Dangers of a Digital Work Flow

There is something about working with film which let people create a lot of great work with it. And there is something about computer video which has allowed people to make an enormous amount of garbage. I think it is important to recognize some of the fundamental differences that cause this.

Quality

With film, you have roughly two choices when it comes to image quality, 16mm or 35mm. Which is pretty much a choice between good and great.

With digital, there are roughly an infinite number of choices ranging from horrible to good, and if you try really really hard and have lots of money, great.

Now imagine the set that occurs after after you have your footage and are editing and making copies of it. With digital, you are force to work through all sorts of menus and choices of quality, file formats, bit rates, types of bit rates, types of compression. All of the options are pretty much related to how much you would like to wreck your footage.

With film when you get a copy of your film, the most choice you get is how you might like to adjust to color and exposure so that it looks better. Other than that, you don't really get any choice, the lab does all the work, and they are going to do a good job because you pay them to, and you can reject the work if it isn't good enough and they will do it again.

So on one hand your choices deal with how much to wreck your work, on the other, choices that lead to it looking better.


And finally. Imagine you are a student making a movie. Suppose you make the whole movie on film and it works out really great. You want to submit it to a festival. It's on film, so the quality hasn't been wrecked and really the only issue is sending in your film as is.

For digital, your film might be great, but the quality of the picture could suck if you chose the wrong format at the beginning, or did use the right settings. You are going to have to make sure the formats match with what the festivals want. It might be quite a painful process.


So what is a filmmaker in this digital age to do?

I think the best choice is to go crazy with the image quality on the computer. Hard disk space is cheap. Understand exactly what you are doing, really read up on the whole subject and become well informed. Just because computers seem easy to use doesn't mean that they are. They are hard and difficult and will screw you up when you least want them to.

And finally pay attention to what you are looking at. Don't just think that the numbers and words and settings will make everything work. Be the final judge of your work and don't settle for quality less than great.

Kyler