Sidney Lumet chose Sony's CineAlta 24P High Definition video system to shoot the A&E drama 100 Centre Street, making it the first production to use multiple 24P cameras both in studio and on location. HD video engineer Barry Minnerly details the technical challenges of adapting HDW-900 camcorders when the planned HDW-F950 studio cameras were unavailable at the shoot's August 2001 start date.
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On the Set of 100 Centre Street
by Jay Ankeney
When watching 100 Centre Street, a new hour long episodic series that airs on the Arts and Entertainment network Monday nights at 9PM, you might think you are seeing a courtroom drama shot on 35mm film as we've come to expect from 90% of prime time TV fare. Directed and often written by famed filmmaker Sidney Lumet (Serpico, 12 Angry Men, Network), the look of the show growls with an appropriate grit in its muted colors and evocative camera angles.
The title of the show comes from the address of the real night court of the City of New York. To tell the story of the prosecutors, attorneys and accused criminals whose lives unfold in the various activities of this multi-faceted building, Lumet decided to shoot the production using Sony's new CineAlta 24P High Definition video recording process. The CineAlta camera, part of Sony's total 24P production system, tapes its images at 24 frames-per-second with each frame recorded progressively instead of with the interlace process used by Sony's 1080i HDCAM. Other shows such as Titus and Earth: Final Conflict have used the CineAlta for their productions, but 100 Centre Street is the first to use multiple 24P cameras both in the studio and on location to heighten the punch of a rawly emotional dramatic story line. This is especially surprising because A & E has no immediate plans to cablecast the show in High Definition.
The central character of 100 Centre Street is Judge Joe Rifkind, played by Alan Arkin, a deeply compassionate man whose depth of feeling for the accused often seems at odds with his background in law enforcement. Contrasting with him is Judge Attallah "Queenie" Sims (LaTanya Richardson) a tough-minded jurist with no compunction about handing out stiff sentences when they are deserved. Around them swarm a central cadre of prosecuting attorneys, public defenders and legal aides who propel each episode's action while living out their own lives on the stage of New York's criminal justice system.
Barry Minnerly was one of the two HD video engineers on the show along with his partner Abby Levine. Minnerly has been dealing with High Definition video almost exclusively since he began back in 1986 by wrestling with NHK's cumbersome analog HDC-100 Hi-Vision tube cameras for Rebo Studios. He was brought onto the 100 Centre Street shoot because few video engineers in this country have as much experience finding solutions for the unique challenges of High Definition video production. "Sidney Lumet wanted a traditional three camera 35mm look for the show," Minnerly says, "but he also needed the production budget to be less than what would be needed to shoot film. The progressive recording of the 24P CineAlta camcorder gave us the best of both worlds."
Since they would often be shooting on the streets of New York, Minnerly and Levine knew they'd have to be prepared to run up to a thousand feet of fiber optic camera cable to get the HDW-F950's HD signal back to the truck. But their first day of shooting was August 8th, and to Minnerly and Levine's dismay they learned Sony was unable to deliver HDW-F950 studio cameras to anyone by that date.
"Sidney and his producers were determined to use the 24P process," Minnerly tells us, "so we rented three of the existing HDW-900 camcorders which were available from Plus8 Video and tried to figure out a way to get the signal from the heads of these 24P cameras back to the production truck. We had arranged to have the optional SDI (Serial Digital Interface) output on the cameras but were faced with the reality that with HD SDI video you are limited to coaxial cable runs of no more than 100 feet." The solution was to set up a rolling cart right on the set and run a 100 foot cable harness to it from each camera. Each harness carried intercom, genlock, color control and SDI signals and fed the video into a digital 4 X 1 Evertz X-HD9504 router mounted on the cart, which came to be known as "the cube". This let them display the output of all three cameras along with a return of Lumet's line cut from the truck's HD switcher in a quad split on a 20" NTSC screen. In addition, the cube mounted a true High Definition monitor that could be switched to any single CineAlta camcorder. Once the HD SDI from the cameras reached the cube, it was converted to an optical signal by an interface they designed based on Evertz 7705 electrical/optical cards, and this signal could be fed down 1000 or 2000 foot fiber optic cables back to the truck.
"This set up gave us two advantages," Minnerly explains. "First, we were able to use the HDW-F900s on location without having to re-invent the entire world. In addition, our excellent first assistant cameraman, Kent Miller, was able to supply power to the cube on the set and fire up the cameras before the remote truck even reached the location. This meant that by the time Sidney Lumet arrived on the set, he could immediately begin setting up camera shots." Most of the crew members on the 100 Centre Street production had little video background since they came from the film world, but Director of Photography Ron Fortunato who lit every episode personally made sure the High Definition monitor on the cube was set up to accurately reflect what was being recorded. In addition, a still store on the Snell & Wilcox HD switcher was used to grab images from each sequence to help Fortunato match the look of every scene even when it was shot months earlier to provide a guide for consistent lighting. They also had a Leader LV 5152DA High Definition digital waveform monitor in the truck so that Minnerly or Levine could check the digital specs of the HD signal. Every night the HD tapes would be taken by production assistants back to the 100 Centre Street offices in the Kaufman Astoria Studios to be downconverted to Digital Betacam. This could then be fed into an Avid Media Composer for offline editing by Post Production Supervisor Tom Swartwout.
"Right next to the difficulty of getting the signal from the cameras to the truck, the next greatest challenge was dealing with the SMPTE time code when the 24P HD video was down rez'd to 30 fps NTSC onto DigiBeta tapes for loading into the Avid," Minnerly explains. "To insure accuracy, we set up a separate HDW-500 24P VTR connected to a dedicated Digital Betacam deck for making the dubs. As long as we made sure the 'A' frame reference was correct when converting the 24P HD time code to 30 fps NTSC, Swartwout and his editing assistants were able to create an EDL that sailed through online finishing." The show's tapes were onlined at New York's Rhinoceros Video, staying in the 24P realm right until the video master was converted to 30 fps NTSC for the air playout delivery tape. The 24P format brings the additional benefit that it efficiently creates a universal master that can easily be translated into other HDTV formats and the various frame rates needed for re-broadcast overseas. "This wasn't the first 24P production for television, but nobody had attempted to use the CineAlta camcorder system on a three camera switched episodic production as extensively as we did on this show", Minnerly reflects. "The 13 episodes of 100 Centre Street were shot in 2 1/2 months, allotting 7 days per episode and I'm glad to say that although we were breaking new ground, the HD system helped bring the production in on budget, saving 50% over comparable film costs. That was, after all, a major reason we used the CineAlta 24P system on the shoot in the first place."
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