using DVX PAL in lieu of DAT for 35mm short

[Bogdan Apetri]

I plan to shoot a 35mm short this winter with an Arri BL1. It is about 15 minutes and I have only a few lines throughout.

As an experiment, and also for cutting costs, I plan to use my DVX100AE as the sound recording device on my shoot, with a normal wood clap for "old style" syncing later in post.

The problem is that my camera is the PAL version, 25p. I wonder what are the things that I will have to solve later, I don't want to encounter some unforseen disaster. I can shoot 35mm at 25fps as they do it many times in Europe. I can telecine both to PAL and NTSC, no worries in this area.

Can you friends give me some suggestions as far as this is concerned? Any obvious problems? Again, I have only a few lines, it's not a heavy dialogue piece.

Thanks a lot!

[Barry Green]

I don't see where you'd have a problem. The PAL camera is going to record the audio as a 16-bit, 48khz audio stream, regardless of the fps.

I'd think you'd be safe shooting the film at 24fps and transferring to NTSC, and shooting the audio on the PAL camera. You should be able to capture an .AVI from the camera into a PAL project in your editing program and output a 16-bit, 48khz .WAV audio-only file, which you could then import into your 24fps film project. It should sync just fine, shouldn't it?

[Bogdan Apetri]

Thanks Barry.

OK, I understand, so if you shoot the same scene with two DVX cameras, one NTSC and the other one PAL you will theoretically get the exact same audio files, as far as length is concerned... Frame rate does not matter in this respect. This is one thing. The second thing, someone told me to be really careful, the film camera has a master crystal sync motor, the DVX cannot really be slave to it, but I don't think that's an issue, especially since I will not shoot two-minuyte long scenes dialogue depended. I could do it line by line.

Why go to AVI and then to WAV? I can firewire the DVX tapes into my FCP HD, take out my video, leave my audio and use it directly in my editing timeline with the digitized footage (telecined directly to minidv or to Beta SP and then transfer to minidv for editing).

As far as sound quality is concerned, DVX is pretty good, not quite like DAT but still very usable even for a 35mm short. Would you say so?

Thanks again for your help Barry.
Bogdan

[Barry Green]

the film camera has a master crystal sync motor, the DVX cannot really be slave to it, but I don't think that's an issue, especially since I will not shoot two-minuyte long scenes dialogue depended.

Both the DVX and the film camera will be precisely speed-governed. The only question about timing would be: is the film camera running at crystal speed of 24fps? Or 23.976 fps? Crystals exist for both, so you'll want to verify which you're using (if staying entirely on video, it's preferable to shoot 23.976).

When you transfer film to video, it gets transferred at a rate of 23.976fps. If you shot at 23.976, you'll have perfect sync. If you shot at 24, there may be the slightest bit of sync error (0.1% speed, which means you'd go out of sync by one frame every minute or so). Which can usually be corrected by just resampling the audio to be 48048hz (or the other way, 47952hz... I don't remember offhand).

As far as sound quality is concerned, DVX is pretty good, not quite like DAT but still very usable even for a 35mm short. Would you say so?

Absolutely.