"The House" a feature shot with HD10Us

[Ben Buie]

Great looking stuff!

Question, do you guys shoot primarily with HD10s? Were the other items on your demo reel also shot with the HD10?

Thanks, it is great to see other people getting such good results out of this camcorder.

Regards,

Ben

[Kevin C. W. Wong]

Hi Ben,

Our company shoots with all types of formats. In the past year and a half we've been experimenting with HDV because we find it reminds us of how when miniDV first came out, there was a period of 'adventurous' folks like us trying it out and really testing the potential of the format. The guys I work with have always been about doing something new, something different and this is just another example of this 'habit' we have.

Other pieces on our site are mostly film actually, but I must say that video have come a long way in the past little while.

Anyway, thanks for your compliments and yes it is great to see others out there trying new things and breaking new grounds with new technology.

Kevin,

[Anhar Miah]

To Kevin:

I really liked this!

Question:

Any thoughts of 35mm blow-up? (surely this would like great, considering miniDV blow-ups, {aka Open Waters ;) })

Also how did you get that last bit of the girl smoking (the shallow DOF , check out her shoulders, very nice)

and also any conversion to 24P or is it 30P ?

Thanks!

Oh gosh i really hope HDV surives.

[Kevin C. W. Wong]

Hey Anhar,

Thanks for your kind words on the piece.

We are planning to have a 35mm blowup soon, but of course we haven't had much info on it yet since we are still working on the offiline. We probably will be converting it to 24p after the online but most of that area of things are still up in the air. I'll let you know more about it when we get to that stage.

Regarding the shot with the girl smoking. We shot that particular shot with a telephoto adaptor attached to the lens. It was really quite amazing since it gave it a bit of a highlight glow, thus helping to sell the narrow depth of field.

I find that inherently, the HD10u in HD mode has less dept of field than most other cameras in its 'class' ie. DVX100. Perhaps it is the 16x9 CCD. So if there is enough room to place the camera back away from the subject, we can usually get a pretty narrow depth of field look with it.

Anyway, thanks again.

Kevin,

[Glenn Gipson]

The movie looks great, but the Radiohead music was a bit distracting...cause I knew it wasn't original. I'm sure you just used that as a temporary solution, though. How did you record the dialogue?

[Kevin C. W. Wong]

Glenn,

Yeah, I know what you're saying about the song. It is definitely way too well known. Fortunately, our composer will fix that problem soon. :)

Regarding sound, we did some tests with the HD10u with plugging a mixer into the camera, it didn't work out since there seem to be a hum. Also there is no control over tne input level so we just went back to the usual, and in my opinion, better way to do sound which is externally. In our case we used a DAT. Worked out great. In terms of syncing, we just went old school with a regular slate.

How do you guys find the camera/format?

Kevin,

[Ben Buie]

For what it is worth, I much prefer source music to a score. It just helps me relate to the picture more, and it is less distracting.

Thus, I loved the radiohead music. Since it was a b-side I didn't immediately know it was radiohead, but it sounded a lot like their stuff. That is the perfect kind of song to use.

I think this is one of the reasons I always enjoy watching Sopranos.

I guess the exception is if you have a period piece or a genre where source music wouldn't apply or would seem out of place. Or if you are really good friends with John Williams :)

Of course, the biggest obstacle to this for most small production companies is licensing fees.

Anyway, this is way off topic, so I'll shut up now.

[Ben Buie]

Oh yeah, I agree about the built-in sound system on the HD10. We tried running a nice Mic directly into the HD10, but the AGC hurts and it means a mixer is useless. Everything was also a bit tinny.

I mean, I wouldn't mind the AGC so much if it actually worked; what the heck is the point of an AGC if it always adjusts the levels so you consistently get levels above 0db? The AGC definitely adjusts things WAY too much on the hot side.

Also, does ANYONE know how to change the recording monitoring volume on the HD10? We monitor with headphones, but it seems there is no way to adjust the monitoring volume at all; we were having problems with feedback because the headphone volume during recording was so hot. We tried changing the playback volume but that didn't change the recording volume. Note that I am not talking about changing the recording/input levels, I'm just talking about changing the headphone volume during recording.

[Paul Mogg]

Hi Kevin,
Thanks for posting your clip, looks good. Just a note that if you're going to be doing much color correction, try to render it out at 10 bit uncompressed in FCP for your master. I experimented with this quite a bit and found that doing a 10 bit uncompressed online as opposed to 8 bit resulted in significantly less noise being generated in the picture, especially if you're going to be saturating the colors quite a bit, as tends to be needed with HD1OU footage.

I hope this helps,

Paul