HDV an alternative to DV for non HD market.

[Frederic Lumiere]

Brian,

I think I'll pass on going back to see '...Mexico' projected in film. It was painful enough the first time. Here's an interesting fact, when I lived in LA, I met this guy called Conrad Denke from American Production Services now called Victory Studios I think. He gave me a tour of his facilities and apparently they provide the online editing solution for Rodriguez' movies. It was a sweet setup!

Maybe I should shoot him an email and ask him what he thinks of HDV....

[Brian Mitchell Warshawsky]

Frederic,

I can't argue with your opinion of '...Mexico'. I do think El Mariachi was a great film though, even without considering the budget. FWIW, Spy Kids 3D was not up to Spy Kids 2.

As was discussed in another thread, Rodriguez stated he used a $4K JVC HD camera for some pickup shots in Spy Kids 3D. Perhaps Conrad Denke can explain how Rodriguez made use of the camera despite its 30P format.

I imagine that 30P may be a non-issue if used for video display scenes / video-phone scenes. George Clooney was seen in one such video window, and I read where Rodriguez went by himself to Clooney's house, quickly setup his camera, and shot Clooney's scene/scenes, which were talking-head close ups.

How intriguing it would be if Rodriguez flew to LA to shoot this footage for his film, armed only with his HD10U, and little else. This is how he shot El Mariachi.

Brian

[Frederic Lumiere]

I am really intrigued by upconverting 720p (30 fps Progessive Scan) to 1080i (60 fps interlaced) which the camera does when transferring the footage to a DVHS deck. My understanding is that 1080i is a lot easier to transfer to film than 720p.

There are some artifacts issues going to 1080i but I'm sure it can't be worse than blowing DV up to 35mm!!!

If you follow me.

F

[Barry Green]

720/30P transferred to 1080/60i, transferred to 24fps film, is still not going to work. The problem is that the motion was captured in discrete samples at 30fps. Just dubbing it to 60i won't overcome the problem. The 60i footage's motion will look identical to the 30P motion, and that's where the problem is.

For someone who's really creative, you could probably make a wickedly awesome film transfer from the JVC -- just have your actors move and speak 20% faster than normal. Then import the footage frame-for-frame into a 24fps timeline, and use ADR to dub in new audio. That project could then be printed to film at a 1:1 ratio, no motion artifacts or conversions necessary, and it'd probably look pretty good! But you'd have to choose the right project, and use that style to your advantage (similar to Rodriguez in "El Mariachi", where the frenetic pace of editing and cutaways was dictated by the fact he couldn't hold lipsync for more than a couple of seconds!)

[Ken Hodson]

Brian, I would edit in full resolution all the way through. You then have a HD master to convert to whatever you want. I would recomend Aspect HD or HuffYUV. If you go HuffYUV spend the $1200 you save on PC system upgrades. You can get lots of hard drives, ram, Parhelia video card and new cpu for that cash.

In regards to the 30p being used in films, studio's often use special in-house software(that is how MagicBullet started) to make it look right. There are ways if there is money.
As far as using the DVHS to upconvert to 60i for further conversion to 24p:
I believe this was mentioned befor and the answer was that the 30p frames were just doubled to 60. Every frame was shown twice. So if you downconvert to 24fps you are still pulling from just 30 frames each shown twice. No improvement in motion would be gained. Can anyone shed more light on the DVHS conversion?
Ken