“That’s just crazy..!”

       The Making Of Hose.

WHY HIGH-DEFINITION

Part of the reason for choosing HD is that as a filmmaker, I wanted the best quality image at the largest resolution I could possibly get. With this piece it was also part of the treatment – I wanted the film to appear very real, almost hyper real. HD gives you a lot of detail and it looks great. The aspect of the frame is much more pleasing to the eye than the square-ish format of SD. The ability to do progressive 24 frames a second was also a big factor – not so much for the film look, but because shaving 6 frames a second ended up saving us a lot of animation and post-production time.

HD was also chosen for distribution reasons – why shoot and do post in a format that will be obsolete in a few years? Surely our chances of being picked up for distribution on TV would be higher if we were in the new television standard.

We also hoped that by the time the film was done that the HD DVD/Blu Ray battle would have been sorted out and the winning format would need content – all those dads who’d spent a fortune on their new home theaters might want to buy a short for the kids, to show the wife that the system is really “for the whole family”..?

With HD there are basically two distinct ‘flavors’ – 1080 and 720. These reflect the two screen sizes. Then there is progressive or interlaced – the frame is either one single image (like a strip of movie film) or its made up of two fields that combine to make a single frame. The advantage of the fields approach is that the data rate is slightly lower, but when you have fast movement, like a racing car, you’ll notice a jagged edge along the side.

Since the DSC images were almost 2K in size we could have gone with a 2K file, but it seemed like overkill as the possibility of us ever doing a film-out is very remote. But we could easily do 1080 (which is 1920x1080 pixels in size and the camera shoots 3504x2336, a reduction of 53%). Since we were shooting stop-frame it seemed natural to go with progressive at 23.98fps.

As an editor and owner of a small shop that does some post, it seemed to be a great way to also learn about the technology in a way that would not be mission critical. I’d rather be making the mistakes on my own project than on someone else’s dime. And we did make a lot of mistakes and learnt the hard way!

For our final Master we settled on a 1920x1080p 23.98fps 10-bit uncompressed RGB file. This seemed to be the best you can get and therefore the perfect format for the Master File.