Crew from Australian HDV Feature Film Gene-X

write about their experiences with the format

MARTIN SIMPSON  [ Writer | Director | Producer

Article: HDV A New Format in Feature Filmmaking

Shooting on HDV

The smaller lighter cheaper HDV cameras made shooting on our movie more fluid, as we could afford two camera shooting whenever needed, the cameras were easier to handhold, easier in tight spaces and less demanding of light levels. Monitoring to a decent sized but highly portable LCD High Def monitor made it easy for the director to see framing and image density instantly. Tapes ran sixty minutes each and their low cost was a huge saving to our budget compared with film. As well their tiny size meant ease of transport. Try putting a few hundred feet of film in your pocket.

Editing HDV

Gene-X was the first Australian feature film shot on HDV. Before we started shooting in May 2005 there wasn’t even editing software available, but Apple assured us that Final Cut Pro would handle HDV in its next upgrade, which it did, and very nicely too.

Downloading our footage from the Sony Z1P camera to the Macintosh G5 was accomplished with a single mouseclick, and at every timecode break (read slate) a new clip was made automatically in the Final Cut Pro browser, making the editing process of clip logging very straightforward.

The beauty of the HDV codec is that file sizes are the same as Standard Definition video files, for a picture four times as big. This means filmmakers presently working in standard definition can make the transition to HDV without increasing their hard drive real estate. Our shoot gave us around 400 Gigabytes of rushes, which we stored on a 500Gig LaCie drive.

This small file size enabled us to cut our picture in native HDV (1080 by 1440) and do our compositing and transitions on the desktop. The brilliantly sharp and clear picture on our editing monitor was basically what we outputted at the end.

The edited 85 minute movie on HDV, with the addition of a 5.1 surround soundtrack was about 30 Gigabytes in size. (With a G5 as the server, this timeline should be able to be fired via HDMI straight into a video projector from the computer, but we haven’t tested this approach yet.)

In our case the 1080 x 1440 non-square pixels (anamorphic squeezed) of HDV were converted to 1080 x 1920 square pixels (true HD) by Black Magic software, ending up with a total file size of just under 500 Gigabytes for our 85 minute HD movie. (For this part you’ll need to buy a 1 terabyte hard drive)

At ‘the LaB’ this file was a) put on HDCam tape, for HD projection and delivery to digital broadcasters; b) downconverted to DigiBeta for analog broadcasters; and c) further encoded with Scenarist hardware to a master DVD.

Picture quality

True HDCam shows around 2 million pixels (1080 x1920 = 2,073,600 pixels)
Camera cost: around a hundred thousand dollars and up.

HDV comes in at over 1.5 million pixels (1080i x 1440 = 1,555,200 pixels)
Camera cost: from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars.

SD Video is less than half a million pixels (in PAL 720 x 540 = 388,800 pixels)
Camera cost: from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars.

So, true HDCam has a 33% greater resolution than HDV
But HDV has a 400% greater resolution than Standard def.
That is, in terms of bang for your buck, HDV punches well above its weight.

In short, for filmmakers now shooting in standard definition video, it would seem foolish not to upgrade to HDV, improving your image by a factor of four hundred percent, for very little dollar outlay. 

Of course, for filmmakers now shooting on film, different questions arise…

Continue here for Part II of article