The Teeth Of The Tiger

Tiger, Tiger Shining bright,
in the darkness of the night…

A long time ago in Sydney, Australia, I was a humble camera operator and film school grad who was heartbroken when I worked out that it cost $250,000.00 to hit the road as an owner/operator shooting BetacamSP and that there were over 1000 crews competing in a town of only a coupla million people.

You might not understand that price – but back in the 90′s it was nearly $90,000 just for a camcorder body (Sony BVW 400a). Add the price of a lens, batteries, tripod and the obligatory SUV to drive the ‘talent’ around in, and I couldn’t bring myself to go the ‘industrial route’ and invest in SuperVHS – little better than U-Matic.

I opted for Hi8 and a shiny Sony VX5000 – I got a lot of little jobs off that camera and rented for anything ‘real’

I’ve owned a succession of cameras from the shallow end of the pool ever since. I think a Sony TRV-8 MiniDV handycam was the best of the bunch. Great pictures, tiny camera, good lowlight, cheap…

And with the advent of editing your own work (Premier 1.5!) and color correction (Magic Bullet Editors) suddenly we could care about image quality again.

But try as we might, the new generation of Coppolla’s “fat 12 year olds” just couldn’t cut it with the big boys.

They had wonderful HD images which just looked (and I’m sure Kodak coined the BS term) “Film-like.”

And in the 2000′s, we all started wandering on the same path, in search of the holy grail – “The Film Look”, which Kodak assured us we could only get on film. I have 2 things to say about that: Epic, and Alexa.

So I went back to film. One time. Super8. Long story- no result. The cost was astronomical,  but I continue to love what Super8 birthed on the unsuspecting music video scene – crapulence. That grainy, interpretive, weaving, flickery, indeterminate, smokey, loveliness that is the ‘grunge look’.

How could I get that look? Ah, now you know why my favorite camera of the past was a standard definition, single chip handycam in low light…Step one of the film look, almost.

The path to righteousness, ahem, the steps to “the Film-look” turned out to be:

1.) Progressive images – not interlaced. Thanks to Adobe Premiere defaulting to this whenever it had to change the playback rate of footage or move it – if you slowed your film by .01% Premiere re-rendered a progressive frame that looked… filmic.

2.) 24 frames per second – NTSC was just too damn clean at 30, even PAL at 25 was not quite there. We needed the herky jerk of 24.

3.) Color Correction – Before Magic Bullet, CC was a mystical art practiced by few  (hey, Stu was doing this stuff before feature films were doing DI regularly). With faster computers, GPU support and a masterful stroke from Apple (giving you $25K worth of Color for free with Final Cut) now anyone with half a clue can do CC. Just use the presets if you really don’t know…

4.) Shallow Depth of Field- The one you couldn’t (really) do with software and electronics.

Three of these things could be achieved in camera, if only such a camera existed – freeing the DV Rebel to make films that “looked like a film”.

No really, I sat through a few SXSW winners that had great stories, great soundtracks, but just didn’t look…well, we used the word “expensive” back then because SDoF implied 35mm film and buckets of cash.

Stu Mashwitz, in his masterful work “The DV Rebel’s Guide” first mooted the Panasonic DVX100 (I had a B version) as the ultimate rebel’s camera – it shoots (sorta) 24p (sorta p, sorta 24) and with a bit of care in post…magic, or poor man’s 16mm – depending on your perspective.

Then along came a couple of guys on DVX User with some spinning CD blanks and old Nikkor lenses…gasp – through the murk and moire you could get SDoF. Stick one of these confabulations on the front of your DVX100 and be instantly translated to Nirvana…the mystical realm, not Seattle.

Now we had a true holy grail to pursue. One of those guys on DVX User realized that and started Red Rock Micro. It turns out the 24p with good color correction is half of the film look (and Magic Bullet could do all that with software!). The other, much sexier, half was Shallow Depth of Field.

Like a tiger in the jungle, she was elusive, captivating, hard to pin down, and many hunted her. Unfortunately, just like the Holy Grail, many perished or suffered in the quest with rigs that ran your exposure down to 50 ISO, cost three times as much as the camera or were ten times longer than your rig was wide (see cumbersome in the dictionary).

Then Vincent Laforet gave us “Reverie” – in all it’s 30 Fps compressed glory. Half of us said “You can’t shoot on a compressed format”, and the other half remembered that if it looks good, people will watch. Vincent won, by the way, with 24, House M.D. and even Lucasfilm using the 5DmkII.

And after a mob with pitchforks and burning torches assembled at the gates of Canon, we even got 24 frames per second. Wasn’t that nice of them?

Yes, after a year of staring at wonderful show reels full of 2″ Shallow Depth of Field images (SDoF), and then laughing at guys with 4′ long camera rigs, I made the plunge to DSLR.

The only problem was that a 5DmkII is a little on the expensive side for a true DV Rebel.  Enter the Canon 550D (part of the Rebel range in Canon’s own parlance).

What makes the 550D so great is that it allows for shallow depth of field, it shoots 24 frames per second progressive, and in a true high definition 1080 format. It also has built-in sound (sorta) and only $1,500  Pacific Pesos ($800 in the ol’ USA).

So, I would humbly suggest that the 550D is the official DV Rebel camera of 2010. Red will sell 10,000 Scarlets, but Canon can sell that many 550Ds in a week. And the first Scarlet (at this time) will ship with a 2/3″ sensor- inferior SDoF performance. And it will cost a whole butt load more than a 550D. Understandably. DV Rebels are a scrappy lot, and if there is a cheaper option that actually looks better in some ways, the choice is obvious.

So, the day finally dawned that I needed a new camera. I spent the day with the Sony NX5 – a “proper” video camera- balanced audio in, full control of exposure, zoom and focus, sorta broadcast video format- .as I said, a “proper” video camera. It made “proper” video looking images of it’s 3x 1/3″ chips too. zzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I ran to the nearest photography store and got the 550D, vowing never to spend 3 times the money to be “proper” and boring again. I drank the kool-aid – “If it looks good, people will watch.” I plunked down the dough to ride the tiger. And only a couple of weeks in, I’ve felt like that famed Indian peasant who rode the tiger more by accident than design.

In part two, I will share some of the joys and some of the perils of shooting on the 550D. Tigers look great, but they have teeth. If you forget about the teeth, you get eaten. But it’s worth the ride.