DCP.com reports on Arri D-20 in production...
Shlomo Godder and Tim Cruz go over their experience using the Arriflex D-20.
Excerpts:
The Arriflex D-20 film-style digital camera system is getting extensive workouts under grueling field conditions these days, with a couple of low-budget features currently using the camera, and the upcoming TNT miniseries about the history of the CIA, called The Company, using it this summer. But independent filmmakers working with New York’s Camera Service Center (Arri-CSC) were the first to get the D-20 in the field earlier this year on two short film projects that will shortly hit the festival circuit.
Milia, a 15-minute short from director Jorge Valdés-Iga, put the camera through its paces earlier this summer, and Boxcar Symphony, a 13-minute short from director Shlomo Godder, used the same camera shortly thereafter—both with help from Arri-CSC and Andreas Weeber, Arri-CSC’s head of digital imaging. Weeber had previously worked at the Arri factory in Germany, and was brought back to New York by the company to introduce the D-20 to the U.S. market. He volunteered to serve as the primary camera operator for Valdés-Iga and his DP, Philipp Friesenbichler, during the making of Milia. Shortly after Milia wrapped, one of the producers on that project, Tim Cruz, asked Weeber to bring the D-20 into the Boxcar Symphony project, working with DP Phil Van, which Cruz was also producing.
They proceeded to use the D-20 tethered to a Sony HDCAM SRW-1 deck, recording at 1080p (4:4:4) resolution, inside a vintage 1910 railroad boxcar at the New England Railroad Museum in Connecticut.
Other than limitations in terms of using the camera handheld, and early problems with their generator, which had nothing to do with the D-20, they say the production went smoothly.We decided to use Cooke S4 lenses, since we were worried about getting a digital look and felt they would tend to be a bit warmer and softer,” Godder says.
Combining the Cooke lenses with the D-20 and the way we lit things, it allowed us to get that kind of look. The camera does have low ASA, which is why we needed a big lighting package. We ended up going for 50 ASA without any gain. During the day, though, it was perfect. I’ve done shoots with other HD formats, but when we shot into the blacks with this camera, we could really pick up details in the shadows. On the big screen, the details are really there. It looks like medium format film, but cleaner, in my opinion.”
"Obviously, there is no grain, since this is a digital format, but beyond that, we found there was enough color information, latitude, and a shallow depth of field to make it look filmic,” Godder adds. “Not ‘like film’ in the sense of duplicating familiar stocks, but in the sense of looking like a new, mid-range film stock. That’s how it looks to my eyes, anyway.”
Filmmakers finished the piece in Final Cut Pro HD at GRS Systems in Manhattan, N.Y. Editing, however, was a complicated process, according to Cruz and Godder, because of some under-exposure issues that caused filmmakers to struggle with their original down-conversion during editing. This wasn’t a problem related to the camera itself, they hasten to add, but it did slow down parts of the post process.
“Some shots were slightly underexposed, and when we downconverted it, some things essential to the narrative weren’t visible,” Cruz says. “During editing, we did color correction to bump up many of those details for the downconversion, but we didn’t get it all back until we onlined at GRS. They really helped us because this was the first D-20 project onlined in New York, using their SRW-1 deck. We got back a lot of details we thought were lost forever. There was an original exposure problem, and, then, not enough play in the downconversion process to bring it back. The great thing was, during the online, we were able to do more specific color corrections.
Arri-CSC’s Andreas Weeber, who worked on both Milia and Boxcar Symphony, says such projects are invaluable in furthering the development of systems like the D-20. And, even as the camera is being used on other projects, more changes are on the way, Weeber says.
There are software changes we’ll do as we learn more about different looks and color characteristics—LUTs that will be slightly modified,” Weeber says. “And there are other features still in the works, like the ability to re-process raw data images on external computers. Then there is the obvious demand for a more compact storage medium on board the camera. Right now, for Steadicam and shoulder work, we are using the Arri Flashmag system (developed out of Thomson’s Venom flash memory recording technology)—solid state storage that we did not yet have available on (Boxcar Symphony). But that is something you remove and download to HDCAM-SR tape.
Eventually, tape won’t be the final solution for recording or storage, so we are looking into new versions of hard disc recorders, and making this camera compatible with them.
