The Digital Survival Guide: Part 1 of 2

In this blog, we’ll take a look at some of the newest digital motion picture cameras, learn where they’re being used and what’s involved in taking full advantage of their capabilities at a wide variety of budget levels.

For more than 100 years, celluloid has dominated movie making as the recording format of choice. It has always been the dream of filmmakers and producers alike to find a less expensive, more user-friendly alternative. Shooting film engenders a mountain of costs incurred during production and post. Film stock is expensive, compounded with processing, telecine transfer to digital for editing, negative cutting, answer printing, release printing and more.

These costs are daunting enough to turn away many would-be filmmakers from realizing their creative vision. Video cameras began to gain prominence as occasional movie acquisition tools in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s but were never seen as a viable aesthetic alternative due to their low image resolution and limited dynamic range.

With the arrival of digital video and later high definition in the ‘90s, movement towards the visual quality of film drew closer and closer. Finally, within the past few years the digital imaging revolution sweeping the still camera world has caught up with the movies. With cameras like RED, CineAlta and Phantom the choice between film and digital is now purely objective and identical image quality results can be achieved in the right hands.

Panasonic was one of the first companies to offer a digital camera specifically designed for movie production with the introduction of its 720/24p High Definition VariCam in 2001. VariCam’s 2/3” CCD chip allowed for more filmic depth of field, especially when combined with high-quality interchangeable zoom and prime lenses. At around $65,000 plus lenses and accessories, VariCam was expensive to purchase but highly affordable as a rental camera while offering high-definition recording to relatively inexpensive digital DVCPROHD tapes. The tapes can be ingested and edited natively at full resolution via Firewire capture to editing programs like Apple’s Final Cut Pro. The VariCam is used extensively in indie movie production, commercials, music videos and on many TV shows such as American Idol and Arrested Development.

Not to be outdone, Sony offers several cameras in the high-definition world under its CineAlta line, aiming to replace film as the primary image capture format. Sony was strongly encouraged to develop its first 24p camera by George Lucas, who requested a digital 35mm equivalent for his second Star Wars prequel. Recording in 1080/24p to HDCAM SR tape decks, the Sony CineAlta line has since developed into a number of cameras including the F-950 and F-23.

The post-production workflow to edit natively in HDCAM SR can be more costly and require more expensive equipment to edit than the DVCPROHD workflow, but several lower-resolution, offline editing methods exist to keep post-production costs manageable. Panavision also derived its own Genesis camera, which is available strictly as a rental, from the CineAltas. Movies shot on the Genesis include Apocalypto, Domino and Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

In part two, we’ll continue to look at digital alternatives to film. Coming Soon.

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