John Rule of Rule Broadcast Systems is someone who is well known in the New England production community as a person who helps broadcasters and filmmakers translate technology, so I met with him last week in order to make sense of the terms and concepts surrounding HD and HDV and what it all really means to producers and directors. Here’s a portion of our conversation.

David Tamés: Given Art Donahue’s experience with HDV, it looks like HD is now real for everyone, regardless of budget or logistical constraint.

John Rule: If you follow the process of any technological sea of change, there are the early adopters, then the niche projects, and then slowly but surely, in a fairly orderly fashion, you move towards wholesale adoption. Between 1997 and 2000 you had the early adopters like The Discovery Channel doing nature documentaries with HD because you had this high quality image which you could down covert and edit much the same way you were editing your film projects but for a nature documentary you get a huge improvement with long 40 min. tape loads(compared to 10 or 20 minutes with film).

In 2000 we first started seeing feature films being shot in HD, in the fall of 1999 SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET was shot with Sony’s HDW-700A (1080i) and we began to see some major productions being shot in HD. People started to see there are some serious cost/benefits to be had with this format. But we did not see wholesale adoption until Sony came out with their 900 24P camera in Nov. 2000 which was essentially the camera that Sony built for George Lucas and that’s when you started to see more and more feature films being done in HD and little by little people started thinking about it outside the context of feature films. Once that happened, once people started to understand what HD meant to them, in their commercial project and in their documentaries and things like that, I would say that was a 2 year process that takes us to HD becoming ubiquitous in 2002. It’s taken an additional couple of years before everyone realized what the benefits were.

Tamés: So now with Sony’s little HDV camera, we have an HD camera available at the entry level as well as the pro cameras at the high end we’ve had since 1999. There is still some confusion over 24P, 1080i, and all the ATSC formats.

Rule: We spend a lot of time talking about the fact that nomenclature and taxonomy is incredibly important, you need to be precise about what it is your talking about in terms of the technology, in terms of model numbers, because every piece of equipment does something different and every different approach of that technology offers a spider web of results and so you have to be careful at the beginning of any project to be precise about the technology and methodology your going to use.

Tamés: Can you help clear some of that up? Can you provide me with a primer on how I use the right terms, 24P 720P, 1080i?

Rule: That’s a three hour lecture.

Tamés: Can we get a preview?

Rule: I guess you’d have to say HDTV is a broad umbrella that includes twelve formats that could be considered HD if you look at the ATSC Digital Television Standard. First thing when you look at the ATSC format chart you have to understand that DTV is not necessarily HDTV, of those standards only some are HD, to me, anything with a resolution greater than 720 x 486 is HD, there are people who view 480P 60 as HD (a.k.a. EDTV for Enhanced Definition TV) but I don’t, to me that’s only increasing temporal resolution, for HD I think you need to have the spatial resolution too. HD can then take several forms and it can be interlaced, progressive, it can have multiple frame rates, the one consistent factor is that HD is always 16x9 but knowing that SD can be 16x9 you have to be aware of that.

Tamés: Can you explain why some people use a big ‘P’ and others use a little ‘p’, is there a difference?

Rule: I’m a big ‘P’ guy, it’s inconsistently used, for frame rate, use ‘P’, if you’re being precise.

Tamés: One of the big choices people seem to be making is either shooting 1080i at 60 fields or shooting 24P. It seems broadcasters are wedded to 1080i, while filmmakers swear by 24P. What’s the difference? Why do people make such a big deal about this?

Rule: The whole point of film, the reason for 24 frames, goes back 100 years. This was the minimum frame rate at which persistence of vision could occur, the illusion of seamless motion without perception of flicker, or separate fames. 24 fps has now been entered in our minds as a frame rate that indicates a separation from reality, suspension of disbelief is possible with a slightly lower frame rate like 24P and broadcasters don’t care about that because they are not necessarily interested in the suspension of disbelief, they are trying to present an entirely different story in a different way. Deep in our brain we are used to seeing this 60i frame rate on the evening news as reality, while motion pictures at 24fps as not being real. Broadcasters are engineers for the most part, there is no engineering reason for 24P, it’s an artistic choice. It’s like a “reality encoder” knob where you can choose a “real look” or “fiction look.” Other factors that come into play are depth of field, dramatic lighting, etc. these are all cues that tell us whether we’re watching a story or something real.

Tamés: Given Art Donahue has had such a positive experience with Sony’s little HDV camera, why would I still want to use the large cameras? As a producer, the choice used to be simple, shoot DV for tight budgets, professional SD for moderate budgets, and HD for big budgets. Now this little HDV camera comes into the picture and it’s priced like an SD camera but it can play in the realm of the big cameras. How do I make my format choice in light of that?

Rule: What’s happening is you have more choices in production, the number of choices increasing all the time, but in lock step with the number of delivery options that are now available to us. For every additional delivery option there are questions that have to be answered at the preproduction stage. Where your project is going to end up will determine how you’re going to shoot it. You always want to factor in quality, and if we’re just talking about quality you look up and down the spectrum and decide where you want to be on that quality level. You can go all the way up to Sony’s HDCAM or HDCAM-SR and shoot with a high end HD camera and record in 4:4:4 and your quality will be staggeringly good, however, not everyone needs to be doing that or should be doing that, it’s always a choice between the quality, and your budget. The one thing that has never changed is that your decision needs to be made in the context of what the project is and what you’re trying to achieve.

Tamés: Can you provide me with some examples?

Rule: Yes, if you’re doing a documentary film and you’re going into dangerous environments where lugging a large camera can get you killed there’s an obvious choice of what you’re going to use. If you are doing interviews and the camera is not going to be moved, that’s another indicator that certain technology can be dismissed. If you’re going for gentle movement, broad panoramas, and dramatic scenes, for those shots you need certain tech to achieve those ends that usually involves the larger cameras. You have to think about budget, quality, and physical constraints. With every piece of equipment, there is a trade off. You can shoot with a large professional camera and you’ll get fabulous picture quality and the lenses are fantastic, you can actually pull focus on a professional lens. This falls into the quality category, have the option of long lenses, interchangeable lenses, on the other hand, that camera is also $125K and 50lbs., to dangle that by a wire over a waterfall might not be the best choice, the Sony Z1U can come in as an excellent B camera, you have with that flexibility we did not have a year ago. And there will be some issues with inter-cutting if the project is 24P since the Z1U does not do 24P so there’s another issue so you have to apply some processing in post. In the right situation the cut will be invisible.

Tamés: What about the new under $10K professional HD cameras coming out now? The HDV camera from JVC coming out right now and Panasonic’s DVCPRO-HD successor to the DVX-100A, expected in December? How does that change the mix?

Rule: The features of all these cameras is becoming increasingly fractured, the smaller cameras have a non-threatening profile that will allow you to pass discretely into any crowd that you can’t do with the large cameras. I’ve not seen the image from these cameras yet. Once these new cameras get thrown into the mix, we’ll have even more choices, however, we’ll still have the issue of the 1/3” chip in the small cameras without interchangeable lenses vs. the 2/3” chip cameras with interchangeable lenses and the shallower depth of field look of the cameras with the larger chip. The new JVC camera, even though it will give us 24P, still has small chips and only has two lenses available for it at this time.