the frame, true 16x9 recording might not be an option for your camera (check the owner's manual for more details).

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Frame Rate and Video Standards

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Another item to keep in mind is frame rate: the number of images that appear on screen each second. Film and video simulate motion by displaying a series of still images, one after another. Research has shown that the human brain can process a limited number of images at a time, and that if a person views more than 15 images per second, the brain interprets the series of images as a single, moving image. This phenomenon is called persistence of vision. Without this, movies wouldn't work. They wouldn't seem lifelike to us.

At the end of the 19th century, photographer Eadweard Muybridge used still cameras to record a series of motion studies. The collections of still images recorded in quick succession provided detailed frame-by-frame studies of people and animals in various stages of motion that had never before been captured. Muybridge's subjects include, among others, a running horse pulling a carriage, a blacksmith striking an anvil, and a nude woman pouring a bucketful of water onto another nude woman.

These sequentially photographed still images function much like individual frames of film or video, and can be animated by playing them back in succession. Playing back a greater number of images at a higher frame rate produces smoother motion. Playing back fewer images at a slower frame rate yields more choppy results.

Frame rates are measured in frames per second, or fps. Higher frame rates create smoother, more natural looking motion. 15 fps video looks jerky or choppy compared to 30 fps video, because a higher frame rate displays a greater number of images in the same amount of time, and the cumulative image sequence creates smoother looking motion.

Just as screens conform to standard aspect ratios for consistency, frame rates are standardized as well. If film or video is shot at one frame rate and played back at another, the motion doesn't appear natural, it looks sped up or slowed down. For example, a 15 fps shot of a person walking across the frame would go by twice as quickly if played back at 30 fps, so it might even look like the person is running.

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Video on Your Computer, Pixel Aspect Ratio

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Unlike video, which uses lines of resolution to create images on a television screen, computer monitors create images using thousands of small squares called pixels. When you work with video on a computer, applications such as Final Cut Pro and After Effects display your video as non-square pixels. As you can tell from the name, these pixels are shaped differently than the pixels in other computer images. If you're creating images in a program such as Adobe Photoshop, and you plan to use them in a video, you need understand pixel aspect ratio to ensure your images don't distort.

Pixel aspect ratio (Figure 2-4) describes the width of a pixel in relation to its height. Square pixels, generated by most computer applications, are equal in height and width —that's what makes them square. Non-square pixels display at different proportions: they appear taller than they are wide. The difference becomes important when you start to combine video and still images. If you create a title or a graphic and then import it into your video, the image may distort slightly due to the difference in pixel aspect ratios. For example, if you create a circle in Photoshop and then import the circle into Final Cut Pro or After Effects, it might display as an oval. Likewise, if you export a still image of a person from a frame of video, the image can distort on a computer screen making the person appear shorter and fatter.

Figure 2-4: In the figure at left, a circle created in a design application looks proportionally correct. At right, the same circle stretches vertically when imported into Final Cut Pro.

The key to avoiding distortion is to compensate for different pixel shapes. Unlike the problems that stem from displaying 16x9 material on a 4x3 screen, pixel aspect ratios can be easily managed. Essentially, if you're going from square to non-square pixels (for example, if you're importing a still image into your video project), you can make your images slightly taller than you normally would, and when you import them into a video-production application, they'll resize to their correct proportions. If you're going from non-square to square (let's say you're exporting still images from frames of video), expand the height of the exported image in Photoshop to compensate for the change. Chapter 11 includes specific techniques and details on aspect-ratio management, but I wanted to mention the process here so it's something you're thinking about from the start. Each decision you make in production ripples out to effect later choices and options—especially when you put your work on DVD.

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Why It All Matters in DVD Production

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DVD production is a great option for independent filmmakers. Until recently, years after digital cameras and editing systems became standard equipment for independents, filmmakers still had no choice but to output their work onto VHS for home viewing. VHS is an analog format, so image and sound quality always suffered. DVDs have been on the scene for a while, but until recently, they cost too much for an individual to produce. Now, computers routinely ship with DVD burners as standard equipment so you can easily output your finished project to disc for less than the cost of making VHS dubs. To make a good DVD, however, you need to understand both screen and pixel aspect ratios, video standards, and how to manage them to make your work fully accessible to your target audience.

You can make a DVD that displays 4x3 content, 16x9 content, or both. This creative freedom, of course, necessitates a fair amount of planning. For example, you can give the user a choice of watching a letterboxed 4x3 version of your widescreen masterpiece or the original 16x9 version, but you then need to produce a 4x3 version along with a 16x9, and make sure there's room for both on your disc. If your DVD includes widescreen content, you need to define how the material will play on a 4x3 monitor (does the material automatically appear letterboxed on a small screen, pan & scanned, or do you give the viewer a choice).

And don't forget the menus. A former girlfriend used to joke that she would rent DVDs to watch movies and I would rent them to watch the menus (to me, they're often the most creative aspect of DVD production). DVD menus offer almost limitless options, and each option requires thoughtful decisions. DVD menus can contain just about anything you dream up, including moving images, background audio, and complex image montages you create in the editing application of your choice. DVD production applications such as DVD Studio Pro use non-square pixels, so if you're using still images created in Photoshop or backgrounds drawn in Illustrator, menu creation requires careful attention to pixel aspect ratio. In addition to other important factors such as usability and visual design, you still have to remember screen aspect ratio. One of the coolest looking DVDs I ever saw didn't fit on my 4x3 television screen so the edges were chopped off and I had to guess at some of the buttons.

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Swing-out Monitor, Viewfinder, or External NTSC Field Monitor

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Once you've settled on a frame rate and aspect ratio, you're just about ready to shoot. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, one of the great things about working with digital video is that you see exactly what you get as you're recording. Depending on your shooting style and technical needs, there are number of ways you can go about monitoring your production.

An external NTSC field monitor (Figure 2-5) connected to your camera shows you exactly what your work will look like on screen, so using one is the most reliable way to compose a shot. These monitors are often referred to as critical monitors, because they don't hide flaws in an image. Unlike consumer televisions, which automatically adjust video signals to make images look better on screen, critical monitors let you see your video exactly as it appears, warts and all, so you can fix potential problems before it's too late. Critical monitors come in various sizes for portable and studio use, but none of them are really pocket sized. If you're doing guerilla filmmaking, quickly setting up in one location and immediately moving on to the next, or if you're shooting handheld, a critical monitor's bulk may become an issue. Even the smallest and most portable NTSC field monitor isn't something you can pick up and hold while you're operating the camera, so while it provides tremendous accuracy, it also limits your mobility.

Figure 2-5: A field monitor, such as the Sony PVM-5041Q, is designed for use on location shoots. It features a variety of professional and prosumer video inputs, and lets you see your footage exactly as it will appear on a television screen.

If your project calls for an especially active shooting style, you might want to use a camera with an onboard monitor (Figure 2-6). Many cameras come with a color monitor that swings out from the side of the camera, enabling you to frame a shot while holding the camera away from your body. These swing-out monitors are great for filming in hectic situations where you not only need to see what you're shooting, but you also need to see what's going on around you off camera—for example, if you're chasing someone down the street or filming a complex action scene. Monitors like this also work well with handheld Steadicams (described in detail in Chapter 6), which stabilize a camera but force you to hold it at arm's length.

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Working with a Viewfinder: Color Versus Black and White

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The image your audience sees on screen will most likely appear at a substantially larger size than the image you see in a field monitor, and will definitely appear larger than what you see in the viewfinder. Imperfections become more visible in larger images, so while you might not notice soft focus in the viewfinder, it can be really obvious to someone watching your work on a large screen. Viewfinder images with greater contrast make it easier to spot focus mistakes, and black and white viewfinder images generally contain more contrast than color images. So, although black and white may seem really low tech and less attractive, using a black and white viewfinder might help you make a better movie.

For a truly detailed explanation of depth of field, including charts that calculate depth of field in various lighting conditions, take a look at the American Cinematographer Manual. This book provides industrial strength information on a variety of very specific technical issues, and was recently updated (the 9th edition was released in November of 2004).

Depending on lighting conditions, parts of your shot may be in focus while others aren't. For example, a person close to the camera might be in focus but the pictures on the wall behind them might not. This is referred to as depth of field, and skilled cinematographers can use it to draw the audience's attention from one part of the frame to another. Cinematographers can also use focus to make people look more or less attractive—older Star Trek episodes invariably feature female lead characters shot in soft focus to make them radiantly beautiful, while evil villains often appear in extra sharp focus so you can see the dark contours of their faces.

Audiences expect images to appear in focus. If a shot appears out of focus, audiences notice. Errors pull audiences out of a story and shift their attention to problems in technical details. As I mentioned earlier, black and white viewfinders display higher levels of contrast, so they may help you avoid focus problems that lessen the technical quality of your project. The same holds true for exposure. If you're using zebra lines to set your aperture (zebra lines, covered in Chapter 4, are black stripes that appear in the viewfinder to indicate overexposed areas of a shot), it's much easier to make adjustments and see the results in a high-contrast black and white viewfinder. Different areas of your frame may require different exposure settings, and spotting exposure problems in the viewfinder enables you to compensate and find a balance. If the viewfinder doesn't display enough contrast, and color viewfinders often don't, it's easy to overlook slight differences in exposure that can become a real problem later on.

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Chapter 3: Composing a Shot to Fit Your Output Medium

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In this chapter

An Overview of Shots—Medium Shot, Wide Shot, Close-up, and Extreme Close-up
Shooting with DVD Compression in Mind

When I was in film school, a professor told us that people learning to use a camera tend to frame things they way they see them with their eyes—everything appears in medium shot. When you look around, your eyes take in everything at once. If you look at a particular object, say a book on a shelf, your eyes don't zoom in and frame out everything around it. Even as you read the words on this page, you can still see objects to your left and right using your peripheral vision.

The medium shot, however, isn't the only option available to a director. As a filmmaker, you have the ability to focus an audience's attention exactly where you want it. Depending on how tightly you frame a shot, your audience might see everything in a room or only a single detail on one specific object. Cinematographers use a vocabulary of different shot types to tell a story and shape their audiences' experience. Directors can also use framing to make a project particularly friendly to a specific viewing environment, such as television, movie theaters, or home screenings via DVD.

Medium shots, abbreviated MS, are generally the most common type of framing. A typical medium shot might show the protagonist of a film in his environment; for example, a teacher at the front of a classroom. The shot would be wide enough to see the teacher and the space around him, providing a sense of context—you might not know someone is a teacher, but if you see the person in medium shot writing on a blackboard, you can figure it out.

The medium shot in Figure 3-1 provides the audience with a fairly detailed view of its subject. It allows viewers to get a good sense of what the person in the shot looks like and provides enough context to place the person in a specific environment, in this case, a school classroom.

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An Overview of Shots—Medium Shot, Wide Shot, Close-up, and Extreme Close-up

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Medium shots, abbreviated MS, are generally the most common type of framing. A typical medium shot might show the protagonist of a film in his environment; for example, a teacher at the front of a classroom. The shot would be wide enough to see the teacher and the space around him, providing a sense of context—you might not know someone is a teacher, but if you see the person in medium shot writing on a blackboard, you can figure it out.

The medium shot in Figure 3-1 provides the audience with a fairly detailed view of its subject. It allows viewers to get a good sense of what the person in the shot looks like and provides enough context to place the person in a specific environment, in this case, a school classroom.

Figure 3-1: Drawn medium shot of a teacher in front of a blackboard.

Wide shots, WS, allow the audience to see a large area at once. If the cinematographer decided to keep the teacher in the frame at the front of the room and pull back to include students taking notes, the medium shot mentioned earlier would become a wide shot. Directors often use a wide shot to show multiple actions taking place at the same time, or to let an audience know where a scene is taking place. When a wide shot is used to establish a location, it's called an establishing shot.

The wide shot in Figure 3-2 shows the same teacher in the same classroom, but also shows more of the area around her. A wider shot provides the audience with more information about where a scene is taking place. The audience could see from the medium shot that the action was taking place in a classroom, but this wide shot gives viewers a better idea of what the classroom looks like, who the students are, etc.

Figure 3-2: Drawn wide shot of a teacher in front of a blackboard.

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Shooting with DVD Compression in Mind

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As I mentioned in the last chapter, DVD production offers fantastic opportunities for the independent producer. Using prosumer equipment, you can affordably shoot, edit, and distribute professional-quality copies of your work in an all-digital format. Editing applications and DVD production packages ship with encoders that convert your DV footage to the DVD-compatible MPEG-2 format. Understanding how these encoders function before you go out and shoot can help you create better quality DVDs.

Not all shots compress as easily, or as well, as you might want them to. Certain backgrounds and some types of movement might look great when you record them but lose significant quality when compressed for DVD. Once you develop a solid understanding of DVD compression, you can compose shots that still look really good after they've been compressed.

As always, your artistic vision is the most important factor. If you're spending the time, money, and effort to make a film, you have to include the shots you want and the images you think people want to see—even if they aren't the most compression friendly. Understanding DVD compression can help you ensure your most ambitious compositions and framings translate to DVD the way you want, with a minimal amount of headache.

Audio and video files take up tremendous amounts of memory. Five minutes of DV footage takes up approximately 1 GB of memory on your computer's hard drive. A single DVD only holds about 4.7 GB, which translates to less than 25 minutes of camera-format DV (which means DV that's been captured from a camera without applying any additional compression). Just about any disc you pick up at the video store plays for more than 25 minutes, and the reason producers can fit more material onto commercial DVDs is the video and audio have been compressed. Compression removes redundant information from a digital signal, which results in a more manageable file size. DVD compression programs, such as Apple's Compressor, use algorithms to analyze digital audio and video and identify information that can be removed without anyone noticing. These algorithms (which are essentially complex mathematic formulas) use two types of compression,

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Chapter 4: Lighting for Digital

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In this chapter

What White Balance Does, and Why You Can Never Forget to Set It
The Importance of Setting an Aperture

At the most fundamental level, lighting allows an audience to see what you're shooting. Digital cameras function much like the human eye, transforming different amounts of reflected light into recognizable images. To a skilled filmmaker, lighting is also a tool to add depth, texture, and nuance to a composition. Careful use of shadows, color tints, and highlights can transform an otherwise unimpressive shot into something that speaks to your audience on both aesthetic and emotional levels. Skillful lighting can make a good shot great and a great shot epic.

Most lighting isn't neutral. Most light contains a color cast that tints the objects in a shot. Even if you can't see the tint with your eye, it makes a difference to the camera. Depending on lighting conditions, the light in a location may have a blue or a yellow tint that colors everything you see. The human eye and brain do a remarkable job of compensating for differences in lighting, so most of the time people don't even notice a tint unless it's really strong. If you stand next to a red light bulb, you'll notice it's turning everything around you red, but most people don't notice that everyday light bulbs make things look yellow. Cameras, however, don't compensate—they record the lighting conditions in an environment, for better or worse.

In contrast to a light bulb's yellow tint, daylight looks blue. You can sometimes see the difference in mixed lighting situations—if you turn on a lamp at dusk, you may notice the natural light coming in through the windows makes the room look blue, except for the area around the lamp, which looks yellow. Cinematographers describe the difference in terms of color temperature. The concept refers to the range of color a light source emits, and is measured as a temperature in units called Kelvin. At the lower end of the scale, light sources emit more red and yellow light. At the higher end, sources emit more blue light. Daylight at noon on a sunny day measures approximately 5500 k, and tungsten light measures approximately 3400 k. (Tungsten refers to the metal used in the filament in a specific type of bulb used in film and video lighting; other kinds of indoor lighting, such as fluorescents, produce different color temperatures and different lighting tints.)

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What White Balance Does, and Why You Can Never Forget to Set It

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Most lighting isn't neutral. Most light contains a color cast that tints the objects in a shot. Even if you can't see the tint with your eye, it makes a difference to the camera. Depending on lighting conditions, the light in a location may have a blue or a yellow tint that colors everything you see. The human eye and brain do a remarkable job of compensating for differences in lighting, so most of the time people don't even notice a tint unless it's really strong. If you stand next to a red light bulb, you'll notice it's turning everything around you red, but most people don't notice that everyday light bulbs make things look yellow. Cameras, however, don't compensate—they record the lighting conditions in an environment, for better or worse.

In contrast to a light bulb's yellow tint, daylight looks blue. You can sometimes see the difference in mixed lighting situations—if you turn on a lamp at dusk, you may notice the natural light coming in through the windows makes the room look blue, except for the area around the lamp, which looks yellow. Cinematographers describe the difference in terms of color temperature. The concept refers to the range of color a light source emits, and is measured as a temperature in units called Kelvin. At the lower end of the scale, light sources emit more red and yellow light. At the higher end, sources emit more blue light. Daylight at noon on a sunny day measures approximately 5500 k, and tungsten light measures approximately 3400 k. (Tungsten refers to the metal used in the filament in a specific type of bulb used in film and video lighting; other kinds of indoor lighting, such as fluorescents, produce different color temperatures and different lighting tints.)

Each of the three lighting types pictured in Figure 4-1 (from top to bottom: fluorescents, commonly available household light bulbs, and tungsten production lights) creates a different color cast. In mixed lighting situations, they can be notoriously difficult to work with in combination. If you're shooting in an indoor location with mixed lighting and your subject moves across the room, he will appear to change color when moving from one area of light to the next. This might look really cool if you're shooting a music video in a disco, but other than that, it's a good thing to avoid.

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The Importance of Setting an Aperture

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Exposure is a film term describing the way light interacts with a negative to create an image. Too much or too little light produces images that are either too dark or too light. In DV camcorders, exposure works in a very similar way. Depending on the aperture you set, greater or lesser amounts of light reach the sensors that produce an image in a DV camera (if you have a digital still camera, it works the same way). Wider apertures let in more light, and smaller apertures allow less light to pass. Prosumer DV cameras allow cinematographers to manually set an aperture, rather than rely on an automatic setting. To some people, manually setting the aperture may seem like extra work—to a professional, manual exposure settings provide precise control over one of the most important camera settings. (Racecar drivers don't have automatic transmissions under the hood at the Indianapolis 500.) Even if you're not shooting the most important shot of your life, manual aperture settings provide valuable control. The aperture of a camcorder functions much like the iris in a human eye—both expand to let more light in or contract to keep light out. For this reason, filmmakers often say "iris up," to capture more light in a darker environment, or "iris down," to close a camcorder's aperture setting in a bright area.

The key to using zebra lines is to adjust your exposure so the lines are just barely visible in the brightest areas. If you can see zebra lines all over your frame, your aperture is set to allow too much light. If you don't see any lines at all, the exposure may be darker than it needs to be. If you open up the aperture until you see lots of zebra lines and then gently stop down, or close the aperture, until they begin disappear, the point at which they're just barely visible will provide the exposure you want.

As I mentioned in Chapter 2, different parts of a frame often require different exposure settings. If you let the camcorder set the aperture for you, you have no control over which part of the frame is properly exposed and which is not. If you set the aperture yourself, you increase the available possibilities. For example, you can film someone standing in front of a bright area and set the aperture so he is properly exposed, while the area behind him appears as an abstract image. Alternatively, you can expose for the bright area behind the person, and the person will appear in silhouette. Depending on the situation, it may also be possible for you to split the difference and choose an aperture that properly exposes the foreground and background of your composition.

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Chapter 5: Shooting for Effects

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In this chapter

Preparing a Chroma Key Shoot
Framing Images with Composites in Mind
Planning a Matte Effect

There's a sequence in Wayne's World where Wayne and Garth introduce the audience to a new feature of their show, chroma key, and use it to travel to New York, Hawaii, Texas, and Delaware without ever stepping foot outside the studio. Chroma key, the effect they were using, is the same technology that allows meteorologists to stand in front of moving weather maps on the 6 o'clock news.

In Wayne's World, the characters stand in front of a chroma key screen and as they pretend to be in New York, they joke about carrying a gun and going to see a Broadway show (which is of course what all New Yorkers do, at least on the weekend).

The images in Figure 5-1 are screen captures from a chroma key sequence created in Final Cut Pro. In the first image, our young star, Luca, is running past a chroma key screen. The center image shows the exterior wide shot into which he will be composited. The final image shows the completed composite: the green background has been removed from the first clip, and the boy has been added to the exterior clip.

Figure 5-1: In the first image above left, a boy stands in front of a chroma key screen; the second photo depicts a street scene he will be composited into; the third image shows the boy composited into the background clip.

Chroma key is not only used in older films and television shows. Many recent blockbusters, including Spiderman and Lord of the Rings, make extensive use of chroma key to create eye-popping effects and stunning visual environments. This has created an entirely new form of filmmaking in which actors interact with imaginary costars who have yet to be composited into the frame, and directors create entirely new worlds out of nothing more than computer-generated images, or CGI. A hefty portion of

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Preparing a Chroma Key Shoot

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In the recent past, working with blue screen or green screen required considerable resources, for example, finding an available screen. If you knew the people at your local public access station, you might have been able to use theirs. If not, or if the screen was already booked by someone else, you would have to spend the money to rent time at a production facility. Now, prosumer technology makes it affordable to set up a good quality screen in your home studio or even on location. Many film and video equipment stores sell chroma key screens at accessible prices. A company called Lastolite sells collapsible chroma key backgrounds that it advertises as "completely crease free." Creased backgrounds can be a problem for chroma key effects because the creases produce shadows, making some areas darker and others lighter—this results in a multicolored background instead of a solid color background (solid backgrounds are easier to key out, because they contain only one color to identify and remove). Working with a creased background isn't the end of the world, but avoiding creases might save you a few gray hairs.

To create the chroma key effects for this book, I used a 5x7 foot background, from a Colombian company called Botero, that folds into a 26-inch disc for travel and storage. Some collapsible backgrounds are also reversible, blue on one side and green on the other, which lets you switch colors depending on your actor's wardrobe. (As of this writing, a single-color Botero chroma key background costs $63.50; a reversible model, such as that in Figure 5-2, costs $79.95.) If you shoot a man wearing a blue suit in front of a blue screen, parts of his suit may become transparent when you key out the screen (you may have noticed that this happens on television sometimes when a new person does the weather forecast and doesn't quite know what to wear).

Figure 5-2: The Botero chroma key screen, shown here folded, is blue on one side and green on the other. The same company sells slightly less expensive versions in either green or blue.

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Framing Images with Composites in Mind

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Just as the shadows and lighting in your key shot need to match the shadows and lighting in your background, the content and framing of your foreground clip needs to work well enough with the background clip that the combination is believable. An obvious example is if you plan to composite someone into a shot on the beach, they shouldn't be wearing a winter coat. (Unless you want to do this for effect; for example, to imply humor, irony, or someone who is crazy or doesn't plan well.) There are also more subtle considerations, including camera angle, framing (wide shot, close up, etc.), and the placement of elements within the frame.

If you shoot an actor against a blue or green screen and then key out the background, it's often easier to composite her into a shot if you don't show her entire body from head to toe (Figure 5-5). Have you ever noticed that you almost never see the feet of a meteorologist when he's standing in front of an animated weather map? Part of the reason is there's no real reason to show a person's shoes as he forecasts the weather, but it would also make the composite more difficult. The shot would require not only placing someone in front of a green or blue screen background, but placing him on a blue or green floor as well, and then lighting everything without producing shadows—no easy task.

Figure 5-5: We shot our actor so that his feet are never shown in the frame.

There are also aesthetic considerations to not framing head-to-toe chroma key shots. If the bottom of the newscaster's body is cut off by the frame of the screen, the viewer intuitively understands that the person is standing in front of a weather map and that part of her body has been framed out of the shot. If we see the newscaster's feet, and the floor and background are keyed out, she would look like she was floating in space. This would either look like a mistake, or would just plain look strange. (Again, there might be a reason you'd want to do this. Once you learn these rules, you can break them.)

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Planning a Matte Effect

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As described earlier, a chroma key effect removes areas of color from the background of a shot, enabling you to substitute another image in its place. A matte effect defines an area of the screen, in the shape of your choice, that becomes transparent and enables another video image to show through. The shape that defines the transparent area is called a matte. Final Cut Pro and Premiere both ship with ready made matte effects you can apply as filters to create round, square, or diamond-shaped mattes. Both programs also enable you to create an (unfortunately named) garbage matte to create custom matte shapes using 4 or 8 points on the screen. Last but not certainly not least, you can use a travel matte to create a matte effect in the exact shape of a complex graphic you've produced in a program such as Photoshop or Illustrator.

I was sufficiently inspired by seeing the original Godzilla that I created the demonstration sequence in Chapter 12. In that sequence, a giant two-year-old Luca (pictured throughout this chapter) looms over New York's historic Lower East Side. Like the matte in the original Godzilla, I used the tops of the buildings to delineate the edge of one shot and the beginning of another. As a result, traffic flows freely through the bottom half of the frame while gigantic Luca rampages across the top. The buildings naturally fill the bottom half of the frame, and it makes sense visually that an oversized toddler would appear behind them. As in the earlier example of framing out a meteorologist's feet, the buildings also provide a natural way to obscure the lower portion of Luca's body, which helps make a more natural looking composite. To give credit where credit is due, the toddler rampage sequence in this book was partially inspired by another two-year-old, who ran across our picnic blanket last Fourth of July. He stormed straight through the center of our meal, laying waste to paper plates, plastic flatware, and marinated chicken kebobs. When his father, who was dining with us, finally caught up with him, he turned to me and said, "He's just like Godzilla isn't he?"

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Chapter 6: Working with Specialized Camera Mounts

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In this chapter

Stabilizing a Moving Camera
Using a Camera Dolly

Having watched years of professionally produced movies and television shows, audiences have high expectations for what they see on screen—they take for granted that all camera movements will be smooth and every shot will be steady. If your camera has the slightest shake, people will notice. In addition to mastering the technical aspects of digital video (frame rate, aspect ratio, color balance), producing a good show requires precise camera control to get the motion effects you want.

For years, this meant using expensive rigs and elaborate setups ranging from specially equipped trucks, to cameras mounted on dollies that rolled along a track, to robotic cranes that moved cameras by remote control. Needless to say, these were not cheap. The affordable options were to shoot handheld, which resulted in shaky images, or to mount the camera on a stationary tripod, which produced smooth pans and tilts but limited mobility. Then came the Steadicam.

A Steadicam (www.steadicam.com), shown in Figure 6-1, is a camera stabilization system that mounts a camera on a rig, called a sled, and balances the camera using a monitor and battery pack that hang underneath and serve as counterweights. The rig lowers the camera's center of gravity, and the design of the Steadicam isolates the camera itself from the operator's movement.

Figure 6-1: A Steadicam and its operator.

In the full, professional versions, the Steadicam attaches to a harness, which distributes the camera's weight and allows a cinematographer to operate a large, heavy camera for extended periods of time. (Even with the harness, Steadicam operators have to be fairly physically strong.) The Steadicam sled connects to the harness through a spring-loaded arm that enables an operator to move freely without causing any

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Stabilizing a Moving Camera

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A Steadicam (www.steadicam.com), shown in Figure 6-1, is a camera stabilization system that mounts a camera on a rig, called a sled, and balances the camera using a monitor and battery pack that hang underneath and serve as counterweights. The rig lowers the camera's center of gravity, and the design of the Steadicam isolates the camera itself from the operator's movement.

Figure 6-1: A Steadicam and its operator.

In the full, professional versions, the Steadicam attaches to a harness, which distributes the camera's weight and allows a cinematographer to operate a large, heavy camera for extended periods of time. (Even with the harness, Steadicam operators have to be fairly physically strong.) The Steadicam sled connects to the harness through a spring-loaded arm that enables an operator to move freely without causing any camera bobbles, or shaky images (a practiced operator can even run or climb stairs). The resulting shots look as if they were captured by a camera floating in midair. A talented cinematographer can achieve fairly stable results with a handheld camera, but in close-up shots, even the slightest camera movement becomes especially noticeable.

A high-end Steadicam is by no means cheap; the list price for the top model is more than $65,000, but with the advent of high-quality prosumer DV camcorders, the company began to offer more affordable models. The scaled-down Steadicam Mini, for cameras that weigh 5 to 15 lbs (such as the 6.5 lb Cannon XL2) lists for $5,500. There's also a handheld Steadicam JR for cameras 4 lbs or less (such as the Sony VX2100 or the Panasonic AGDVX100A). The Steadicam JR, which does not attach to a harness, lists for well under $1,000, falling solidly into the prosumer price range.

The Steadicam JR's setup manual (available online free of charge at http://www.steadicam.com) compares the function of a Steadicam to balancing a cereal bowl on the tip of your finger, as in Figure 6-2. The manual explains that balancing the bowl is difficult, because its center of gravity is higher than your finger. If you turn the bowl upside down, the manual points out, balancing the bowl becomes significantly easier (even while moving your hand) because the bowl's center of gravity is lower than the tip of your finger. Even if you have no interest in balancing a bowl on your finger, the comparison provides a great explanation of the principles behind the Steadicam's operation. Placing the weight of a monitor and battery pack at the bottom of the rig helps balance the weight of the camera on top, making it easier to stabilize.

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Using a Camera Dolly

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The arrival of the Steadicam on movie sets has by no means made the camera dolly obsolete. Some of independent film's most creative directors continue to use dolly shots to achieve specific effects.

There's a key scene in Spike Lee's 25th Hour, when a 17-year-old high school student played by Anna Paquin glides dreamily through a nightclub on her way to seducing her awkwardly bookish English teacher, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Paquin is standing on the same dolly as the camera, which frames her from the chest up, so she maintains a fixed distance from the camera as the furniture and the people in the club move around her. She seems to float. As she moves, the ambient light on her face changes with her surroundings, highlighting the surreal motion—if she were walking, the camera wouldn't remain at her perfect eye level through the entire shot, and the distance between her and the camera would change slightly as she took each step. Lee is a big fan of this kind of shot (he includes one in just about all of his films) and uses the actor-on-dolly technique again as the scene winds down. The next time, Hoffman stands on the dolly staring up at the camera, looking seasick and bemused as the camera moves with him away from the bathroom where he has just clumsily kissed his student. As he glides through space with the camera, Hoffman stands still, holding the same facial expression and not moving his body at all. The shot produces a similarly surreal effect as Paquin's earlier dolly appearance but with much darker emotional overtones.

Martin Scorsese uses similar dolly techniques in his films, careening through a bar with a drunken Robert DeNiro in Mean Streets, and using a point-of-view dolly shot in Goodfellas to introduce the audience to the extended family of mobsters as Ray Liotta narrates. Lee and Scorsese use these techniques to draw the audience in and make people feel like they're part of the action they're watching onscreen. In Goodfellas, the mobsters all look slightly off camera as they say hello to Liotta's character, Henry Hill. The audience sees the action, and viewers feel as if they were walking through the bar along side Liotta, living the story firsthand.

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Chapter 7: Recording Audio, an Overview

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