is anything less than HD unacceptable?
In a moving image world seen through the prism of high definition its easy to carried away with the endless pursuit if more pixels. But will the viewer not watch anything less? Is anything less than HD unacceptable?
I was recently involved in editing and post production of a short documentary entitled Black Russians - the story of Russian sailors ship wrecked on the north west coast of Australia and taken in by the local Aboriginal people.
The film took the hybrid nature of mixed sources, arguably one of the hall marks of contemporary production, to a whole new level. In one short 12 minute video were 5 different resolutions, 3 different frame rates, 5 different pixel aspect ratios and 4 different codecs.
The project was built and mastered in HD but comprised PAL DV, PAL Widescreen, HDV, 640x480 and 320x240. Moreover the project was 7 layers deep with 9 layers of audio. Lots of PinP and merged imagery.
Whilst I have a number editing systems available the obvious choice for this type of production was Vegas as no other system has such an effective open resolution and codec independent engine. Vegas happily allowed all these to coexist on the one timeline with preview to external monitor without rendering. It's really quite something to have that sort of highly efficient flexibility.
Whilst much of the film was new footage, interviews and re-enactments, much was also sourced and scrounged including, of all sources, Youtube. The initial end destination for the project was a projected cinema theatre screening in full widescreen with DTS sound.
Of course the nay-sayers were many and vocal... 'you cant project res that low', 'you can mix frame sizes like that', 'you cant put 320x240 in a HD frame', so on and so on. This was an experimental project and the director and I simply figured, why not? Who saids you cant? Will the audience not watch? Will they complain or walk out? They came for the story, right? Everything else is nothing more than a vehicle for that and if the content is an appropriate vehicle then why not?
Of course thats all nice in theory and on a principled soap-box but sitting in the theatre, lights down waiting for the projection I was, I confess, nervous it would look bloody awful... I had of course carefully treated, filtered and colour-graded the footage to look as good as possible, But the entire project was constructed end to end inside Vegas so the tools of restoration were nothing outside of standard NLE capabilities. Projection in a cinema might be pushing the scant few pixels a bit hard.
Pleasant surprise. It looked remarkably very good on a 30ft screen. And was even more intriguing was the variety of responses from audience members. Some said they liked how we'd gotten the footage to have the 'feel' of being found and scrounged as if it had be deliberately artificial. Others liked the intimacy of the nested smaller frames. Still others noticed nothing out of the ordinary and commented not all. The story itself justified the content. It seemed people had interpreted the footage in a number of ways personal to them and internally justified the image in the context of the story they were engaged in.
I certainly wouldn't vouch for the viability of such a hybrid mix in any project but certainly what the experiment did point to is that if content is suited to story an audience can be far more forgiving than you might expect. Likewise on a technical level, with the number of formats getting wider not narrower and both ends of the frame size spectrum finding validity with viewers - HD at one end, mobile phone video at the other - the ability as a media producer or editor to say 'why not' rather than 'no way' on both a technical and creative level is going to become increasingly important.
Posted at 12:00AM Apr 27, 2007
by Mike Jones in video |
