"HD is a medium, and you treat it that way, you can make anything look good or styled or whatever it's..." "what-what-whatever the story is." "I said, "Give me a, give me" ""a magnifying glass and toilet paper," ""and I'll see if I can make an image out of it and see if it'll get in there."" "It might look cool." "There was an issue of cutting costs for this year, and, you know, the studio's natural instinct is," ""Hey, go to digital,: it'll save you a shitload of money, " and, well, you know, there is a savings involved in going to digital." "An HDCAM tape only costs $70 for 40 minutes or 50 minutes, depending on what your frame rate is." "Whereas, the same amount, um, in film would probably be closer to $1,000." "But the truth was, there were ways that I could actually have continued on 35-millimeter for not much more and found my savings elsewhere." "There was tremendous resistance when the studio sort of threw the gauntlet down." "Not because there was concern about our ability to deliver on HD." "I think there was a fair amount of reasonable skepticism about what the actual benefits were going to be." "There's two schools." "You've got the ENG school, and you had the film school." "If you're a die-hard film guy, you're never going to basically go to the, the HD side, or you're going to constantly be fighting it." "I think there-there was not only a technical learning curve in film to digital, but also a... a comfort zone... to get out of your comfort zone and get into something that's challenging." "This is the Genesis." "This is a single-chip high-definition camera." "You've been ripping film through a gate, you know, for the last hundred years at 24 frames a second." "It works." "Why change it?" "What I didn't want to do is," "I didn't want it to change the way that we handle cameras." "Ken rightfully really put that process through the ringer." "I mean, when the studio made that insistence, he went in with our DPs and with some of our production keys, really went through a detailed sort of test and analysis process." "You know, I did take a look at it with Bing and Ron and, and kind of examine how people were shooting it and what you had to and hadn't... didn't have to do, and the one thing I didn't want to do is end up tethered" "and everyone gathering under a tent and fiddling with knobs, which was the knock on HD." "It's a tool." "So now how do we use this tool?" "Well, let's use the tool the way we've always used our tools." "Our show runner says the rule, as he talks to the director, is:" "No running the tape forever." "I mean, yeah, that's another thing we direct the directors..." "you know, don't keep on rolling the, the shot." "Call "Action" and "Cut"" "because you don't want to screw the editors over in terms of them having to fish through stuff." "We do circle takes, we do all the stuff that we normally do." "For us it's pretty much business as usual now." "We're not tethered to a high-def screen." "We don't actually have high-def monitors." "A lot of my peers thought that Ron and I were crazy and said," ""Well, how-how, how are you going to go out and do that?"" "What... you know..." "and finding the right DIT was the other part of the equation that was going to buy into this concept." "What's different about this DIT Station from most is that this thing does not have a giant monitor on it." "In this case they didn't want to be "tethered," as it's known." "They didn't want a cable running from the camera to a monitor and, and whatnot because they wanted to keep the same style of shooting that they had over the last five seasons, which is quick." "So with a film camera, you don't have to tether to anything." "And-and the little monitors are for framing reference only, pretty much, um, not to be used for lighting and that kind of thing, so they wanted to keep that system." "I wanted the directors shooting the way they shot on film, which is trusting the operator when the operator says we've got it, trusting the DP when the DP says we've got it." "That's what they're paying Ron and I for... to basically make those decisions and say "You're lit properly."" "It's not that we're control freaks, but that's what our job is, is... is to control the image, so let us do our job." "This isn't a $200 million movie where every frame has to be perfect and can be cleaned up." "This is TV." "It's a little rougher, and it's more about, uh, what Ralph Hemecker, one of my favorite directors on the show, would call data grabbing." "It's going out and shooting lots of stuff and sifting through it in editing to get the pieces you need." "Basically, do what we have done before." "'Cause otherwise, we will never make our days." "This is a very ambitious show." "We shoot up to eight, ten pages a day." "And so, in order to shoot in a way that I thought was more efficient, where we could make our hours, and we could still do a lot of the kind of guerilla run-and-gun action that-that we'd been used to on 35, we adopted" "a method that was much closer to 35." "And I think if other people haven't caught on already, people will be doing the same thing, because there's just..." "There's no necessity to make... to make digital video a liability production-wise, and-and so we don't." "It's like any artist." "You want a palette of tools." "And you use the right tool for the right image." "We did a side-by-side comparison of... of a number of cameras." "And we shot every camera that you can imagine." " A 900." " D-21." " Red camera." " The F-35." "The X-1." "Tried the SK-2." "The Viper." "And you know, those were all... would have been slightly cheaper rentals than the Genesis, which is a feature camera." "But I just like the look of the Genesis better." "It was a no-brainer in terms of, all we had to do is change our bodies out." "The lenses are the same lenses we've always been using, and on the Genesis, we found they behaved the closest to how they behaved on 35 millimeter." "I mean, there were still a lot of adjustments to be made, but really even the first couple episodes, when the DPs shot it a little bit like film and eyeballed it like film, it tended to respond well, even if slightly differently." "This close... you still want to go for center mass." "I mean, we'd been using some of those cameras even in previous seasons, blending them with film, and nobody was even aware of it." "Even before this last season, way back about three, three and a half," "I think the second year, there was a, um, Sony five, six year-old camera that was shooting some of the math inserts of-of... of the montage stuff, and, uh," "Rob Morrow was directing, and he had a car sequence." "And I said, "We have..." "We're so crushed for time."" "And it was just like two or three lines." "I said, "Let's not bog down with the film cameras" ""and mounts and tows." ""Let's just grab the Sony, and I'll shoot you on the side." "Get a couple of shots, and we're out of there." "We... "" "But, uh, we shot it, and no one even noticed." "So I..." "So I started shooting a couple of more scenes with that, and then" "I saw the Panasonic P-2 for the first time with the card." "I went, "Nice camera."" "This is an HVX-200." "A P-2 camera, which uses..." "A P-2 card is a, you know, larger storage card." "Um, this was, you know, long before the EX-3 was invented." "And they use this primarily, again, for those situations where size and weight was a problem." "And, as you've noticed from the show, um, there's a lot of video monitors in the show, in their offices." "And so, one of the things we can do with these cameras is get simultaneous surveillance footage while they're shooting regular action." "So by taking these cameras and putting them up somewhere high, where there might be a surveillance thing, we can photograph the action from that perspective, and then, put it through the post process, and re-photograph it on there." "Sometimes these cameras might even be in the shot, if it's, you know, appropriate for the situation." "Here we got a couple EX-3s which get a lot of play on this show." "We get a lot of action out of these because of the size and the weight, uh, so, like I said before, when we're inside this Charger, they can do crossing-overs at the same time" "from the back seat with the talent driving, instead of having to do what normally you would do if you were in a 35-millimeter situation." "Or with the Genesis, you would have to tow the car on a platform and put the cameras outside the windows." "We also use a bunch of these things, which are called snap cams." "They're like this little cheap Sony Handycam." "The advantage of this being, extreme small size and weight." "We had several attached to kids' bicycle handlebars and..." "And then, in situations like, there's gonna be another episode coming up shortly where we crash a car... we put these snap cams in the steel housing, and then, basically launched a car over it." "We had, uh, probably eight or nine cams running on that stunt." "That's a way we could get more angles at the same time." "And these cameras would be so small that they can be hidden out of the view of the-the larger cameras." "And also, if they're destroyed, it's not a huge investment, and I can still pull the memory stick out and get the data." "HDV camera down in here, the Z1 U, that we have another crash housing for." "This big bad boy here." "Which gives us an opportunity to put a little bit nicer camera in a place where there's gonna be a fireball, or something like that." "We also use these Flip cams, which are the same kind of a situation." "It's a very small, consumer-type camera that you're able to put in a place that you wouldn't normally ever be able to get a camera." "Like, as an example, we had an episode where there was a driving stunt, and we were able to get shots with that camera through the steering wheel back at the person driving." "You know, the Flip cameras were-were, once we kind of found them..." "You know, the challenge of them is, you're transferring from 30 frames to 24 frames, so all sorts of odd things happen, and you basically pick what problem you have, whether it's stutter, or-or this weird" "kind of, uh, wavy effect." "And you can see it, actually, in episode 12 this year, the "Arm in Arms."" "There's a nice over as the machine gun's raking the FBI car, and you can see that little wave, because that was a mounted 30-frame, high-def camera on the machine gun, doing that sort of" "Duke Nuke 'Em, you know, looking shot." "Or Doom or video game shot, as we call it." "FBI!" "Open up!" "Ralph Hemecker, I think, really opened the playing field on "Hydra," by using not only the Flip cams, where they were mounted for those cool shots of-of Dylan and, uh, and Aya going through the house, and you know, they create" "this tension, but he also mounted them all over the cars for that car chase, so you got just boat loads of film, and as long as you use it in quick cuts, it works great," "'cause it's... it is high-def, and because we're not finishing to film, we can hide a lot of the weaknesses of it." "I think the paradigm is, you're not stuck with one tool anymore to try and make everything work." "Uh, as soon as I figure out how to get this in focus." "You don't have to pull a wall out to put a-a big camera in there with a crane." "You can go in there with a little tiny, hand-held, poor man's Steadicam and do an amazing shot with it." "The technology's gotten to the point where they're just making it less expensive every time." "And they can put it into a smaller container, to the point now where, yeah, Cannon now has a 7-D that's shooting material that looks almost as good, or as good." "It's... it's imperceptible to tell the difference between that and a full-on, you know, Genesis camera." "You know, I just believe in kind of... kind of experimenting and innovating." "And, uh, you know, Ron has the 5-D, and so, we started playing with that a little bit, just to see what it would do, and when the 7-D came out," "I ran out and bought one, and there's actually..." "There are two 7-D shots in the library sequence, and I defy you to tell me which ones they are." " Which ones are they?" " Uh, I'm not gonna tell you." " Man!" " We can have a Numb3rs contest." "If any man ever called out for a killing, it was Eddie Sawyer." "The first day that we had a 7-D, they gave us this rig that was as long as the Genesis, and you know, it had a battery pack on the back to try to balance it." "And we looked at it and said, well, this is ridiculous." "It-lt defeats the whole purpose of having it." "But finding the right operating system for mounting that camera is a challenge, because there are things that an SLR doesn't do that you want an operator to be able to do." "And, you know, the follow focus is an easy thing, but just having it mounted and having an eyepiece adaptor and having it mounted in a way that he can easily hand it..." "graceful... handle it gracefully handheld, you know, those are things that we're still working out." "But I think those are grip problems, and I think those are things that people are going to be figuring out this year." "We're constantly experimenting, and we don't always do the right thing, but I think part of the joy of the show... and in some ways it reflects back on math... it's about experimentation." "It's about going out and finding things, and not kind of just following... following a rut, you know, following a track." "Everybody embracing the new technology..." ""Let me experiment, let me get my toes in the water first,"" "rather than going head-first..." "was a really nice, comfortable learning curve, and I really learned an awful lot about the-the... the beauty of digital photography."