Jeffrey Cree, manager of Band Pro market development and numerous consultant HD projects made an excellent presentation during the One World on HD event in which he showed the different spaces of the high market definition, the advantages it presents for each segment of the market, and the maturity to which this technology has arrived.
Why HD
now?
The answer to this question is as blunt as it is surprising:
because it helps reduce costs. But, then,
what are we talking about? Care! The statement refers to the
world market where high definition has positioned itself as
alternative to celluloid, and geographically, this market is
is mostly found in California, in the Los Angeles area,
where the need to reduce costs, doing in HD what before
it was made on film, it touches various segments of the market. According to
The official of Band Pro, there are about 450 Sony F900 camcorders in
the Los Angeles area. And they're all busy. Let's see in what:
The television market you need to reduce production costs, and HD is a way to doing so holds Cree, replacing the use of the celluloid in serial productions.
The production of large series Television is always trying to offer high quality to a low cost. That's the producer's job. But the problem is that in this type of production it is important to preserve the cinema appearance. Being able to do 24p -or 23.98 in States United- allows to fulfill that condition. In the last season, at least 73 series were made that used HD for production in the North American market says Cree. At the end of the season, 52 of them were still at air. The fact is that this is a large portion of the market television since there are only 108 programs in prime time. What if it is taken into account that the realities are made in SD; we see that there is an overwhelming majority of serial programs produced in HD.
The production of commercials lives the same situation and also has to do with the need to get commercials on the air faster. The Commercial life cycles are a very important factor. The WYSIWYG factor, what you see is what you get, is a very important point for the use of HD in this segment, the advantage that advertisers can see and approve notices before receiving the final product.
One of the great changes that has There is in this business in the United States is that they are no longer made contracts as a percentage of the cost of production. I mean that now, if the agency can save on production, it will earn more silver. And in this process, they're realizing that they can work faster and have a higher turnover. The greatest The problem that exists today is that they do not find enough people trained to do commercial production high quality HD. That's why what's happening in the U.S. United is that much of this production is moving from the east coast to the west where there are more resources.
In the field of filmmakers Independent, the advantages are very clear. Digital cinema allows filmmakers to start production with little budget while leaving for later – as get more funding, showing trailers - the parts more Expensive. If they were filming in 35mm, they should have 65% of the budget before you start.
According to Cree, 80% of projects presented at Sundance last year, in the category of Feature, were made electronically. Not that. it means that they were all made in HD. Some were produced in DV and these, very surely from now on will be produced in HDV.
All Film Festivals Important accept electronic production now. At Sundance, for example, all rooms have electronic projection while only some of them have film projection. It's a big change. But it is a consequence of the great relationship. cost-efficiency of the system.
Cree maintains that the immediacy of the response of digital cinematography favors the producers with less experience such as those in the market of independent cinema.
Another market where HD is being imposing is in the great productions of cinema where the Need to work more and more special effects has made that the big studios turn to digital cinematography in high definition. From the already hundreds of times cited Star Wars, from George Lucas, to the recent Miami Vice or Collateral of Michael Mann. Robert Rodriguez, also in his productions of low cost, he worked in 4:4:4 for his ability to make effects.
A new frontier, to the which we did not think to arrive so fast, is to use cameras with CCDs 2/3 for IMAX movies with 3D projection. The Savings are huge. Aliens Of The Deep, by James Cameron, it was produced in this way.
Working in electronic media it makes everything much easier. What surprises us is that are making digital films not necessarily loaded of effects. Even if they continue to work on film, many will pass by Digital Intermediate and then return to the film holds Cree properly.
Another aspect that drives the distribution with which electronic cinema is that the Bonding companies are much happier with the electronic productions that they do on celluloid because they have access to several master's degrees as protection of the final product.
How did we get here?
Jeffrey Cree is clear that the popularization of HD goes through
a technological change. At the beginning we talked about cameras
of 390 thousand dollars, plus a recorder of the same ... without
have the lenses. In total, we needed 1 million dollars
for the basic package. With the arrival of HD with CCDs of 2/3 of
inch, we were able to access cameras weighing a fifth of
a cinema camera and function as a camcorder. Any
can operate, whether it comes from the cinema environment or the
video. And the fact is that by lowering the cost of the product, we go down.
the cost of production as well.
Another determining factor is that for the first time there is a consensus, there is a world standard that it serves for the exchange of materials. While there are different transmission modes, today you can carry material from a standard to another without major problems. There are easy ways to convert from 1080 to 720 and from 50i to 60i. Resolution ITU-R BT.709 was a great push for product development by the large manufacturers such as Sony, Thomson and Panasonic and that had a common standard: a single resolution format, a single standard scanning, a common colorimetry and a curve of transport. All those things we needed to consolidate a world market. Then came the SMPTE standard which unified issues such as aspect ratio and other characteristics.
The F900 was the first camera to Sony can sell both in Europe and the United States with only some changes to the menu.
