Looking at the rich, detailed, color-saturated images displayed on D.P.
James Weber’s video monitor on the set of Temps,
it’s hard to believe they come from the unassuming camera he’s using,
which looks just like a DVCAM. But there it is. The crew is crammed
into Sin-é, a club on Manhattan’s lower east side, and huddled around
the very low-profile JVC GY-HD100U HDV camcorder to shoot a scene from
a half-hour comedy pilot called Temps.
“Lightweight is nice,” Weber said during the shoot. “We’re shooting in
an apartment, which is supposed to be a very small apartment because
we’re trying to show what New York City is really like. We’re trying to
do something realistic, so we’re in some tight spaces.”
But what really drove Weber and the production company he co-owns,
Loosely Translated Productions, to the camera was the intersection of
quality images and cost efficiency. “I’ve shot with the [Panasonic]
DVX100, which is also a great camera, but this is the first camera that
came out shooting 720p at 24 frames,” he said, referring to the HDV
acquisition mode JVC markets as ProHD. “We knew we wanted better
quality than MiniDV, but at the same time we wanted a not completely
finished look, something that could be colder, and you can adjust the
JVC quite a bit, for a camera that’s under $10,000, to get the darker
looks.”
After production wrapped — and after we shot the video linked here —
Weber came back to us with an important update. Simply put, his
post-production workflow didn’t work, and he had to radically rethink
his plan for capturing and editing the 720p footage. He says he
scrapped plans to use the third-party Lumiere HD software to get
footage into Final Cut Pro because of “audio slip” issues and
inadequate image quality. Instead, the production invested in an AJA
Kona LH PCI card and KL-Box breakout box and edited the footage in
DVCPRO HD using Gtech FireWire 800 drives.
Weber’s still “very happy” with the camera. But he’s disappointed with
the existing post workflow. “This whole 720p HDV journey has been a
huge ordeal,” he says. “I wish I had more straightforward info on the
post-production side so we could have budgeted for a $2000 Kona card
for Final Cut Pro which, in my opinion, is the only current, true,
correct solution for bringing in HDV 24p.” With any luck, a new version
of Apple’s Final Cut Pro will offer built-in support for JVC’s ProHD.
Watch The Video:
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