"Planet Earth" HD vs Super 16mm

[T-Scan]

I was looking for info on the BBC show "Planet Earth" and found a link boasting about how it's shot on HD... But then seems to diss Super 16mm as an inferior alternative used in cold weather.
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:iIG ... cd=2&gl=us

[David M. Leugers]

Seems strange in a day where S-16mm is gaining ground for theatrical origination, it is considered not-good-enough for TV. I have viewed R-16mm material cropped for 16:9 that looked terrific on HD TV. As for not usable in
cold weather, the producers and cameramen of the hit film "March of the Penguins" might have a different opinion about shooting S-16mm.



David M. Leugers

[MovieStuff]

I'm sure the disclaimer has nothing to do with what they think about 16mm and more about doing a pre-emtive strike against complaints that the DVD was not shot totally in HD. It would be the same if something were promoted as being shot in 35mm and parts were actually shot on video. There would be a difference in the look between the two. For a story telling movie where format is fairly meaningless as long as the story is good, there wouldn't be a marketing issue. But for something promoted with HD as the hook, anything shot on film would need to be explained to satisfy the lawyers.

Roger

[Will2]

Super 16 can look amazing in HD, but HD will also show any flaws in technique pretty quickly. Focus & lighting always seems to be my problem. But that has nothing to do with the format... when it's done right its amazing.

[audadvnc]

The BBC bias against Super16 was discussed in a thread several months ago. I believe Mattias posted that the main complaint against film in general and S16 in particular was because the grain patterns of film jam up the HD codecs; inter-frame compression techniques go right out the window when the backgrounds are noisy with grain. Video, which doesn't have grain, doesn't suffer from this problem and compresses more gracefully.

[wado1942]

That's hillarious particularly since the BBC is the reason 16mm is what it is today. A good portion of "Planet Earth" and it's subsequent miniseries were shot on S-16. But this show was really serving as a sampler/trailer for the real shows that are upcomming in the next couple of years. They want to stress new technology as much as possible to draw attention. If they said it was shot on 16mm then they'd be afraid it would draw negative feedback. Most of the show was shot on Varicams from my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong. Anyways, test shots on the varicam shows its usable resolution is about 700-800 lines and has about 8-9 stops lattitude. Now S-16 using a crappy lens will resolve about 1200 lines or if a top quality prime lens is used, 1,800 lines. The lattitude of course is around 12-stops. So while yes the Varicam is a pretty good/useful camera, I'd use S-16 over that anyday.

[steve hyde]

...I saw some of this series on an HD system. My eyes were telling me that the bulk of it was shot on 35mm that went through an HD post path. The program is certainly a mix of formats: S16, HD and 35, but it is sold as an HD product because it is. I watched it with a Microsoft engineer (non-filmmaker) who is quite a tech-savvy dude. He explained to me that it is all HD and he was a bit surprised when I suggested that the bulk of it was probably shot on film. Then I explained HD post production for film... Point is many people assume HD means digital origination.

There is also a discussion on this out at Cinematography:

http://www.cinematography.com/forum2004 ... earth&st=0










Steve

[wado1942]

I like that excerpt in that other board's discussion about the slow-mo shark attack being 35mm when it's VERY DEFINITELY a direct to disk video format. In the series they actually explained that the ultra high speed video cameras are constantly recording to HDD and they just hit a trigger to mark that segment not to be overwritten.