January 25, 2001
PARK CITY, UTAH--It's called 24P, and as debuts at this year's Sundance Film Festival have gone, this one is a hit.
T
he term 24P may look like shorthand for British money, but in fact it represents a new generation of high-definition digital-video cameras that are finally creating footage good enough to challenge film.
While tradition-minded Hollywood aesthetes may be unable to bring themselves to use the technology, 24P demonstrations here at Sundance proved that the reasons for resisting are lessening dramatically. Expect a slow, substantial shift from film to high-end video, dramatically changing both the businesses behind film and film-based cameras and those behind the new technologies.
ìItís truly revolutionary,î says director Wim Wenders, who intercut his upcoming Million Dollar Hotel with 24P footage. "A lot of people will stick to their guns for years. But for me, to go back [to film] would be difficult."
The new cameras are called 24P because they run at the same speed as traditional film cameras -- 24 frames per second (fps), rather than American TV's National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) standard of 30 fps or European TV's Phase Alternation Line (PAL) standard of 25 fps. The P in 24P is for progressive scanning, the method the cameras use to "draw" the screen.
MORE KODAK MOMENTS
The technology, in cameras from Panasonic and Sony/Panavision, got a huge boost when George Lucas used six of them to shoot the next Star Wars prequel.
"It was a learning experience, but I can unequivocally say we were all pleased," says Industrial Light & Magic's Fred Meyers, who has been Mr. Lucas' camera-engineering point man.
The cameras operated flawlessly in rigorous conditions, allowing an astonishingly quick shooting schedule and easing the process of compositing visual effects over live-action footage, Mr. Meyers says. Mr. Lucas intends to create an entirely digitally produced film, from its live-action footage to visual effects to editing to projection.
"It makes so much sense to work with digital end-to-end," says Mr. Meyers, who screened a brief, gorgeous digital clip from the new film of two characters talking in profile against a blazing sunset. "And digital technology is getting better and better. Each time we do a shoot, we discover something new."
Hollywood has been slow to accept video in general, for reasons such as the differing frame rates of 24Pís predecessors. Hollywood artists demanded film's look and feel, which 24P is able to approximate.
"It took us a long time to figure it out, but eventually we did," says Laurence J. Thorpe, vice president of Sony's acquisition systems division. "We finally said if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. "Film's there, it's loved, it's huge."
LONG TIME COMING
Sony had been working on a 24P camera since the mid-1990s, trying to persuade persnickety Hollywood directors and cinematographers that top-notch digital video could compete with their beloved 35mm film stock.
Hollywood has had an enduring suspicion of digital video technologies, sparked by its bottom-end origins in Mini-DV, a format created by consumer-electronics companies for cheap camcorders. Cost-conscious documentary makers, less wedded to picture quality and needing run-and-gun flexibility, quickly adopted the format. But Mini-DV creates ugly visual artifacts when converted to film for distribution in theaters.
Sony's digital Betacam format was a step up in quality and cost and is used widely in TV news and on Hollywood's fringes, but Sony eventually had to ditch its Mini-DV roots to create 24P, an explicit attempt to mimic 35mm film. Now, eight months after 24P's debut, it is quickly winning converts, in film and in television, where it can shave $50,000 per episode and still provide an excellent picture.
AS SEEN ON TV
The technology isn't perfect yet. Digital Betacam and Mini-DV don't deliver fine detail in shadow and strong light the way equivalent 16mm and Super 16mm film can. Even high-end cameras do a poor job handling slow- and accelerated-motion scenes. And, paradoxically, high-definition cameras can sometimes pick up too much detail, forcing far more attention to makeup, costumes, and backdrops.
"There's a huge difference in these two media in what you can get away with," says Judy Irola, who heads the cinematography department at the University of Southern California's school of cinema-TV.
But right now, the biggest hang-up to further digital production is another kind of economics. Some 125,000 theaters worldwide have film projectors; only about 30 are digital. Film will be with us for a long time to come.
Major investments are being organized to implement digital distribution and display. Right now the movie industry is engaged in the arduous task of organizing standards. Once agreed on implementation will commence with dispatch.
Also having digital theater display technology in place is not required to produce features using 24p. Once a feature is complete it can be converted to film and/or archived in digital form indefinitely. In other words Studios and Producers can, and are, exploiting the creative and cost savings advantages of digital production irrespective of display technology. JVW
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Liberty Imaging, Inc.
RH 24p at Sundance.
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