OT: MiniDV quality

Ultimatley is Mini DV format going to be high quality enough for the big screen. Will it suffice for a high quality documentary, given the right exposures (lighting, sound)? Thanks for your input.

Rick

as far as i'm told, they shot 28 days later on a canon xl2. so id say yes.

thank you Wayne.

I shot and edited a 30 minute documentary that's been shown on large screens around the country (and a bit outside as well), and I'm in talks about showing it on TV, and it was all DV. I did use an AJA Kona card to import at 4:2:2, which came in handy for color correcting.

Also- you can record High def-ish video on Mini DV tapes, with HDV. It depends on what your camera supports.

I do have a Canon XH A1, my format is very mixed I have digitized 16mm, stills and live interviews would I be better to stick to one format over another? I shoot regularly on XL2s.

Rick

> Is Mini DV format going to be high quality enough for the big screen. Will it suffice for a high
> quality documentary

I might even argue, especially for a documentary! Content is king for a documentary, and if you can have four cameras rather than one by shooting Mini-DV, by all means go for it. (Your assistant editor will want to kill himself given the volume of footage, but it's still worth it) Documentaries have a very wide berth with audiences in terms of visual quality.


www.derekmok.com

I'll offer a counter opinion Derek's statement.

Social documentaries yes. By all means, multi-cams for better coverage beats having one pretty shot on digital beta. However, you need to know what you are shooting. DV isn't great for the beautiful sunrise/horizon shots which requires both huge chroma and luma gradients. Nature and foliage tends to look a little mucky on DV. Next to that, compressed end formats- if you're going to compress it later on, the higher resolution you start with, the better it looks after compression.

It depends on what look and what type of content you are going for. It's practical for stories about people, renegade film making, where content is what you are going for, and don't have the luxury of lugging huge cameras around or having the budget to afford to shoot in higher res.

Yes, and no. 28days was DV, but looked awful - but then again, they grained it all up to make it that way. It could have looked better.

I've seen DV sympathetically treated that looked "ok", so if you take care, it can look acceptable.

Graeme

Hi Derek, thanks everyone for the comments, do you have a favorite multi-cam documentary you recommend. Most interviews I have are with one or two people. The travel bits to Mexico and Hawaii I'm going to show 3 or more old surf guys together to try and get a more lively story, those would be multi-cam. These are 60s surf guys who won't dig a camera in their face so to speak. Thanks again everyone.

P.S. on Twenty Eight Days the set shot they may be XL2s but what were the lenses wow?

> Most interviews I have are with one or two people.

For one thing, I think interviews are a terribly overused device in modern-day documentaries. Most documentarians I've met think 75 per cent interviews and 25 per cent action. Not a good ratio at all. You find out much more about your subjects by watching them than by asking them. Overusing interviews is like giving up your own narrative prerogative and relying on other people to tell your story.

That said, interviews can be good structural devices. However, shooting a good interview is much more about getting good camera operators than how many cameras. One great, steady, active camera can be much more useful than four jittery, undecisive ones. If I had skillful operators I trusted, I usually wouldn't need more than two angles. With multiple interviewees, think harder about how you arrange them, and again, make sure your camera operators are paying attention. I've been working on this "round-table" conversation piece where the cameras were consistently two steps behind the action, and the two cameras on the interviewees often ended up on medium shots that don't cut with each other. Also, they did way too many "reaction shots" on non-speaking participants even though they weren't reacting at all, which mean a lot of footage was wasted on a shot of two guys being bored.

One more thing I recommend: Don't always set up your interviewees in a super-well-lit, staged, sit-down situation. You often get more from your subjects if you put them into their own space while doing their own life activities, rather than on the spot like a deer in headlights, where they know they're expected to "perform". Spellbound was one documentary that did great by not just doing sit-down interviews. Sacrifice a bit of technical slickness and you get much more precious human behaviour.

> do you have a favorite multi-cam documentary you recommend.

An unusual choice I love is A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica. It doesn't look all that hot cinematography-wise, but the content is phenomenal, superb fly-on-the-wall stuff. Aerosmith's The Making of Pump is saturated with examples of how not to shoot multi-camera interviews.


www.derekmok.com

Thanks again Derek this is the perfect information for me to follow.

Rick

We just had the Australian leg of the International Documentary Conference here in Fremantle, and in the DocuMart the buyers said just about exactly that. Less talking heads, less VO narrative, more action.

> We just had the Australian leg of the International Documentary Conference here in Fremantle,
> and in the DocuMart the buyers said just about exactly that. Less talking heads, less VO
> narrative, more action.

Amen.

Sometimes it's astonishing how some of us filmmakers, by focusing so much on the making of the film, lose touch with the audience. This really isn't a hard problem to solve, nor is it that obscure!

Strangely enough, or maybe not so much, some of the most consistent documentaries are nature shows, Discovery, History Channel, those shows. They tend to never lose sight of storytelling and action. Probably because alligators and dead generals don't give good interview.


www.derekmok.com

Right on Derek -- get a wireless - a good camera operator/cinematographer and get your subject out in the wild -- they will always give you better soundbites than up against the well lit firing squad

Right on Derek -- get a wireless - a good camera operator/cinematographer and get your subject out in the wild -- they will always give you better soundbites than up against the well lit firing squad

> they will always give you better soundbites than up against the well lit firing squad

Nice image.
And I'll also mention the well-intentioned director who goes like this:

"How did blah-di-blah-di-dah?"
"Good. We were..."
"I'm sorry, can you include the question in the answer?"
"When we blah-di-blah-di-dah..."
"Sorry, you spoke before I was finished. Can you give it to me clean?"
"....."

Leave them alone, fer Pete's sake!


www.derekmok.com

I have to confess to some difficulties with some of what's been said here.

My main concern is that some subjects - often quite important - do not lend themselves to more action. And if you try, the risk is that it will be contrived, and look contrived. At worst, the thing looks dumbed down. Before you know it, you are making not Fonzie jump the shark, but some eminent naturalist.

It may be that documentary buyers want more action. All that means is that they want to buy more action. It says nothing about what people truly want to see. The record of buyers in the creative industries is nothing to be proud of. A respectable body of opinion holds that their choices perform in the market no better than a random sample.

To say that talking heads are terribly overused is to forget the power of attraction of one human being for another, and the natural interest in what they have to say. It also underestimates the potential for projection by the audience. If you doubt the power of projection, consider the phenomenon of Barack Obama.

That said, talking heads are never a simple creative issue. It seems to me that a major problem is to introduce some visual variation without dying the death of a thousand camera angles. One approach is to use camera angles that are different, but only subtly so. Just a few degrees. This mirrors what people do when they talk to each other, moving themselves in their chair. You can see this in Errol Morris's The Fog of War, his interview with Robert J. McNamara (the full movie is on Google Video). Whether it was by design or accident, I don't know, since Morris had numerous sittings with McNamara. But the effect is to introduce elegant variation in a feature-length interview.

Baz

> Less talking heads, less
> VO narrative, more action.

good point. Where I am, VO is constantly used as a crutch. Shooting documentary action is tough, I have to admit. I constantly come across footages from scenes that I can't put into use because of too much camera shake, or the subject is shot from too far a distance. But of course, that is also likely why good documentary camera ops are paid good money. Nothing beats cutting to action.

> To say that talking heads are terribly overused is to forget the power of attraction of one human
> being for another

One more response and then I'll shut up!

Baz, I don't grant with your premise that talking-head interviews are the only device to generate human connection to the characters. I am, after all, from a narrative-film background, and my favourite scenes to cut are always the acting scenes -- you can really craft the performances and put forth the best beats, deliveries, reactions.

When I say "action" -- and I think Jude also meant this -- I don't necessarily mean crashing cars, burning buildings, a lion eating a deer, though these are also actions. I mean:

- The black little girl screwing up early in the spelling bee and crying in her mother's embrace in Spellbound.
- The tense mediation sessions in American Dream.
- The Dixie Chicks meeting with their manager to figure out how to market their music to overcome the "Bush" backlash in Shut Up and Sing.
- The junkie throwing up in the waiting room in Hospital.
- Kirk Hammett continuously screwing up the guitar solo to "The Unforgiven" and Bob Rock and the bandmates commenting on how he "doesn't do his homework" in A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica.

Basically, fly-on-the-wall shooting and editing where the action isn't done for the sake of the camera alone. Jude's mentioned in an older thread that this is very costly shooting -- you have to wait for something to happen and end up with mountains of boring footage -- but that's where you get the gold, true behaviours, when the onscreen subjects (ostensibly) forgets the camera is there, rather than having the director/producer/camera operator constantly comment on the action and try to affect the outcome.

Sometimes these scenes are staged, but when the real thing gets captured, it's magic. A kind that no other genre but documentary can generate.

"Action" also means "dramatic action". What a lot of producers have forgotten is that people aren't just interested in big bangs, violence, sex and controversy. Almost like they only remember the young-male demographic. I always like to bring up a director friend of mine whose thesis film I edited: Our $30,000 DV short -- not even 24p, plain ol' NTSC DV -- about two brothers reconciling (I call it "Two Black Guys in a Car" beat out two $80,000 35mm shorts at the Student Academy Awards. One had skydiving, the other had a cat who could act. And he was told that his win was a landslide with the voters. People are way smarter than marketers and producers give them credit for.


www.derekmok.com

The thread started out "is MiniDVd" GOOD enough for the BIG screen?

No one offered the "technical" reason for or against. Lets see,-- 720 x 480 pixels with 4:1:1 color space? Can that be blown up to a good looking BIG screen?

No one has touched a BIG screen film with Digital Cameras except Lucas and a couple of others for effect and they used BIG bucks High Def cameras.

So where they wrong to spend so much to capture digital images?

> The thread started out "is MiniDVd" GOOD enough for the BIG screen?

Pretty sure you meant "Mini-DV" there, John! You'd have to tie me to a tree to get me to shoot onto DVD.

So back to my original point: "Good enough" is a relative term. For a documentary, as per the original post, I think the answer is yes, even for a big screen. For an FX-heavy sci-fi film, or a period piece, or a moody thriller? Definitely not, unless you have no budget to shoot on any other format.


www.derekmok.com

> - The black little girl screwing up early in the
> spelling bee and crying in her mother's embrace in
> Spellbound.
> - The tense mediation sessions in American Dream.
> - The Dixie Chicks meeting with their manager to
> figure out how to market their music to overcome
> the "Bush" backlash in Shut Up and Sing.

And in rebuttal I?d offer ?Shoah? which was essentially 9 1/2 hours of interviews occasionally relieved by some mostly static landscape photography. Or a lot of the work of Errol Morris, as cited above. ( I started watching Shoah by accident- I was watching a scene in which an elderly woman in front of a group of peasants was speaking in LS to an offscreen interviewer. I was unconsiously waiting for the cut to her CU before I flipped to the next channel. Only there was no cut- and she spoke at some length. When she finished speaking, she stepped back into the crowd, and another elderly person stepped up and began his testimony. And it was riveting!) (Or at least I was riveted by it- which may be a very different thing!)

Let me hasten to add that I appreciate the value of what you?re saying. It is very often true- and the examples you?ve cited are very much spot on- but I just don?t think that it can always be generalized out to say: ?all docs should be this way or that way.? The subject material and the story determine the approach.

And the medium, for that matter- to return to some semblance of the topic at hand I also, in my perversity, do think production values can matter- a lot. I don?t think Errol Morris?s work would ?play? if it was shot on Mini DV?.

IMHO and AFAIK, of course?
randy

I think Randy makes makes excellent points.

First, what was the effect of the failure to cut to a CU? It turned the brain ON. That was the impact. Because it was unexpected. (IIRC, El Jobso himself has made the distinction between activities that generally turn the brain off, like watching TV on the one hand, and using a computer, which turns the brain on.)

I wonder, however, what mark would have been awarded to the editor of Shoah in a film school course!

Second - and this is pure speculation - I sometimes wonder to what extent some popular ideas, like this emphasis on action (however defined), are a legacy of the Social Realism of the early Soviet film-makers. Don't get me wrong - I accept it has a place.

But I suspect it introduces an automatic bias against the conceptual and abstract, and works to demean approaches that seek to engage the audience's imagination.

Baz

Well, I think there's also some good reasoning behind the push.

Take, for example, the concept of teaching survival skills. You could get an SAS soldier to stand up and talk about specific setups and use overlay of acted scenes to demonstrate. Which, OK, does the job, but boring.

Or you could get something like Man VS Wild where they get a survival expert, give him a knife and a flint, and then drop him in the Outback, or the Amazon, or on a volcano, and then film him finding his way to civilization. The things that he encounters along the way and the methods he has to use tell the story in an infinitely more engaging manner.

Which would you buy?

I am saying simply that it is a mistake to think that one size - in anything - fits all.

To my mind, the problem is that once a simple idea like the push for more action takes hold, then attempts are made to shoe-horn everything into it. To me personally, "more action" is redolent of the management buzz-words that in the end spell trivialization and mediocrity. And poor financial outcomes.

The sad truth is that nobody knows what will sell. If they did, no studio would ever have gone belly-up. No publisher would ever go bust. One of the few things we do know is that herd thinking leads at best to mediocre financial returns. What herd thinking has Apple ever embraced?

I would argue that Jude's question is the wrong question. They are different market segments, appealing to different kinds of personality and purpose. So "what would you buy" is not quite the right test IMHO.

I recall that of all the tennis and golf books, The Inner Game of Tennis and The Inner Game of Golf sold millions of copies. Neither has a single illustration.

>>I recall that of all the tennis and golf books, The Inner Game of Tennis and The Inner Game of Golf sold millions of copies. Neither has a single illustration.<<

But no documentary buyer would even look once at it in that form.

I'm not that invested in opinion on this. I'm just relaying what the international buyers said they wanted to buy. Do with that what you will.

Derek -- why aren't you teaching Doc film classes? - very good advice and commentary

As a middle ground -- having produced and written network news and documentary programs for the last nearly 3 decades...you learn how to dance to the music in front of you.

If you are producing SHOAH -- the talking heads are so compelling you don't need much more.

If you want to help the viewer pour themselves into the story - looking for the "golden" moments - the found moments when subjects forget the camera is there -- find the absolute best photographer and audio guys you can -- add a few wireless mikes and get out of the way. Spellbound is a great example of extraordinary documentary making -- few if any sitdown interviews - lots of people talking about what they're doing at the kitchen table - on the fly etc.

When you have that -- the tape format is almost irrelevant (I think Spellbound was shot entirely on MiniDV)

Andy

> why aren't you teaching Doc film classes? - very good advice and commentary

Thanks for that, Andy. I do teach them, just not as often as I used to. That's why you'll see the same examples in my postings over and over (Kopple, Wiseman etc.). They're from my film-theory writings that I use to make lesson plans.

> you learn how to dance to the music in front of you.

Absolutely. General rules say that interviews-only rarely works, but it's always down to specifics.

> When you have that -- the tape format is almost irrelevant (I think Spellbound was shot entirely
> on MiniDV)

And how did I forget that documentary classic: Hoop Dreams? It's not a particularly "pretty" film photographically, but man, did it capture the spirit and story of those people.


www.derekmok.com