Filmmakers right now owe it to themselves to intimately understand the technology that powers their art form. That means cameras and computers. We should know what a B-Frame is, or the difference between megabits and megabytes, or why HDV takes up more processing power to playback, or what’s the difference between 3:2:3:2 and 3:2:2:3 pulldown. We owe it to ourselves to understand what h.264 is, and what the difference is between VP6-S and VP6-E, and what values to enter for a data rate, and why we should be encoding in multiples of 16 for width and height.
The reason for this is simple – movies and music videos are splitting up from movie theaters and television. The tools to create movies and becoming more diverse and more complex. Never before have you had so many options as a filmmaker, and never before have you had so many opportunities to fuck yourself. Whereas once you would be deciding between maybe three or four 16mm camera options, and a limited number of film stocks, now you have a myriad of decisions. Should we set it to 24p or 24pA? What about choosing a camera that does 4:2:2 versus 4:2:1? Does it even matter?
Simply put, as the tools become more complex, our understanding of these tools should grow proportionally.
The problem is right now, there’s a void between creativity and technicality. The right-brain/left-brain creative/technical modes of thinking are divorced, when more than ever, they need to work hand in hand. It’s almost as if people are afraid if learning the technical details, as if it somehow fundamentally conflicts with their idea of the ethereal art of filmmaking, and that such details shouldn’t matter because this is creativity and vision we’re dealing with, not bits and codecs and mundane stuff like that. But my concern is simply practical – if you don’t nail down a workflow that you understand from the beginning to the end, you can quite simply fuck yourself later, and no amount of creative thinking can outwit problems that required fundamental technical know-how. There are now more things than ever to worry about, and the problem is, mistakes in these new realms are not immediately apparent the way, say, screwing up an f-stop would be.
Here’s an example – a project I was prepping for a film out was shot at 29.97 with 3:2 pulldown. It was dropped into a Final Cut Pro timeline at 23.97 without removing pulldown. Then it was exported to a color corrector in this form, who returned it using the lib-quicktime codec at 24p (although Quicktime player itself reported it as 23.97). Then this new footage was dropped in on top and everything was going out of sync on export. Every step of the way, there was something fundamentally wrong, but on the surface, it didn’t look wrong. That’s the hidden danger of ignorance – your mistakes will hide from you, and when they do rear their heads, it’ll be that much harder to figure out what went wrong.
The DP and AC should have double-checked their workflow. The editor should have checked the format of the footage. Everything ground to a halt simply because key people in creative positions misunderstood and neglected to attend to technical fundamentals.
But the biggest problem with ignoring technicality is we let ourselves get fucked by the companies making the products.
Equipment in the film industry seems driven by a herd mentality. A lot of people own G-Drives, but when you ask them why they paid twice as much as the usual for an external hard drive, they’re hard pressed for an answer. More often than not it’s because someone recommended it to them, or that’s what they used at work.
Another example is the Panasonic HVX-200. Tons of people use it, and while there are good reasons to use it, anybody who takes a moment to examine the P2 card format would know that they’re getting fucked. Panasonic essentially sells SD cards with a RAID controller using the outdated PCMCIA Card format to interface with it at a ridiculous premium that people pay just because it’s P2 and all the pros are using it. In fact, the PCMCIA format was outdated months before they announced the P2 card format – the guys in charge of that standard even said “Hey everybody use ExpressCards from now on – it’s faster and basically better in every way.” Wonder why you have to find an old Powerbook to use on set to capture the P2 footage? It’s because all the newer laptops got rid of that outdated port, and you’re forced to use outdated technology.
(Incidentally, the Sony EX1, which tends to get eschewed because it does 4:2:0 does use the up to date ExpressCard format.)
And I’ve heard people say the Panasonic shoots 4:2:2 and that’s better, but they can’t tell me why it’s better or why they need 4:2:2 for a web short. They know that everyone uses the Panasonic. All the pros do. So they should too.
Don’t get me wrong – you can go too far with technical knowledge. The only thing worse than a creative person who knows absolute jack about the technical aspects of their craft is a non-creative person obsessing over every bit of technical detail. The answer, as always, is balance. Otherwise, on the other side of the coin, you got entire forums dedicated to people arguing over how 4:2:2 is absolutely necessary, and how can you even think of shooting at 4:2:0, and how 35mm adaptors that cut your depth of field to like the depth of pores on an actors nose are incredible and everyone needs to get them, or how film will never die, or any number of intellectually masturbatory debates one can curl up next to on a lonely night. It’s easy to fall in love with the gadgetry behind filmmaking and lose sight of the ultimate purpose of all that gadgetry to begin with.
Know the reasons for all your actions – creatively and technically. Understand how every choice you make affects your work down the line. Never be satisfied with “everyone else does it” as a reason.
Could not have said it better myself. This is something I’m constantly annoyed with. I want to bang my head against a wall when I go on craigslist and see, “First time director looking for investors for film to be shot on 35mm,” People that don’t understand the benefits of shooting digitally, especially when money is on the line. And yeah, likewise, there’s people who scowl at my lack of a RED camera when at the same time I’m working on better films than they are. So in the end, as always, the public will decide, and the industry will inevitably side with the people who know how to find a good balance between art and technology.
Final Cut Pro is making me stupid.
When I drag footage into an ill-fitting timeline, FCP offers to “fix” the settings for me instantly now. Ta-da, it still looks vaguely interlaced when I export to Quicktime. My only excuse is that I am just too fucking lazy to change the 3:2:2 setting in my XL2.
But after having worked with Avid intensively* for almost 3 months now, I still have to say I prefer FCP’s mode of thinking when it comes to editing. I don’t care if it’s for little girls; I LOVE that the tail ends of the clip I’m dragging can snap to the head of a clip in front of it. I LOVE that pulling a video clip up a track in turn sends its corresponding audio down two tracks to compensate. And maybe I just don’t understand all of Avid’s effects yet, but I far prefer the way FCP organizes them.
As far as cameras go, I remember buying the XL2 solely on the fact that my far more camera-savvy friends were using them, and its depth of field potential really impressed me back when I held it in my hands for all of 5 minutes, in Drew’s UCLA dorm room. And I think I got lucky with my bullshit, almost totally uninformed-choice, because I do really like my XL2 and it’s been with me for years now.
Even though its most attractive feature (switching out lenses with ease) is the one I haven’t capitalized on at all. Hey, I’d have snapped up a fully manual 14x if they didn’t go out of production when I bought the camera in the first place. Honest.
*As in, either-I-learn-this-program-or-I-get-fired intensive.
Hey Freddie, I don’t know what kind of project you were working on, but right now the clusterfuck isn’t dependent on the creative end of the spectrum whatsoever as much as massive shifts in the market itself that have everyone in doubt. It’s gold rush time to get all sorts of competitive products in the market, so there will be wars and divergent standards and complications abounding. At the really high end the ASC and ACE have a technology panel who are doing some amazing high end technical work to make sure all this stuff lines up someday.
But the fact is that filmmaking is never dependent on technology for quality. This has been proven time and time again.
Most people don’t know this but most early films in the sound era were shot on blimped cameras that lacked a reflex viewfinder. The camera operator could not actually see what he was shooting while he was shooting it. He would practice using a crosshair contraption and then for the take rack a mount that would put the camera in place of his crosshairs he’d practiced with. No shit.
I use an HVX200 because when it first came on the market it was the only affordable camera that wasn’t doing sucky HDV to tape and my boss had to deliver to New Line behind the scenes stuff from a movie for the eventual Blu Ray / HD DVD on Hidef. So he bought what was just starting on the market.
Here’s the thing: like musical instruments one could go over every spec and technical detail and fetishize sheer performance in numbers, but a talented guitarist could do more with a beat up acoustic than any hack would pull out of a Les Paul. I had to shoot on the HVX and learned a lot about its color space and compression and how it held highlights and how to operate it without thinking.
So when I went to shoot a massive project after that, and the EX1 was new to market, I decided to stick with the HVX because I had an idea of what I could get out of it. I knew intuitively what I could do with it. I knew that – given I’d be travelling around the world and having to ship footage to New York – that we’d developed a workflow with them that worked.
But when we did our telecine at the Mill in which we had to combine that fake 720p with the 1080p stuff that had been shot on anamorphic 35mm with the band, some random ass export in quicktime issue out of fcp came up that ruined the initial render of the entire project and hours before we were supposed to ship we had to work all night in the mill to save it.
Infuriating, but it happens.
And ultimately, I used to obsess over knowing everything I could technically, which has served me well as a director. But the more I direct and the better people I work with (and the beauracratical, unionized world of filmmaking takes a lot of adapting to if you come from a school of making things yourself) the more I realize I can trust them and its better to occupy my mind with creative issues first and foremost.
Anyway, good thoughts, and yes frustrations are what they are… Just remember, it’s never the instrument so much as the player. Technical difficulties are what they are – time consuming annoyances. But far more important is decent story, compelling performance, material which captures ecstatic truth.
Oh believe me – I’m with you on the quality thing. I can’t wait for a time when quality is not a thing to worry about and you can just, you know, make movies, same way you can just shoot a still photograph right now on a DSLR and be done with it.
There are some guys who play guitar and they’ll sit there tweaking all their amps and buying vintage pedals to get the right tone, and buying special tubes, and using certain picks. Then there’s guys like Hendrix who grabbed a guitar and just rocked it.