Wrangling Data

I took some time to make prints this week.  Working with a DSLR is a surprising return to the practices used on film stocks.  The camera takes very high resolution pictures that are not practical to work with on anything that isn't a government supercomputer.  The way I work is I capture video-assist from the camera's live output tap and then, once i'm happy with the shot and the sequence of movement, I unload the camera and develop the pictures.

I don't use any particularly fancy software.  I know SMP and DragonFrame are incredible tools and every day or two I wonder which one I should hitch up to but until I can pull the finger out I'm still using Monkeyjam which does the basic job rather well.

I shoot everything on twos i.e. each movement lasts for two frames - this works out as a peculiar 12.5 frames per second (FPS) in the European 'Pal' video standard of 25 FPS.

It sounds like a cop-out but the difference is barely noticable unless the animated movement is very quick.  Then I can switch to singles - one frame per move - for a half second or so and switch back.  You'll never see the change, and fewer frames means less hard work.  So that's what the computer does for me; keeps track of all my inconsistencies.

The camera meanwhile is recording each frame in 3675 lines... or some other indescribably big number, I can't remember.  This is RAW format which is the digital equivalent of a film negative.  Every percievable bit of light is recorded on the file so that if, on a whim,  I decide in post production to stage the scene at night, I can process the final video to look how I want.  (I'm not joking, I had to do this once and while it's basically impossible to do it with Standard Definition Video, shooting in RAW makes it rather easy)

Then comes the sequence assembly.  I go through the exposure sheets - generated by the computer at the shooting stage - this lists how long each picture holds on screen (usually either 1/25th or 2/25ths of a second - very occasionally 3/25ths, never more) and I line up the frame numbers with the dialogue soundtrack.  This takes ages.

 

The finished product is a strip of AVI video measuring 1080 by 1440 pixels which can be imported into any video editor (I use Avid because I'm an Avid fan - don't even get me started)  After that it's just like proper filmmaking. I'm nowhere near that stage on Firebird but now at least I have some video to play with.