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256 points MattSayar | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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_m_p ◴[] No.43542301[source]
I was reading about the cinematography of _Collateral_, possibly the first large budget feature film to be shot digitally, and one of the issues back in 2004 when it was made was the amount of storage required for digital video and the risk of not being able to retrieve the images from the data stores:

> “We did massive testing with the hard drives, and everything was great, and then we had an experience where we shot, and when we sent in the material, they couldn’t get the information off the hard drive,” said Cameron. “So the studio went ballistic and was like, ‘There’s just no way we can we can let you guys do this.’”

> The compromise was the production would record to hard drives as well as SRW tape. And unlike today, verifying the digital footage was equally cumbersome and tension-filled.

> “We recorded everything two or three times on decks that we carried with us,” said Beebe. “So we were backing up, two or three times.”

https://www.indiewire.com/features/interviews/michael-mann-c...

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dkh ◴[] No.43544193[source]
Collateral was not the first fully digitally shot feature film. In fact, Collateral was not even fully digital. (The first major, all-digital, HD feature film was Attack of the Clones, but there were other fully-digital feature films before that, just not as major, and/or not always HD. Robert Rodriguez' Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2001) was fully digital.)

But you are right that Collateral did do something very new/unusual at the time, and that was shooting scenes in higher frame-rates than 24, and mixing multiple frame rates in a film. (This might not sound like much, but until this time, pretty much every film was 24fps for the previous eighty years and it had a very specific look that everyone's eyes/brains were conditioned for, unbeknownst to them.)

And the other thing that was very interesting thing about it (though not something very visible to a viewer) was that it was shot on the Thomson Viper FilmStream camera[1], which was the first major attempt at shooting not just digital, but very close to "raw". It was also a huge pain in the ass. The camera itself was massive, but due to the bandwidth, it recorded to an external storage array that had to be pushed alongside it at all times, and that was itself about the size of a shopping cart. (This device was hilariously referred to as the "Director's Friend.")

In 2002, my friend and I, both cinema nerds in high school, drove an hour away to the nearest theater showing a film called Russian Ark[2]. Why were journeying to to see a strange little Russian film where a never-named character walks the viewer through Russian history? Because just like each episode of the recently-released Netflix show Adolescence, this entire film was a single, very long, very complicated, unbroken shot. One shot. No trickery, no cuts that were just hidden to the audience, one shot, through streets, buildings, snow, ballrooms with a couple hundred choreographed actors, it was crazy. This is easy now compared to how it was back then.

As we've now established with Collateral (and this film predates it by 2 years), digital cinematography existed, but the storage was a real problem, the power was a real problem. Since this film was one shot, it needed almost 100 minutes of both, unbroken. And since it was a very complex moving shot, it had to be operated handheld. So essentially they had an incredibly ripped director of photography who operated the camera on a steadicam the whole time while a giant array of daisychained batteries and hard drives were lugged behind him. And they did it something like 100 times until they had a few takes where there were no mistakes.

None of this really means anything to anyone anymore, but at the time, to cinematography nerds at least, this stuff was all absolutely insane!

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040103133953/http://www.thomso...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ark

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pjc50 ◴[] No.43544298[source]
I saw Russian Ark! Definitely a piece of art made by film buffs for film buffs; impressive to see, but far more impressive when you understand the amount of work that went into it.

I'm wondering why people would have chosen to do early digital if it was so inconvenient. When did the cost and flexibility advantages start to really kick in?

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1. dkh ◴[] No.43544504[source]
So in the context of this specific goal—shooting a feature film in a single unbroken shot—digital was a pain in the ass, but this was close to impossible to do on film, and Russian Ark was the first to ever do it, on any medium.

Simply shooting a feature film digitally was not that complicated by this time, or at least it didn't have to be. The Sony CineAlta F900 was the camera developed to shoot the Star Wars prequels, and was revolutionary at the time, became the gold standard for years, and very convenient relative to film. Tons of things started to be shot in 1080p around that time, and it was very nice to work with. Collateral was insane because they wanted to shoot raw and at high frame rates. Russian Ark needed a single unbroken shot in a form factor that one human would be capable of holding for that long. Aside from very specific and/or boundary-pushing needs, the arrival of the F900 in 2000 was effectively when digital was more convenient than shooting film while also meeting the technical requirements of high-end production (though it was many more years before most cinematographers agreed that the image quality was comparable)