Lights, camera, high definition

The advent of digital film-making High Definition (HD) technology has made film-making more accessible as this advancement helps to lower production costs, as well as simplify a great deal of the production process. What was once only achievable with a mega budget of S$1 million can now be produced with just a few hundred thousand dollars of investment.

The opportunities are great. Apart from taking up the directorial seat or scriptwriter’s pen, aspiring film-makers can also serve as director of photography (DoP) – or as set designers, casting agents, producers, technical consultants, or even as marketing and public relations officers.

There are many options available to the budget-conscious filmmaker today. There was a time when all low-budget filmmaking meant shooting on DV. But since this is the age of HD, there is a shift towards high definition.

What makes a cinematic HD image? There are two main formats of HD for cinema right now - 720p, and 1080p. 720p refers to a 1280 x 720 frame, while 1080p refers to a 1920 x 1080 frame. Both HD formats are fine for film transfer. Two acquisition formats have emerged - 2K (2048 x 1152) and 4K (4096 x 2304). Traditionally these were out of reach for the lower-budget filmmakers, but this has dramatically changed in recent times.

Most Singaporean HD features to date have been 720p films. Gone Shopping, 881, Be With Me, and I Not Stupid 2 are all shot at 720p on the Varicam. Two recent films have bucked the trend, opting to shoot in 1080.

Kallang Roar: The Movie, written and directed by Cheng Ding An. was shot on combination Canon XL H1 HD camcorder and Wafian’s HR-F1 HD portable Direct-to-Disk field 1920 x 1080 10 bit 4:2:2 HD-SDI video recorder in Cineform Intermediate format.

The film celebrates Singapore’s win in the 1977 Malaysian Cup, bringing back nostalgia of a year that saw an apex in the country’s national pride.

David Foo, DoP for Kallang Roar The Movie said the choice of Canon hinged on three key factors. “Recording directly on tapeless format retained the original high quality digital format on hard disk. This omitted additional time spent during post-production hence saving time and money. Second, I could immediately playback and view what was being shot without the need to do extra takes as backups.

“Finally, the Canon XL H1 costs a fraction of the conventional expensive six-digit figure equipment, yet it produces the same high quality in the broadcast film industry,“ said Foo.

“When we announced our decision to do so, many people in the industry were stunned and thought that we were mad. At the end of the day, it is really about pushing the envelope of technology, and about standing behind what we believe in. Kallang Roar is about the dreams of a single man who stood in the face of disbelief, and led the underdog Lions team to victory. In a way, we were standing against the belief that full feature HD films can only be done with a substantial budget using expensive full HD camcorders.”

Similarly for his film My Magic, director-producer Eric Khoo opted for Panasonic’s AVC-Intra format on the AJ-HPX3000 P2. The AJ-HPX3000 is the industry’s first native 1080p one-piece camcorder, which delivers master quality video thanks to its AVC-Intra codec recording system that employs the industry’s most advanced image compression technology. Together with the newly developed high-resolution 2.2-megapixel CCD, the AJ-HPX3000 is the first camcorder to offer high image quality, high resolution 1920 x 1080-recording with full 10-bit/4:2:2 sampling.

“Shooting on HD is very cost effective. You don’t need that much light and set up times are shorter. The whole film was done in 90 hours,” said Khoo.

One AJ-HPX3000 and 10 16GB P2 cards were made available for the shoot. Each 16GB P2 card records approximately 16 minutes of full-HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) content. However, only up to five P2 cards were utilized everyday, as footages were transferred from P2 cards onto an external hard drive at the end of the day, making the cards ready for use again the next day.

Editing was done using Final Cut Pro. P2 content is ingested into the NLE and transcoded to Apple ProRes 422 HQ. The bit rate of Apple ProRes 422 HQ is around 230Mbps and it is able to hold the quality of the footages being encoded in AVC-I 100 from the AJ-HPX3000. As for the transcoding rate, it takes one and a half time of real time, i.e. 60 seconds of footage takes 90 seconds to be transcoded from P2 format to Apple ProRes 422 HQ.

While Singapore has a fledging and promising film industry, with new directors emerging every year, it is hoped that the efforts of the filmmakers in making Kallang Roar and My Magic will inspire more directors without huge financial backing to start making their feature dreams come true.

Panasonic AJ-HPX3000 P2 With the AJ-HPX3000, production houses do not have to compromise mobility for video quality. This integrated camera-recorder makes it possible to acquire the kind of high-quality video that in the past required a standalone HD camera plus a large VTR such as the HD-D5. The AJ-HPX3000 uses P2 solid-state memory, which provides outstanding features common throughout the P2 HD Series, including superior reliability, long record times, fast on-set workflow and compatibility with leading non-linear editing systems. P2 HD equipment also can reduce both total costs and production time. The AJ-HPX3000 is suitable for high-end video production (television programmes, commercials, music videos, movies and documentaries) as well as budget productions. P2 or P2 HD actually refers to the solid-state recording media, P2 cards. P2 HD is available with both DVCPRO formats (DVCPRO HD, DVCPRO 50, DVCPRO/DV) & AVC-Intra formats (AVC-Intra 100 & AVC-Intra 50). For My Magic, P2 cards were used to record full 1920 x 1080 raster video quality using the AVC-Intra 100 codec (100 Mb/s bit rate), which is the highest recording quality currently available in a one-piece camcorder (comparable to mastering video quality). AVC-Intra 100 is part of the AVC-Intra codec family that is a fully compliant H.264 codec implementation. AVC-Intra 100 gives professionals and broadcasters access to mastering quality HD recording and does not utilize any video sub-sampling. With 4:2:2, 10-bit Intra-frame coding, in 1080 progressive or interlace systems, AVC-Intra 100 records the full 1920 x 1080 raster. AVC-Intra offers significantly better compression efficiency than older codec families, resulting in storage and bandwidth savings. The AVC-Intra 50 (50 Mb/s bit rate) delivers the same picture quality as DVCPRO HD at half the bit rate, hence doubling the recording time on the P2 cards. Due to intra-frame compression, AVC-Intra is unaffected by motion or rapid changes in scene content, and stands up to rigorous editing (compositing, multiple layers of video etc) far better than long-GOP/Inter-frame compression scheme.