Why Formats Don't Matter

Jay Gladwell wrote on 7/27/2007, 3:54 AM

In the July issue of Studio Monthly, Jim Feeley, shares some excellent thoughts:

"We waste too much time talking about acquisition formats. How DVCPRO HD compares to HDV and HDCAM. The benefits and drawbacks of 1080p, 1080i and 720p. The supremacy (or idolatry) of 24fps. The quintessence of 4K. None of that really matters. Recording formats are too removed from subject matter to make a big difference in the quality of a story. This goes for corporate, docs, broadcast, indie and Hollywood work."

You can read the entire article here.

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Comments

apit34356 wrote on 7/30/2007, 1:21 PM

ted turner himself, of course, I like your description better------- a classic idiot. He should have stayed with road ads and yacht racing. But when he married Jane, he demonstrated that he would torture himself or the public for any attention ---- really sad case of mass destruction of an entire art form for attention.

Coursedesign wrote on 7/30/2007, 1:22 PM

Well, that wasn't an issue of [...] shooting in available light (or did your news crews shoot 35mm).

No, news crews used 16mm, but nobody got stressed over grainy news footage.

[...] we used 16mm exclusively (even for showing your shows) and that met the superior demands of PAL.

You mean your national broadcasters received the shows as 16mm prints?

Seems reasonable, as in every decade we're talking about 16mm was superior to SD video. And 16mm print film is of course superior in quality compared to typical acquisition emulsions.

PAL has about 20% higher resolution, but also had vastly superior color rendition (compared to NTSC) from its creation until digital video processing appeared in NTSC sets over the last decade or so. I don't know how exactly what they did, but somehow the "Never Twice Same Color" issue disappeared.

Coursedesign wrote on 7/30/2007, 1:27 PM

ted turner [...] mass destruction of an entire art form for attention.

Why do you say that? We can perhaps agree that colorizing old movies was a failed experiment (with presumably good intentions), but TT got a ton of movies restored and shown that otherwise would still be deteriorating in really poor storage conditions.

I'm more inclined to think of him as a rescuer of an entire art form (b&w movies) than as a destroyer.