I recently co-directed a 30 minute short called “Collide” with Eric Henninger, the star and writer of the film. Despite nearly two years of pre-production on this film, a lot of things went wrong at the last minute which could have had disastrous consequences on the look of this film. To begin with, our DP that had been on board, decided he couldn’t take the time to shoot the film a month before the shoot. As such, we ended up seeking out a new DP who came on board about two weeks before shooting commenced. While new people coming on board adds stress, additional stress was added because the professional lighting kits we had originally lined up for the shoot all fell through at the last minute. My gaffer and lighting analyst, Jessica Creech, is a true micro-budget trooper and she took the loss of sophisticated lighting with a simple nod and a gritting of her teeth.
With all these things thrown into the mix when it came to our visuals, we needed to be able to see exactly what the production’s DVX100B was actually recording with higher pixel resolution than what is available in the camera’s LCD screen or viewfinder. While we could use a standalone production monitor, they are heavy, expensive, and single-purpose items. As such, we looked to the new Adobe CS3: Production Premium with it’s included OnLocationCS3 to solve our problems.
OnLocationCS3 used to be known as Serious Magic’s DVRack 2 until it was acquired by Adobe late last year. It allows any laptop with a firewire plugin to become a high quality monitoring station. In addition to being able to visually see exactly what you’re shooting, how it will look, and if it’s in focus, the program includes a variety of light and color meters, sound meters, and, most importantly, the ability to directly record the best quality footage your camera can record with two streams of audio directly to a hard drive. This gives a lot of the non-linear power of the HVX200 to the DVX100 and other non-hard drive based cameras.
While OnLocation can’t directly tap the imager on your camera the way the special Telestream device does (the $2500 TeleStream device allows the recording of higher than SD resolution at 4:4:4 color space from the DVX100B) nor does it allow you to record faster frame rates than your camera normally does (so no 60 fps recording from the DVX100B), it does have the ability to pull out certain pull-down ratios on special cameras. For example, if you record footage with the DVX100B with Panasonic’s 24PA format (which creates superior 24 P recording), it normally records 29.97 fps to the camera and encodes a special 3:2:2:3 pulldown in the data stream. When this footage is digitized, editing programs like Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro can remove it to create true 23.98 progressive footage. However, if you record in this format into OnLocationCS3, it automatically removes this pulldown from the stream and records only the true 23.98 fps. This means that you save 20% of your hard drive space by directly recording it on site.
To make sure that we didn’t run out of “tether” between the camera and the laptop, we made sure that we had a couple of 25 foot four pin to four pin firewire cables. (By buying online, we got two of them for $16, which is a far cry from the price firewire cables were a few years back when a 6 footer was $40.) This gave us the flexibility to put the laptop in the shade when we were outdoors, which allowed for much easier viewing and checking.
Of course, as you can imagine, the lack of professional lighting required our gaffer to really try some unusual lighting setups and her being able to see exactly what the camera was recording as it would look on screen later was invaluable. This was especially true during a late night shoot in which the main character of Collide is in his car at night and about to commit suicide with a dark steel revolver. It was very difficult to get enough lighting to illuminate the protagonist and his firearm without it looking artificial. However, Jessica tried using a silver bounce card to reflect a street light on the protagonist, which to everyone’s shock, did an amazingly good job of adding the necessary light. (Earlier that day, we had used the same bounce card for sunlight and noticed almost no difference, which is why we were surprised at the effectiveness of the bounce card at night.) Being able to confirm that we had enough light in OnLocation allowed us to get the shot as soon we had enough light, which in turn allowed us to finish our shoot day by 2 AM, rather than by 3 or 4 AM. (And when you’re only getting five hours of sleep after a 21 hour shooting day, that’s the difference between life and death.)
I recently co-directed a 30 minute short called “Collide” with Eric Henninger, the star and writer of the film. Despite nearly two years of pre-production on this film, a lot of things went wrong at the last minute which could have had disastrous consequences on the look of this film. To begin with, our DP that had been on board, decided he couldn’t take the time to shoot the film a month before the shoot. As such, we ended up seeking out a new DP who came on board about two weeks before shooting commenced. While new people coming on board adds stress, additional stress was added because the professional lighting kits we had originally lined up for the shoot all fell through at the last minute. My gaffer and lighting analyst, Jessica Creech, is a true micro-budget trooper and she took the loss of sophisticated lighting with a simple nod and a gritting of her teeth.
