I was in the market for a microphone a couple weeks ago and stumbled across this shotgun microphone shootout. Its a controlled test of seven popular shotgun mics. Its the only useful comparison I could find and this test alone convinced me that spending more money on a microphone does make a difference. Before I heard the test results I was dead set on getting the Rode NTG-2, but I was surprised to hear the Sennheiser ME-66 sounds substantially better for about $100 more. We picked up an ME-66 and its been perfect.
I have a theory that audiences are subconsciously much more critical of sound than they are of picture. The audience doesn’t understand the details of production value, but through a lifetime of viewing experience they have a subconscious checklist of attributes that are necessary to create an emotional link with the content. In my observation, sound is higher on the checklist than picture and they’ll tune out right away if the sound is rough. So a better mic on set and little extra work on the mix buys you a lot of latitude in the picture. Or so the theory goes.
If you ask me to make a two minute animated video that will garner thousands of hits on YouTube and national media attention, I’ll hand you a six figure budget and a four week schedule. But that’s because I’m a bloated fat-cat from the 1990’s, which is why I’m about to be made obsolete by the kids that produced the “Six Ways To Kill Piper” viral video.
These girls may need some behavioral therapy and/or shock treatment, but when they’re done, they’ll have careers as video Producers. From what little I can see of the original video, its concise and well structured, and includes effective marketing attributes in the title that are carried out in the content. In the web marketing world, there are firms charging tens of thousands of dollars for less effective viral videos that can’t garner this much attention. Yes, threatening to kill someone is a cheap shot, and its not sustainable, but I bet if these girls were allowed to make a follow up apology video, it would be a Youtube sensation.
I’m amazed at how much more adept each successive generation becomes at producing effective content with less expensive, easily accessible tools. I still remember 1997, when the online editors at the Post Group in Hollywood laughed me off after I decided to finish TV promos in my Avid at AVR75. I’ll admit that I don’t know how these little assassins produced this video, or what software was used, but I don’t dare laugh them off. I know there’s a whole generation of kids that are ready to produce effective content with inexpensive, accessible tools that I don’t know how to use. They’ll be coming for my job soon, if they can survive junior high.
A few weeks ago I had the good fortune to spend some time at a new production company called Studio Lambert. The company was founded by Stephan Lambert, who is a heavy hitter reality TV show runner in the UK. He recently opened a US office where the first production was a reality show pilot for CBS called Undercover Boss. My friend Courtney Smith was the lead editor, and he called me in to help them finish up the last week of editorial. The schedule was grueling, but Courtney and the producers were great to work with. They kept the show on the rails while the network made massive 11th hour changes, and they maintained a positive, creative atmosphere until the bitter end. Well, the end wasn’t so bitter, because its just been announced that CBS has picked up the series. Congratulations to everyone at Studio Lambert.
On a technical note, the pilot episode was cut on Avid Adrenaline machines with a MeSoft network for the producers. In the offline edit, we were working at 10:1 resolution in 4×3. The show was shot on Sony XDCam. I came to the show in the last week of editorial, and I had assumed that they shot HD and downconverted to standard definition for the offline edit. I didn’t find out until the up-res that they didn’t shoot HD. They shot standard definition, in 4×3. I assume that was a budgetary decision, but its a surprising choice given that it doesn’t cost much more to shoot and edit HD these days. Sony XDCam is HD. The Avid is HD. The Davinci color correction is HD. The post house isn’t going to charge you less for using SD, unless they are charging for VTR usage. Every consumer that owns an HD TV (about 33% of viewers) *hates* watching SD programming on their shiny new TV set, so I don’t see where you come out ahead by producing a show in SD. Of course, CBS will blowup the image for HD broadcast, but I think the difference is noticeable and the HD purists will still complain.
Halo-8 started production on a documentary project last week. Its a typically low budget production, so we used the Panasonic DVX-100A as the main camera for shooting interviews. We’ve been using the DVX100A for almost all of our low budget productions for the last several years. I have a consumer HDV camera that I use to take video of my kids, so I decided to bring it along as a hand held “B” camera. Its a Canon HV20, and it has some cool prosumer features like 24p mode. I didn’t buy it for professional use, but I thought I’d bring it along and get some extra b-roll, and use this scenario to produce a real world test between HDV and DV. To get to the point, the images from the Canon HV20 were vastly superior. I guess it shouldn’t be so surprising that the HD images looked better than the SD images, but I assumed that the superior lens on the DVX100 would count for something. The only problem with the test was that the DVX100 wasn’t setup very well, so the picture came out about one stop too dark, and very flat. I didn’t pay enough attention to the other camera operator because I was dorking around with my HV20, but I think it’ll work out because the footage from the HV20 looks great, and the footage from the DVX100 is salvageable. Even if the DVX100 had been setup correctly, the HDV still would have produced a superior result. The fact is that neither camera produced a picture that was usable right off the tape. I usually do extensive color correction or color style work to my footage. For this test, I digitized the DV footage and the HDV footage through firewire. I used Magic Bullet Looks and Colorista to whip up a couple of color styles for both sets of footage. This is where HDV really proved invaluable. The HDV footage had substantially more latitude for color manipulation, meaning that I could make severe style adjustments to the whites, blacks and saturation values without noticeable distortion in the image. I tried that same kind of manipulation on the DV footage, and it became noisy very quickly. I’ve never edited in HDV before, so I’m not sure what the pitfalls may be, but in this basic test it was more or less like working with Apple Pro Res 422. The HV20 isn’t perfect, but we were very impressed that we got such image quality out of a $700 consumer camera, and we’ll be using it as the “A” camera on some of the interviews for the documentary.
Here’s a couple of loosely edited clips from the shoot with a variety of color styles applied through out the clip. The first few seconds of each clip shows the untreated footage. The interview subject is adult film star and punk porn director Joanna Angel. The documentary series is tentatively called “Unsimulated: Sex in Cinema.”
Footage from the DVX100. In this clip, Joanna talks about directing comedy porn.
Footage from the Canon HV20. In this clip, Joanna describes the social implications of starting her porn site Burning Angel.com.
As a television and video production professional, I’m a very late adopter of HD technology. I waited until it really didn’t cost any more to do HD than it did to do standard def, then I jumped in. That meant waiting for compression schemes to improve so that I didn’t need an expensive storage system, and for the price of deck rentals to fall. Its nice to let everyone else work out the kinks, then take advantage of that knowledge base. Its not a very forward thinking strategy, but I’ve been the early adopter on too many other occasions, and that’s a suckers game. The bottom line is that as producers, we all have to meet the demands of the project at hand. The cable TV work I’ve been doing in recent years didn’t have an HD delivery requirement, so there wasn’t any point in producing HD until we could do it without incurring additional costs. At Halo-8, where I make movies and lifestyle videos, the main delivery method is DVD, which is standard def. Yes, there is Blu-Ray, but I’m betting that Blu-Ray will be replaced by any number of video on demand services before I ever have the occasion to release a Halo-8 movie in HD. I’m also betting that affordable software for scaling standard def video into HD will improve imeasureably over the next couple years. I’m happy to be working in HD, but I’m glad I waited for the streamlining of the workflow and the drop in price.
