5 ms·

I was reading about the cinematography of _Collateral_, possibly the first large budget feature film to be shot digitally, and one of the issues back in 2004 wh

by _m_p 2y ago

I was reading about the cinematography of _Collateral_, possibly the first large budget feature film to be shot digitally, and one of the issues back in 2004 when it was made was the amount of storage required for digital video and the risk of not being able to retrieve the images from the data stores: > “We did massive testing with the hard drives, and everything was great, and then we had an experience where we shot, and when we sent in the material, they couldn’t get the information off the hard drive,” said Cameron. “So the studio went ballistic and was like, ‘There’s just no way we can we can let you guys do this.’” > The compromise was the production would record to hard drives as well as SRW tape. And unlike today, verifying the digital footage was equally cumbersome and tension-filled. > “We recorded everything two or three times on decks that we carried with us,” said Beebe. “So we were backing up, two or three times.” https://www.indiewire.com/features/interviews/michael-mann-collateral-miami-vice-interview-cinematography-1235035511/ https://www.indiewire.com/features/interviews/michael-mann-c...

progbits 2y ago
> we were backing up, two or three times So they just rediscovered what IT world knew for decades, or what am I missing?
- wodenokoto 2y ago
  That you don’t film on two or three wheels at a time
  - progbits 2y ago
    I mean they should, film can get damaged too. The reason they don't are probably because it would be too expensive, bulky and film is single-use so also wasteful. Even hobby level DSLRs have two card slots with option to write to both. Professional cameras have tons of gear strapped to them, a second drive or some link to external storage is a no-brainer.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- m463 2y ago
  probably 20 years and the switch from hard disks to flash drives. I remember when hard drives started getting big that it took a long time to get data on and off them. They got bigger faster than interfaces could keep up. I think about 2004, a "big machine" would be an aluminum powermac G5 with an 80gb sata hard drive. Or a powerbook G4 with a 60gb ATA drive.
- fezz 2y ago
  When Data/File based workflows started in movies (around 2004), 2-3 copies was the standard from the get go and ideally this was with MD5 checksums (currently xxhash is more common because it's alot faster). LTO backups are also generally part of the copy chains as the 3rd or 4th copy. Before that, duplication with tape was while recording wasn't as common, but it was more common to duplicate after recording. Although you'd have some amount of generation loss depending on the format, not so with recording to multiple decks with the same source video. With film it obviously wasn't possible but original negative (o-neg) was much more cautiously handled. You'd have copies made going to an interpositive for editing and dailies process. Those wouldn't an identical quality so to get a negative copy, you'd be 2 generations of loss. By the time you're seeing a print in a theater, it would be 3 generations. (one->IP->IN->print)
  - dkh 2y ago
    3 different copies driven to 3 different places by 3 different people before you leave set for the day continued to be how it was when I was working on set. And believe it or not, there was still one incident in 2015 where Murphy's Law negated all 3 and I spent about a week file-carving the $60k worth of footage we didn't have the ability to reshoot again if we had to
pier25 2y ago
Weren't the Star Wars prequels the first big digital productions?
- dmbche 2y ago
  Phantom menace used some (pioneering) digital shots but Collateral is fully shot on digital from my understanding
  - pier25 2y ago
    Attack of the Clones (2002) was shot fully digital with an early Cine Alta camera. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CineAlta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CineAlta
    - mavhc 2y ago
      So early the film isn't even in 1080p
      - pier25 2y ago
        it's not?
        dmbche 2y ago
        From a cursory search it was recorded at 1080p but the aspext ratio was 16:9, and the final.movie was to be 2.41:1, which means they had to crop the image, meaning less than 1080p.
MarceliusK 2y ago
Back then, it was basically the Wild West with digital cinematography. No wonder studios freaked out at the idea of lost footage
dkh 2y ago
Collateral was not the first fully digitally shot feature film. In fact, Collateral was not even fully digital. (The first major, all-digital, HD feature film was Attack of the Clones, but there were other fully-digital feature films before that, just not as major, and/or not always HD. Robert Rodriguez' Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2001) was fully digital.) But you are right that Collateral did do something very new/unusual at the time, and that was shooting scenes in higher frame-rates than 24, and mixing multiple frame rates in a film. (This might not sound like much, but until this time, pretty much every film was 24fps for the previous eighty years and it had a very specific look that everyone's eyes/brains were conditioned for, unbeknownst to them.) And the other thing that was very interesting thing about it (though not something very visible to a viewer) was that it was shot on the Thomson Viper FilmStream camera[1], which was the first major attempt at shooting not just digital, but very close to "raw". It was also a huge pain in the ass. The camera itself was massive, but due to the bandwidth, it recorded to an external storage array that had to be pushed alongside it at all times, and that was itself about the size of a shopping cart. (This device was hilariously referred to as the "Director's Friend.") In 2002, my friend and I, both cinema nerds in high school, drove an hour away to the nearest theater showing a film called Russian Ark[2]. Why were journeying to to see a strange little Russian film where a never-named character walks the viewer through Russian history? Because just like each episode of the recently-released Netflix show Adolescence, this entire film was a single, very long, very complicated, unbroken shot. One shot. No trickery, no cuts that were just hidden to the audience, one shot, through streets, buildings, snow, ballrooms with a couple hundred choreographed actors, it was crazy. This is easy now compared to how it was back then. As we've now established with Collateral (and this film predates it by 2 years), digital cinematography existed, but the storage was a real problem, the power was a real problem. Since this film was one shot, it needed almost 100 minutes of both, unbroken. And since it was a very complex moving shot, it had to be operated handheld. So essentially they had an incredibly ripped director of photography who operated the camera on a steadicam the whole time while a giant array of daisychained batteries and hard drives were lugged behind him. And they did it something like 100 times until they had a few takes where there were no mistakes. None of this really means anything to anyone anymore, but at the time, to cinematography nerds at least, this stuff was all absolutely insane! [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040103133953/http://www.thomsongrassvalley.com/products/cameras/viper/pdf/viper_ds.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20040103133953/http://www.thomso... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ark
okdood64 2y ago
> large budget feature What does this mean?
- pbalau 2y ago
  A film that requires lots of resources in order to be made?
- herculity275 2y ago
  You parsed it wrong - it's a large budget feature film. A feature film is a theatrical movie too long to be called a short film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_film

by _m_p 2y ago

progbits 2y ago

> we were backing up, two or three times So they just rediscovered what IT world knew for decades, or what am I missing?

wodenokoto 2y ago
That you don’t film on two or three wheels at a time
- progbits 2y ago
  I mean they should, film can get damaged too. The reason they don't are probably because it would be too expensive, bulky and film is single-use so also wasteful. Even hobby level DSLRs have two card slots with option to write to both. Professional cameras have tons of gear strapped to them, a second drive or some link to external storage is a no-brainer.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
m463 2y ago
probably 20 years and the switch from hard disks to flash drives. I remember when hard drives started getting big that it took a long time to get data on and off them. They got bigger faster than interfaces could keep up. I think about 2004, a "big machine" would be an aluminum powermac G5 with an 80gb sata hard drive. Or a powerbook G4 with a 60gb ATA drive.
fezz 2y ago
When Data/File based workflows started in movies (around 2004), 2-3 copies was the standard from the get go and ideally this was with MD5 checksums (currently xxhash is more common because it's alot faster). LTO backups are also generally part of the copy chains as the 3rd or 4th copy. Before that, duplication with tape was while recording wasn't as common, but it was more common to duplicate after recording. Although you'd have some amount of generation loss depending on the format, not so with recording to multiple decks with the same source video. With film it obviously wasn't possible but original negative (o-neg) was much more cautiously handled. You'd have copies made going to an interpositive for editing and dailies process. Those wouldn't an identical quality so to get a negative copy, you'd be 2 generations of loss. By the time you're seeing a print in a theater, it would be 3 generations. (one->IP->IN->print)
- dkh 2y ago
  3 different copies driven to 3 different places by 3 different people before you leave set for the day continued to be how it was when I was working on set. And believe it or not, there was still one incident in 2015 where Murphy's Law negated all 3 and I spent about a week file-carving the $60k worth of footage we didn't have the ability to reshoot again if we had to

pier25 2y ago

Weren't the Star Wars prequels the first big digital productions?

dmbche 2y ago
Phantom menace used some (pioneering) digital shots but Collateral is fully shot on digital from my understanding
- pier25 2y ago
  Attack of the Clones (2002) was shot fully digital with an early Cine Alta camera. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CineAlta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CineAlta
  - mavhc 2y ago
    So early the film isn't even in 1080p
    - pier25 2y ago
      it's not?
      - dmbche 2y ago
        From a cursory search it was recorded at 1080p but the aspext ratio was 16:9, and the final.movie was to be 2.41:1, which means they had to crop the image, meaning less than 1080p.

MarceliusK 2y ago

Back then, it was basically the Wild West with digital cinematography. No wonder studios freaked out at the idea of lost footage

dkh 2y ago

Collateral was not the first fully digitally shot feature film. In fact, Collateral was not even fully digital. (The first major, all-digital, HD feature film was Attack of the Clones, but there were other fully-digital feature films before that, just not as major, and/or not always HD. Robert Rodriguez' Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2001) was fully digital.) But you are right that Collateral did do something very new/unusual at the time, and that was shooting scenes in higher frame-rates than 24, and mixing multiple frame rates in a film. (This might not sound like much, but until this time, pretty much every film was 24fps for the previous eighty years and it had a very specific look that everyone's eyes/brains were conditioned for, unbeknownst to them.) And the other thing that was very interesting thing about it (though not something very visible to a viewer) was that it was shot on the Thomson Viper FilmStream camera[1], which was the first major attempt at shooting not just digital, but very close to "raw". It was also a huge pain in the ass. The camera itself was massive, but due to the bandwidth, it recorded to an external storage array that had to be pushed alongside it at all times, and that was itself about the size of a shopping cart. (This device was hilariously referred to as the "Director's Friend.") In 2002, my friend and I, both cinema nerds in high school, drove an hour away to the nearest theater showing a film called Russian Ark[2]. Why were journeying to to see a strange little Russian film where a never-named character walks the viewer through Russian history? Because just like each episode of the recently-released Netflix show Adolescence, this entire film was a single, very long, very complicated, unbroken shot. One shot. No trickery, no cuts that were just hidden to the audience, one shot, through streets, buildings, snow, ballrooms with a couple hundred choreographed actors, it was crazy. This is easy now compared to how it was back then. As we've now established with Collateral (and this film predates it by 2 years), digital cinematography existed, but the storage was a real problem, the power was a real problem. Since this film was one shot, it needed almost 100 minutes of both, unbroken. And since it was a very complex moving shot, it had to be operated handheld. So essentially they had an incredibly ripped director of photography who operated the camera on a steadicam the whole time while a giant array of daisychained batteries and hard drives were lugged behind him. And they did it something like 100 times until they had a few takes where there were no mistakes. None of this really means anything to anyone anymore, but at the time, to cinematography nerds at least, this stuff was all absolutely insane! [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040103133953/http://www.thomsongrassvalley.com/products/cameras/viper/pdf/viper_ds.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20040103133953/http://www.thomso... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ark

okdood64 2y ago

> large budget feature What does this mean?

pbalau 2y ago
A film that requires lots of resources in order to be made?
herculity275 2y ago
You parsed it wrong - it's a large budget feature film. A feature film is a theatrical movie too long to be called a short film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_film