When shooting with 16:9 in SD DV there are different ways to do it.Some cameras have proper 16:9 sensors and record proper anamorphic DV, using all 720x576 (720x480) pixels. Other cameras have 4:3 sensors and you lose a number of the vertical lines recording widescreen, even if you record anamorphic the resolution i is no better than recording 4:3 and cropping off the top and bottom. These cameras are the ones I shall be refering to in this essay thing. There are therefore a few ways of recording widescreen, hereafter known as the right way and the wrong way. Unfortunatly I have a differing opinion to many people on which way is which.
One of these lovely instituions is the SIT, an instituion I have long been aware of but never had anything formerly to do with. They have grated on me before and they grate on me still. They recommend the practice of filming 4:3 and cropping down to 16:9 in post so you can reframe if necessary. A fine idea that seems great in theory but works horribly in practice. This is largly because it requires more steps that people never seem to follow properly. It also severly screws up the workflow. Every time someone insists on working like this I wince because I know that something screwed up is going to come out of all this, and most likely I'll have to help fix it up.
The first problem comes during shooting. If you want to shoot 4:3 and later crop to 16:9 you have to know what it's going to look like in 16:9 so you can frame it properly. When I did this (once) I just stuck some tape over the the top and bottom of the LCD screen. Most people don't do this, they just frame for 4:3, shoot 4:3 and then in post crop the damn thing down. Then ends up an unmitigated disaster, framing is all screwed, tops of heads are missing, stuff down the bottom is missing. You've heard about how much directors hate Pan and Scan because it mutilates their vision, this is like doing the same thing to your own work before it's even finished.
Then we have the editing, they stick it into their editor of choice, throw a widescreen filter over it, then edit away. This creates numerous problems, often to do with, due to the fact that they are working in a 4:3 edit space, to put it simply, stuff coming over the black space. This includes special effects, (like muzzle flash), credits, and stuff like fade to white, where even the black bars get white. Then after all of that it's still not going to play properly on a 16:9 screen and you are going to have to do something with that anyway. All this is ef fort is hardly worth the ability to reframe given that you probably aren't going to reframe anyway, especially given the way to crop the images.
Could it be shot 4:3 and cropped later if done properly, absolutly. Probably if done within an anamorphic window and zoomed in, rather than in a 4:3 window and cropped, but that also takes work. In the end I've only ever worked on one project where someone has done this properly, and that's because we planned it all from the start, and as I had little to do with the post process I have no idea how much extra effort it was. Do I recommend it, hell no. Chances are you are going to screw it up really badly, hell a lot of people seem to have trouble just editing the damn thing properly in anamorphic without attempting to do stuff you barely understand why.
In conclusion, screw the SIT and there stupid ideas, they give out a piece of advice and yet don't follow it up with the whys and how to do it properly so we get a big mess. They don't explain properly why they are doing it and students just do it without understanding the purpose and make a big mess. At least the coming HD revolution should get rid of this mess even if it causes numerous other problems, and at least there are some SD cameras that record 16:9.
To finish up with, if you ever recommend that anyone I have the slightest possiblity of working with, or even anyone who's film I might see, shoot in 4:3 and then crop to widescreen I will personally stab you*
*I will not stab you.
1 comment:
Yes, I guess we can hope that such institutions will stop their silly practices as such. One thing I remember during my time at the S.I.T. which I found rather silly, was when people shot in 16:9 Widescreen, then captured it either as 4:3 or captured the widescreen into a 4:3 sequence. Although this may not sound too bad (or it may), you get all the problems that you mentioned already in the post with effects and everything, and when you actually export to tape you lose a chunk of the available bandwidth or pixels. I think their reasoning behind it was so that the videos would play correctly on Standard 4:3 televisions, but if you set up your dvd or tape correctly, you can have the player automatically letterbox if required. I think I actually listening to them before I thought for myself.
At least with HD (proper, full HD) you don't have to worry about such things. In fact, for the most part it rules out a lot of interlacing/aspect ratio problems which is nice.
Post a Comment