IT IS NOW AS IT WAS in the beginning: If you’re involved in producing programming or commercials in the high definition format, you’re most likely still trying to make video look like film.
But today, almost exactly 16 years after Toronto’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre was on the receiving end of the first major, mainstream HD broadcast seen in Canada – a fight transmitted from Las Vegas pitting Sugar Ray Leonard against Roberto Duran – the momentum in the battle for TV screens here is beginning to favour video.
Producers are becoming accustomed to the idea of originating content on HD video, staring down all the long-touted challenges of the form, rather than tamed it on old-faithful film before transferring to HD for post-production.
It’s still rare to encounter someone who declares, “Just embrace HD” as boldly as Michael Marshall, director of photography on Whistler, which began its HD shoot last month through Vancouver’s Boardwatch Productions and Toronto’s Blueprint Entertainment and will join CTV’s lineup in 2006.
Marshall, who first shot HD in 2001 on the YTV teen show 2030CE, says, “We were trying to fool people into thinking it’s film. But I don’t think we should do that any more. Just embrace HD. The visual language has changed. Most people will get it.”
Marshall’s attitude has been long anticipated but seldom observed. Telesat Canada launched a research and development project aimed at kick-starting content production in April, 1990, just a few months after viewers took in Leonard and Duran assaulting each other in eye-widening detail. Although the fledgling industry’s marketing strategy, as told to Video Innovations magazine in 1991, was “Programming first, transmission standards later,” the pioneers knew HD was going to be very niche for a very long time.
Telesat’s then-production partners had taped and packaged a series of performing arts events and a medical procedure, and sold some programs to Japan’s NHK, the leader in HD broadcasting. But even when the partners arranged what looked to be a coup, shooting the 1991 Major League Baseball all-star game at SkyDome, it was unclear how many in Canada could see programs on a widescreen, digital receiver or how they would receive the signal. No wonder: VI magazine reports that HDTV sets shown at NAB that fall retailed for “about US$1,000 per diagonal inch” and programmers expected the FCC to decree a transmission standard by 1993!
Now that the FCC says it will reclaim analog broadcast spectrum in April 2009, more Canadian ‘casters are likely to require HD product. At the moment, some, like CTV, boast that their entire production slate for 2005-06 primetime is in HD, while others are encouraging producers to deliver HD masters.
These days, producers weighing the pros and cons of HD versus 35mm or Super 16mm film, consider a range of aesthetic, technical, financial and distribution issues.
Sometimes they conclude, after testing out the latest HD production gear, that while it’s surely the coming thing, it has yet to arrive. “For the kind of depth of field and blacks we want, we’re convinced Super 16 is better,” says Stephen Stohn, president of Epitome Pictures and an exec producer on CTV’s Degrassi: The Next Generation and Instant Star, both post-produced in HD.
Other times, producers are unwilling to risk HD cameras. “This is such a big show, we can’t afford to mess around,” says Tim Hogan, a producer on the CBC miniseries Canada-Russia 1972, which shot last winter in Super 16 and will be finished in HD.
“I don’t have a problem experimenting with new technologies, but if we’d had a problem on the set, we’d have to pull money from other parts of the budget, like the music rights, in post-production.”
Hogan, with Moncton’s Dream Street Pictures, says the budget for the two-part mini should have been higher than $7.7 million, given the 90 cast members and “thousands of background performers” filling the hockey arena. He’d heard they could save money by shooting on HD because there are no rushes to process or transfer to video for editing. “But there was no clear evidence, on a line-by-line budget comparison,” that high-end video would be cheaper.
Hogan also worried that HD cams would “smear” on whip pans, the fast movement impairing their ability to fully register the image. He was also concerned HD cams might “blow out” images shot against white backgrounds, which would make it hard to shoot the white ice and the white in hockey players’ uniforms.
“Nobody could look us square in the eye and sell us on their confidence level that they could do things well in HD.”
Film still reflects “a little bit more warmth,” Stohn says. “A lot of it is subjective. (In our tests) we’ll light and shoot the same scene identically. Sometimes there’s a problem with camera movement, not on the whip pans, but just the pans, a little bit of what we call judder. That was on our last test, which was a year ago. But that will change. HD is very close” to the quality of film.
Stohn also repeats the often-heard remark that HD is good for shooting sports, where you want “to be able to see the hitter’s eyes clearly, and the catcher’s eyes, too.”
But other producers, including several working in the high-def holdout genre of drama, argue that an experienced director of photography (DOP) can overcome the format’s challenges. Brian Hamilton, an exec producer with Omni Film Productions in Vancouver, has been pushing broadcasters to acquire HD product.
OMNI is shooting and posting a long list of high-def shows, including a 13-part comedy series, Alice I Think for CTV/Comedy Network, the four-hour miniseries Dragon Boys for CBC, and Booming Out, CBC’s first shot-in-HD doc.
“It’s a medium in which, once you learn its characteristics and idiosyncrasies, you can create just as striking imagery as you can in film. A lot depends on your DOP.”
OMNI liked the format so much it bought the equipment it needs to handle every stage of post. “I have to post in HD,” says Hamilton. “Whether I shoot with film or with an HD camera is my only choice to make.”
In fact, he says the company held a “great debate” over how to shoot Dragon Boys and Alice I Think. “Could we achieve the quality?”
But Hamilton says advances such as the Pro-35 adaptor, that allows users to mount prime lenses designed for motion picture cameras, mean that HD cams can “capture the shallow depth of field that you associate with film. So you can highlight a portion of the frame and throw everything else out of focus.”
Given this technical improvement, producers say extra time isn’t needed for makeup, sets or costumes. “I think it’s largely a myth that hi-def shows highlight flaws more than Super 16,” Hamilton says.
“When the (total production) price is lower and the quality is equivalent, it’s a no-brainer. It doesn’t make sense for us to do shows on standard definition (SD) unless the show has a short shelf life and no potential for international distribution.”
Hamilton is convinced the trend toward HD content is “only going to accelerate. It’s worth the increased (post) cost because our catalogue will be valuable for much longer.”
Stohn agrees. “If we’re to compete with all the other American shows that are out there…on Degrassi or Instant Star, if the production values are even marginally inferior, the audience says, ‘Oh, there’s something wrong here.’ So if we’re gonna play in the big leagues, we have to be in high def.”
Certainly U.S. broadcasters and cable nets are accelerating demand for HD product and, because so many buy Canadian, producers here need to shoot or at least finish in the electronic format.
“We do all our post in HD,” says Stohn, “and at the last minute do one version HD (for the broadcaster’s high definition feeds) and one down-conversion to NTSC. The picture that goes out on the CTV regular feed is still better than the normal standard definition.”
“We found a market in the U.S.,” says Stephen Ellis, a veteran doc producer and president of Ellis Entertainment, an eminence grise among Toronto production and distribution houses. “There are two or three niche channels, cable and pay and specialty, such as HDNet, VOOM HD networks – 17 channels of HD, 24 hours a day – and HD Theater, part of Discovery.”
Ellis says his company first shot HD in 2002 on a three-part doc series called The Baby Human. Today, Ellis has 25 high definition hours spread across seven properties. The content spans the spectrum from nature docs to unscripted programs.
Ellis says HD producers also improve their opportunities to partner and distribute beyond North America. His company is doing an international co-production with Tile Films of Ireland and Ellis’s new Canadian partner, VisionTV International, to produce a doc series called The Lost Gods.
Instead of shooting SD in Ireland, at a per-episode cost of $300,000, as originally planned, Tile Films decided to move production to Toronto because the series could be shot in HD here for the same price. Ellis says equipment rental rates are very competitive in Toronto.
While he realizes Canadian producers are moving into HD production relatively slowly, he reckons production levels will rise as consumer demand grows. Rogers has surpassed 100,000 HD subscribers.
“As a general rule,” he says, “every technology at the consumer level, since the VCR, has been adopted much faster than expected. HD, arguably, is taking longer, except for what’s being mandated by the FCC. But in all the big box stores…I defy you to find a standard def TV.”
“Our starting proposition, now, is we want to do everything in HD unless there’s some compelling reason not to, even though most broadcasters in Canada and international markets don’t broadcast in HD. We always justify doing HD against ancillary sales,” Ellis adds, noting he would welcome some government support to help offset the higher costs – approximately 20%-30% of the budget – of producing in this format. A spokesperson for Canadian Heritage says there is nothing to announce yet.
Overall, says Ellis, investing in this format is “partly just buying insurance that your programs will still be of interest in five years’ or 10 years’ time. …There’s a low risk of deterioration. And, three or four years from now, people will look at the aspect ratio we have now (4:3) and it will look quaint.”
While long-form producers are learning to focus on HD, film still rules in advertising. “We’ve done a few PSAs (public service announcements), a few spots here and there, but people who shoot film are really respectful of the medium,” says Coleman Baslaw, film and video manager at The Partners’ Film Company, Toronto.
But Baslaw is biased: he’s also a manager at Affiliated Equipment, a division of Partners’, which rents film equipment to commercial shops. Film he says, is “the closest thing to what my eye interprets when I look at something….That grainy quality, that dreamy quality, it’s unique. Video I find a bit too hard.”
Video is all they do at Toronto’s Sim Video, a prime source for HD equipment in Toronto. HD specialist John DeBoer says although technology trends lag about six months behind in the commercial world, lately some leading DOPs have been calling for information, and testing equipment. Still, “the major bulk of the spots are shot on film. With so many spot houses owning their own film cameras, they want to shoot on film.”
Says Baslaw: “You can’t argue with the economics of shooting on video. A roll of film is $350 or so for 1000 feet and you can shoot just under 12 minutes. You can get a 40-minute high definition cassette that costs $70. On average, it takes about 6000 feet of film to shoot a 30-second spot.”
Baslaw concedes the two media “are getting close” in quality. But he says HD requires great care outdoors. “It’s the most difficult thing to shoot because you can’t control natural light. You can filter it all you want and you can change your film stock, but imagine if you’re doing a skiing scene and it’s white. It’s…hard to distinguish the background from the foreground. If you mess up, you might not even be able to save it in post.”
Speaking of skiing brings us back to Michael Marshall, DOP on Whistler. Although there hasn’t been enough snow to allow the crew to shoot any snowboarding sequences yet, Marshall knows “we’ll have to fight the white backgrounds on the snow. HD’s always better when you can control the light.”
So far, Marshall says, all is going well. He’s stopped using the array of filters he tried on 2030CE because the effects were exaggerated so much during the down-conversion to NTSC that it appeared to have been “shot through a bed sheet!”
“I have no reservations about shooting in HD,” he says. “It’s only going to get better.”
Susan Tolusso is an Ottawa-based freelance writer.
