Three Histories: Wag the Dog?

Five Years Into Digital Filmmaking, and Counting

Working in a hotel room, editor Lilah Bankier uses a 15in. ApplePowerBook, Final Cut Pro 4, and a bantam Toshiba TDP-D1 DLP projectorfor her work on the indie film Swimmers. Produced by theauthor's company, Damage Control Filmproduction, the 35mm SundanceInstitute feature was written and directed by Doug Sadler.

Oceans of ink have been spilled about the impact of digitaltechnology on our lives and times, and nowhere have the changesshattered more precedent and liberated more opportunity than in thecreation, distribution, and consumption of media, whether Internet,broadcasting, or motion pictures. The last five years alone have borneparticular witness to the acceleration of change in both the ways we dothings and the results we produce.

So permit me, for a moment, to explore a fixed idea I've held foryears: that in cinema, and by extension TV, technology is the dog, formis the tail. And it's been that way since Eastman and Edison.

In other words, ever since mechanical and photochemical advances inthe 19th century gave rise to the invention of motion picture recordingand display, the evolution of the “art” of film has been aconsequence of the rate of technological change. It is the march oftechnology that has enabled artistic innovations, not the other wayaround.

For instance, the great aesthetic principles of black and whitecinematography came into being because orthochromatic (laterpanchromatic) film was the rule. (Think film noir.) Non-naturalisticconventions of acting needed before the invention of sound on film gaveus Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and the sublime oeuvre ofthe silent film era. But the advent of color forced changes on lightingand mise en scène, just as the coming of sound necessitatedchanges in acting, reinforcing naturalism.

Put another way, formal breakthroughs by filmmakers rarely causetechnology to come into being. Cinematographer Gregg Toland, who gainedacclaim for his deep-focus photography of Citizen Kane, didn'tinvent the new Cooke lens coatings, faster Kodak Super-XX negative, andinnovative arc lights that made his achievement possible. Instead heembraced these technological changes and exploited them to greatartistic advantage, and in the process altered film form.

Speaking of the relationship between technology and art, a funnything has happened lately on the way to the Forum… In these timesof chronic mutation (aka innovation) and marketplace chaos, perhapstoday's film and digital video artists have a rare chance to wag thedog after all. In his influential 1997 book, The Innovator'sDilemma, Clayton Christensen, a professor of businessadministration at Harvard, drew a distinction between technology thatsustains a status quo and technology that overturns it. A“disruptive” technology, he said, takes root outside thebusiness model of an established technology, invades smaller markets,then upsets the whole apple cart with products that are cheaper,simpler, smaller, and more convenient to use.

Over the past five years a handful of notably disruptivetechnologies have radically transformed how and what filmmakers andother media artists create, in the process sparking industryrealignments and shakeouts. Chief among the technology disrupters areMiniDV camcorders, cheap nonlinear editing and effects software, andfast FireWire hard drives. As HD joins the club, which will happen indue course, the consumer and prosumer democratization of the“means of production” will be complete.

The rising tide behind all this, of course, is digitalprocessing (coupled with shrinking interest in mechanical andanalog solutions). So let's acknowledge the one inescapable fact aboutdigital technology: It turns everything it touches into computer orperipheral. What is a digital video camera but a dedicated motion-imagecomputer attached to a CCD? And a digital videocassette? Data storage.No traditional video signal exists on a MiniDV tape, or any digitalvideotape for that matter.

And where computers dwell, hackers can't be far away. For example,when Sony introduced its classic DCR-VX1000 MiniDV camcorder in 1995,the European PAL version lacked digital input or output. A FireWireport existed on the camcorder but did not function. Why? European Unionexcise laws had slapped a big tax on anything considered a VCR, so Sonydisabled DV I/O. On cue, however, an Israeli website posted thenecessary hack. In the NTSC version, the internal 16:9 function wasdisabled, as its CCD was thought inadequate in vertical resolution. Butif you knew about a special port hidden inside the battery compartment,you could access the VX1000's 4,096 mostly undocumented settings,including aspect ratio.

The VX1000, discontinued in 2001 and replaced in 2000 by the VX2000and PD150, was perhaps the greatest single disruptive product in ourindustry in the late '90s. Its debut was a huge breakthrough incompactness, price point, image quality (three CCDs), reliability,digital recording, and FireWire-based DV output. (DV output was a boldmove by Sony; you may recall that at that time, rival MiniDV camcorderslacked DV output over fears that Congress, spurred by the MPAA, wouldturn its sights to digital video tape, much as it had done to DAT, whenit fatally delayed its introduction to the consumer market and alsoslapped a surcharge on sales of blank DAT tapes.)

Ironically, the VX1000 soon proved disruptive to even its maker.Sony Broadcast didn't anticipate its instant popularity amongprofessionals and seemed to deny its runaway success for a good longtime. (Rival Panasonic, meanwhile, leapt on professional 1/4in. tapeand came to market with its DVCPRO format.) There's little doubt that agreat many documentaries that would otherwise have been shot on Betacamwere made using the diminutive VX1000. Early examples of VX1000feature-length documentaries that achieved both festival acclaim andU.S. theatrical distribution in 35mm include Ulrike Koch's Saltmenof Tibet (1997) and Bennett Miller's The Cruise (1998).

The little camcorder that could: The popular Sony DSR-PD 150, whichreplaced the groundbreaking DCR-VX1000 in 2000.

While news professionals from the start recognized the $2,500 VX1000as an ideal throwaway camera for high-risk assignments, independentfilmmakers were making a similar calculation. I remember documentarylegend Al Maysles pondering the purchase of a $2,500 MiniDV SonyDSR-PD100 in late 1998 or early 1999, around the time it wasintroduced. His reasoning went like this: “If I get 80 percent ofthe quality, and it's broadcast, for 20 percent of the price of [Sony'sthen-popular industrial camcorder] for shooting my doc, that's not bad,is it? What do you think?” Maysles bought a PAL version and fellhead over heels in love. Shortly afterwards, excitedly recounting“filming” individuals on a city bus alone with his PD100and without the intrusion of a sound recordist, he seemed reborn,almost child-like in his renewed enthusiasm for the possibilities ofdocumentary form.

Maysles was particularly enamored of the PD100's form factor: nextto nothing, compared to his trusty 16mm Aaton. Inconspicuous sizecomplements the documentary maker's desire to avoid unsettling his orher subjects with camera, lights, and overhead microphone, and to blendinto the street, unnoticed. The Lilliputian scale and flyweightlightness of the VX1000 and its offspring have therefore created a newset of expectations about camera size and mobility, the influence ofwhich is being felt in many corners.

When Peter Abel of Abel Cine Tech sneak-previewed Aaton's Super 16A-Minima at New York's “docfest” in June 1999, he held itup alongside a VX1000, which roughly matched in size and gray color, todemonstrate the A-Minima's desirability as a small camera. Anotherexample: several years ago I was shooting an HBO documentary, which, inmy opinion, due to its sports subject was a perfect match to the slo-mocapabilities of Panasonic's new AJ-HDC27 Varicam. The director howeverhad enjoyed a recent hit at the Sundance Film Festival, which she shotwith her own VX1000. So, while the Varicam images we captured wereundeniably compelling, the Varicam's size and elongated profile (withzoom and battery) in small, intimate spaces displeased her, and shedecided to return to MiniDV for the balance of the project.

The petite size of MiniDV camcorders has even influenced wherethey're expected to go. DP Teo Maniaci, who used a PAL PD150 to shootFenton Bailey's and Randy Barbato's recently released film, PartyMonster, in which Macaulay Culkin plays decadent '90s New York clubkid Michael Alig, told me how he shot a climactic scene in which Alig,having murdered a friend, is seen from the point of view of a rat.Maniaci made a hole in the wall the size of a rat hole and backed inthe PD150! Try that with a Panaflex.

A cottage industry of building flyweight jib arms, booms, and cheapbut effective skateboard dollies has arisen to provide small camcorderswith high-end camera moves like crane shots (also finding their wayinto TV news reportage). This development has enriched shot flowpossibilities and production values of no-budget docs and dramas.Several recent NABs have even seen the introduction of what can only bedescribed as a tall fishpole boom with a camcorder on top, fastened toan operator's vest. On the professional side, it's now common to seeFisher 10 or Chapman Super PeeWee dollies riding on track on top ofsleds of ganged skateboard wheels, which have proven smoother than thedolly's own.

In sum, MiniDV created an expectation of broadcast-quality resultsfrom small, three-chip prosumer camcorders under $3,000, foreverforcing downward cost and size. This expectation translated last yearinto Panasonic's AG-DVX100, a progressive-scan MiniDV camcorder capableof conventional 480i as well as 24p and 30p, with a street price around$3,000; and this year's JVC JY-HD10U, which captures all of the aboveplus 720-line, 30p HD and plays back 1080-line, 60i HD. Its streetprice has already slipped below $3,000. Both the AG-DVX100 and JY-HD10Uare roughly identical in size and configuration to the original SonyVX1000 and both use FireWire for digital I/O.

Indeed, Apple's FireWire, originally created to replace the bulky,terminated cabling of SCSI buses, has become synonymous with digitalempowerment. (One party's empowerment can be another's disruptivetechnology.) Standardized in 1995 by the IEEE as specification 1394,“High Performance Serial Bus” (Sony calls it i.Link),FireWire has become the low-cost, high-speed lingua franca of digitalcommunication among consumer, prosumer, and professional NLEs, DVcamcorders, digital still cameras, disk drives, MP3 players, anddigital set-top boxes.

Introduced in April 1999, Apple's Final Cut Pro NLE software broughtchange to the industry by including a wide range of features into abasic prix fixe package. NLE in a box, no turnkey, no dongle.

Because FireWire was developed in the first place for high-speeddata transfer; because it arrived in the early '90s at exactly the sametime as the DV standard, which it coincidentally matched in data rates;and because it was brought into this world by a maverick company thatalways seems to wreak havoc on established technologies —remember what the little 512K Mac and Apple Laser Writer, which createddesktop printing, did to the printing industry? — perhaps it's nosurprise that the last five years have found Apple Computer at the coreof breakthroughs that have dramatically transformed how and whatfilmmakers and video artists create.

Introduced in April 1999 as low-cost “desktop editing,”Apple's Final Cut Pro rocketed out of the consumer realm and straightinto the professional. Furthermore, Apple set a basic prix fixe toFCP's feature set, but threw in everything but the kitchen sink witheach new release. By not segmenting users by tiers of varyingly pricedmodels, Apple put real pressure on the pricing vs. feature set equationof every professional NLE on the market, while at the same timepromulgating professional editing tools to a wider user base thanprevious systems had ever dreamed of, or intended to.

Apple's latest release, for instance, includes tools forlicense-free, loop-based music composition, type font animation,realtime match-frame YUV color correction, film negative conforming viaKeykode cut lists, true 24fps editing, an economical JPEG offline mode,loads of realtime effects, built-in broadcast quality codecs, and asophisticated MPEG-2 compression tool for output to DVD and beyond. Allthis, plus resolution independence, since QuickTime-based FCP handlesanything from DV to (with the aid of third-party boards) CCIR 601 andHD. To put this into perspective, think of what it would have cost onlya few years ago to assemble these capabilities under one roof.

So how, in this moment of heightened disruption in the camcorder andNLE realms, might filmmakers and digital video artists wag the dog?

Software by nature is malleable. In the ongoing democratization ofprofessional digital video, let your voice be heard. Competition forNLE features and pricing can only grow fiercer among Apple and itscompetitors: Avid, Adobe, In-sync, Ulead, Discreet, Canopus, et al.

Combine and utilize new devices in unexpected and imaginative ways.An indie feature my company, Damage Control, produced this fall inMaryland, shot in anamorphic 35mm, went over budget (with an assist byHurricane Isabel). But we economized in editing by assembling, in aMaryland hotel room, a 15in. Apple Powerbook with Final Cut Pro 4, aSony DSR-11 for logging DVCAM dailies, several cheap 120GB FireWiredrives, and a tiny 5lb. Toshiba TDP-D1 projector, smaller than the VHSdeck we stacked it on. A single-chip DLP model with 800:1 contrastratio, 1024×768 XGA resolution, and powerful 2000 lumens output,the TDP-D1 is targeted to the business presentation market, but itproduced beautiful, filmic images, much like Digital Cinema DLPprojectors in theatrical venues. What more did we need? Sometimesmanufacturers stumble upon markets they didn't know existed, guided byreal-world users.

A corollary to this: Don't let anyone tell you what is, and what isnot, professional. In the late '90s I was told that Sony's VX1000, itsDVCAM decks (e.g., DSR-20), and FireWire in general were substandardand inadequate to produce professional results. (Remember the anxietysurrounding the issue of “unlocked” audio in MiniDV?) Ofcourse I didn't listen, even though my interlocutor was, in one case,an applications engineer working for the manufacturer of theseproducts.

Professional camcorders are presently inching down an uncertain pathfrom conventional tape to optical and magnetic disk and evensolid-state recording, and nobody really knows which will come out ontop. (Will optical discs prove noisy?) Explore their innovativecapabilities — or perhaps even build your own from components,like computer enthusiasts do. How difficult can it be to build amotion-image camera with hard disk capture? Hint: Forget YUV encodingand instead digitize RGB signals directly from a single, sizable CCD orCMOS color imager, much as any digital still camera does, only at 24fpsor 30fps. Or for that matter, any frame rate you wish. It's notvideo.

Software-based digital signal processing in tandem with programmablechip sets are leveling the playing field for the adventuresome. Myprediction? As the “desktop” digital revolution intrudesdeeper into motion imaging, all facets of digital motion pictureimaging, from camera design to scanning of film for digitalintermediate work, will open up to personal innovation andinvention.

In this scenario video encoding, a legacy of 1950s colorbroadcasting, will be swept into the dustbin of history. ImaginePhotoshop-like control of RGB motion images on your desktop.Independent filmmakers who heretofore have turned to MiniDV toexperiment with low-cost acquisition — the Dogme 95 crowd, NewYork's spunky InDigEnt, innumerable documentary makers — willline up to wag this new dog.

Now, that's what I call disruptive.

D.W. Leitner, President of Damage Control Filmproduction in NewYork, is a veteran producer/director and cinematographer who agreeswith Francis Bacon that time is the greatest innovator of all. Happy30th Anniversary, Millimeter!