Digital Video on a Shoestring
There’s little question that digital video is revolutionizing the movie- making process. But what are the limits of digital video? Can you make a movie with consumer-grade equipment on a budget that would hardly fund a single day on a traditional Hollywood shoot?
That’s the challenge director Thom Steinhoff and his editor brother John set for themselves when they, along with writer/actor Tony Winters, decided to shoot a fully-digital, feature-length comedy using nothing more than a prosumer video camera and a PC. And they set out on this journey with a budget of only $40,000 — including hardware costs.
“‘Scaled-back’ is an understatement; this was the bare basics,” said Thom, whose finished film — Retiring Tatiana — recently won the top award at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, beating out more than 80 other films.
Choices, Choices
Like all filmmaking, digital filmmaking is a series of potentially disastrous choices. The first thing the brothers decided was to buy rather than rent most of the equipment they needed. The camera of choice was Sony’s prosumer VX-1000 because of its cost and quality, but choosing an editing program was more difficult.
“My first foray away from A-B Roll (three deck/controller editing system) was the Avid, which was way too expensive for us, but once you go non-linear, you never go back,” said Thom. The brothers toyed with the idea of a version of Final Cut Pro running on a supercharged Mac — the platform of choice of most digital filmmakers — but the Steinhoffs’ familiarity with Windows and access to Pentium-based hardware led them to Windows-based Adobe Premiere.
“Premiere had all the necessary features that a nonlinear editor should have, such as mature three-point editing, which is a standard for high-end, non-linear editing tools,” said Thom. The brothers used Premiere for editing and synching 90 percent of the audio, as well as creating titles for the opening sequence. “We used some Vixen color-correction controls, and we were able to directly plug them into the Premiere architecture. This expandability was a big plus,” said John.
The hardware choice wasn’t so obvious. “I knew that a fully digital process was the only way we could compete on image quality but I wasn’t sure it would do the trick. I must have picked up the box of the Pinnacle DV300 (a single-slot PCI video card with internal and external FireWire ports) five different times and researched everything I could find on the Internet,” said Thom.
They finally purchased the DV300 and built an editing system around it that comprised an eclectic mix of previously owned and newly purchased gear, including a Sony 19-inch” television, an Intel Pentium 400 MHz PC with 256MB of RAM running Windows NT, and a Turtle Beach Tahiti-Rio combo sound card.
As for storage: “We tried enhanced IDE drives, but couldn’t get the drives working fast enough to render,” said Thom. “MPEG systems compress the video more, which would make it possible to fit more information on slower drives, but they were expensive, and ‘compression’ means loss of quality. ‘Zero Loss’ was our mantra.”
The brothers settled on Ultra Wide SCSI hard drives. They brought as many as they could afford and strung them together in an empty PC cabinet with a SCSI ribbon cable.
To bypass the expense of a high-capacity tape drive for backups, the brothers bought a CD burner for just over $300 and a spool of blank CDs. “We burned our back-ups one CD at a time — I wouldn’t do it again, but it did the job.”
By the end of the project, the brothers had amassed close to 100GB of storage in various sizes of drives — enough to hold the entire two-hour film from start to finish and a few additional working scenes.
“We would bring up a scene from tape or from CD, work with it, and render an AVI with full- color correction and effects and drop it into the final project,” said John. “Then we could roll all the snippets to CD as we needed more space to work. When we ran out of space, we bought another drive.”
The biggest expense was a $4,000 editing deck. “We really had no choice. I didn’t want to put all that extra burden on my camera,” explained Thom.
Sound Off
The biggest problem the brothers faced was not video but sound. “The original audio had so much compression, high-end hiss, and low-end rumble, that it was almost unusable,” said John.
“We had rented a boom microphone for production, and connected it to a a small pre-amp that plugs directly into the camera, but we wanted feature quality sound, and this just wasn’t it. We thought of looping the entire film like they did for The Blair Witch Project, but that’s a lot of time and effort, and the only way we figured we could do it easily was to drag our editing system into a studio. — iIt just wasn’t practical.”
The brothers solved the problem by renting a portable DAT recorder for each shooting day. But this increased editing time tremendously, because they then had to marry the audio to the video, shot by shot, before editing it into the final scene.
And this solution did nothing to fix the scenes that were already shot. For that, John loaded each audio snippet into Wavelab, where he cleaned the audio at very high resolutions, reduced hiss, and isolated the voices.
Timing Isn’t Everything
On past projects, Thom and John had used time code religiously when editing. But the Sony VX-1000 uses its own consumer- level, time-code that the hardware neglected to transfer over the FireWire.
Initially, the brothers panicked. But then they found that it was easier to simply forget time code completely, doing everything by eye and ear instead. “With Premiere, it is easy to spin and slide shots. Even in the singing scenes where we had playback — it was just easier to slide the shot over the CD audio until it started phasing. Then I knew it was in place.”
Based on a half-edited project, their film was accepted into the 8th Annual Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles. The brothers promised that it would be ready by the screening day.
John worked on it right up until the day of the screening. The film was too long for a one-hour Mini DV-CAM tape, so they had to buy a Sony DV-CAM tape and use it.
“It was kind of scary,” explained John, “We worked right up to the last minute, then rendered it live all the way through from start to finish right to tape. We had only one hour to get to the theater.”
The audience response was great and the showing went on without a hitch. “The only way we could hold up such quality was by keeping it digital all the way. And the only time it went analog was in that last foot of cable to the projector — not a single pixel lost in our entire process,” said Thom.
This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on December 29, 2000
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