Statten Roeg

Well I don't want to contradict Mr. Mullen considering his expertise while I am just a lowly loader, but the print I saw was definitely grainy as hell, perhaps it is living in Europe and getting hand me downs from the American theatre circuit (would that make any difference though?). I did think some of the faces looked plasticky, especially the bald barber, they had just shown a trailer for Beowulf beforehand and in the first shot I almost thought that something similar was going on (although not looking so much like a shoddy video game intro), I didn't know that DI could do that. Unless you are going to really mess around in post why would you bother with DI if there is this downside? PS that history of lighting was very interesting, I particularly like the let them see the sets line, so often nowadays with all these face shots I keep finding myself begging the director to go to the wide so we can see some of the set...

I just saw the new Cronenberg movie Eastern Promise which was marvelous. While I was watching it I was trying to figure out what it was shot on. It was very grainy and a bit yellow so I thought that it was 16 to 35 blowup and used some kind of Antique Suede filter or something like that. Then in the credits it said there was DI and also there was a credit for HD rushes, so does that mean it was 35mm (does anyone do DI on 16 and would they DI the whole thing or just some of the sequences which they needed to manipulate for the gory parts) with some HD stuff or just that the rushes were delivered on HDCAM tapes? I guess they must have used a bit of variety but it all has a very unified effect. Does anyone have any info about this as the end result was a subtle strangeness across the whole film that was very effective and I would like to know how it was achieved.

Thanks for the reply Brian, is that right that the Digital signals of Freeview are being broadcast by the same aerials, I have been trying to find out the exact system that is used to play out and transmit so called terrestrial television in the UK but have been piecing together tidbits and can't find a place with all of the info together. I would put a post in the digitalspy.co.uk forums but they won't accept my email account. All the old play out codgers on that site get really wound up if people call digital signals PAL and maintain that PAL is an analogue only format and that the digital equivalent should be called 625i SDI, I also thought it was weird as I thought of SDI as a type of cable, but as I can't post there I can't get anything out of them... This post has deviated extremely from its original intention, still quite interesting though.

There are plenty of digital channels in the UK being transmitted by antennas and received through normal aerials, all of the Freeview channels are broadcast digitally in this way, they are SD but digital. The switchover is the switching off of the analogue signal, the digital signal has been rolled out nationwide. The SD equivalent of PAL is 625i SDI or something like that.

The way I understand it is that barring 1 or 2 HD channels in the UK all the digital channels are broadcast at the digital version of PAL which is called something like 625i SDI at an aspect ratio of either 14:9 or 16:9 depending on how sure they are that their market has widescreen TVs. Perhaps they broadcast a progressive signal too and then the digital boxes choose the interlaced version if it knows the TV is an old CRT. What I don't understand is how the old analogue TV stations are still broadcast. Do they have to use different antennas to broadcast at the different wavelengths? And since most shows are ingested onto servers from DigiBetas and then converted to MPEG 2 files for broadcast digitally, how do they then convert that MPEG 2 into an old style PAL analogue signal... I just don't know!

Thank you very much for your time David, you have been very helpful.

Thanks again David. Does that mean that with old interlaced format video cameras, say Betacam SP recording PAL, each field making up a frame was not identical to the other only made of the alternate lines, but rather there was a 1/50th of a second time difference in the recording of each field and whatever might be able to happen in such a short time could be in one field of a frame and not the other! Also, do you know a good book about all these issues and the history of video formats (I'm quite interested in how to recreate the effect of old television cameras, like that strange crispness on recordings of The Beatles on Ed Sullivan or the blown out tone leaking on older television clips, I suppose this could even be recreated in grading suites nowadays, but it would be interesting to find out the original reasons) Thanks for replying to my elementary questions!

Thanks for the reply David. That is what I thought, but I had been reading about field leading and saw a warning that if you had recorded on an interlaced format that leads with the odd lines and then played out to an interlaced format that leads with the even lines there would be a strange effect, so I started to worry that the same would be true of video recorded in a progressive mode. But perhaps I am misunderstanding the whole process: does a camera record video as either progressive or interlaced or is this just a way of condensing information for display purposes...? Do you know a good book to read that summarises all of the different video format issues, both technical, such as bit rates and compression, and also aesthetic like motion and flicker? Thanks again for the reply.

I am planning to shoot a short film at 25p, probably on a Sony 900. If this is converted to 50i to play on a normal PAL television screen will there be any artifacts from the interlacing process? Thanks!