We’ve heard the stories - someone gets a HD tv and says that now they can see the pores on a person’s face. Does this cause problem / extra effort for the makeup and set design people? For example, watching Star Trek TNG, Worf looks fairly realistic. But in magazine photos, the line where the latex means real skin is pretty obvious, as is the mesh that hold on his fake eyebrows. I’ve also heard that sets that look great on tv can be fairly fake looking in person. Now that HD has set a higher standard, has this made life more difficult for set designers / makeup people, etc? Also, from the consumer end, has anyone with HD noticed that things look obviously fake or weird now?
Yes. It was sort of anticipated that kind of thing would happen, I remember reading about it a lot before many of the networks and shows had made the shift, so they had been prepared for more set being seen in the widescreen aspect ratio.
But it’s the additional cost that it requires that they hadn’t really prepared for. Things have to be cleaner, painted carefully, and not faked as much. They don’t just have to be more vigilant, they have to use better quality materials.
It’s not so much having an HD set, - it’s filming in HD. So for your example of TNG - Worf still looks realistic on an HD set because all it’s doing is upsampling the 480i signal to the native resolution of your set. This has its own problems, like blurriness, but it won’t suddenly reveal the line where his skull prosthesis met his skin, because the cameras used to film the series didn’t have a high enough resolution to pick that up in the first place.
I got my HD set in 2004, just in time for the first World Series shot & broadcast in HD. Fox spent a lot of airtime focused closely on pitchers faces. Pitchers are ugly, sweaty people, and probably look askance on having makeup artists give them touchups between batters. I’ve noticed since then they don’t zoom quite as closely on the pitchers anymore.
keep in mind though, that 35mm film has almost always been “high-def” equivalent when shown in a theater, so while the broadcast TV makeup crews probably have to work extra hard nowadays, the movie makeup crews don’t have to make too many changes at all.
My wife and I were discussing the same thing the other day. HD must be a nightmare for the makeup artists.
Filming on 35mm is lighted differently and has a smoother picture whereas HD is valued for its sharpness.
The truth is some actors/actresses do not have a face for HD and believe me it shows.
35mm is not High Def, it is just a higher resolution image than standard def. No doubt that when you remove the granular movement inherent in even the finest clearest T-Grain Kodak 35mm stock, or Vision 500 stock, you wind up with a different KIND of image.
That, to me, is what HD looks like. There is no swimming grain, and lacking that ( along with lacking the persistence of vision trick of motion picture film ) you wind up with your brain seeing more information in a well-shown HD recorded image.
If you shoot in HD and show in HD, the image clarity is stunning. I don’t mean lovely. I mean stunning. To me, too much is seen.
Gone are the days when foam core, show card and 2" black Permacel Gaffer’s Tape is the stuff you can make a set out of. So much is shown with greater crispness, that one simply must spend more money on sets, make-up and costumes. It is fair to say that a crowd scene, say a boxing ring, will show you more details in the folks in the 4th row from the ring than you have ever seen on motion picture film.
It’s a pain. It also appears to my eye to be quite flat. There’s greater crispness but the image depth is crushed. Feels like I’m watching “Tron”. Now, the Red One Digital Camera? THAT is an image. 4k CMOS. Quite something…
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Okay, maybe this was you… A long while back, I remember a similar OP. It might have been back when I was still lurking, so maybe it was two years ago.
Someone mentioned something about a “digital mask” that you could use for things like the Oscars, to help smooth things out, so you can’t see the humongous pores that some actors really have. I thought it was specifically a thing for live TV and I was trying to tell my girlfriend about it.
Was that you? And does anybody know what I’m talking about?
Not a digital mask. The people who “shade” video cameras ( Senior Video Op, or SVO ) typically use the “skin detail” shading abilities of newer control panels.
You can shade the skin of someone differently than the rest of the frame. The computer running the board can memorize dozens of different skin detail settings, so when you have people of different skin tone and skin texture in the same scene, their faces are “shaded” or adjusted for all at once.
Remarkable stuff. On the other end of the scale are more traditional filters. The finest ones I’ve handled are Tiffen filters. Now, Tiffen has gone high-tech with the advent of its DFX Software. This software emulates the full range of glass photographic filters made by that company, allowing you to mix and match effects and store them.
In terms of dealing with H.D. images, there are H.D.-specific filters made, and so there are filters in the package that handle the “overly crispy” details inherent in H.D. images.
E.T.A.: Not sure if that was me in the post you referenced.
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I watched the CNN election coverage in HD, and I was of course a little drunk. Much humor was made at the expense of (I think) George Will, when I realized I was being entranced by a stray nosehair that was catching the light in a very obvious fashion.
Oh, good. It’s not just me. My husband’s very excited about the possibility of inheriting his brother’s big screen HDTV at the holidays, and I’m rather ambivalent. I like the large size and widescreen aspect, but I’m not crazy about the overly crisp images themselves.
Cinematographer-in-schooling checking in.
I prefer filming in HD if I get to make the decision, mostly because our class has a very post focus. It’s occasionally been hard on the make-up crew and the light manager, but with the use of proper use of focus and minding your set and lighting, it’s not too bad. We’ve had to become a lot more careful with lighting in particular, since even if we tone it down in post, the actor will still be illuminated crisply enough to show blemishes in the makeup.
(OK, for the sake of full disclosure, we’re mostly filming with Sony XDCam EX 1 with 35mm adapters, which is mildly put a bit off the “blow your socks off” scale of things, but still. Had to relearn a lot of my old lighting skills since moving off pure 35mm.)
Would you mind expanding on this a bit? This website indicates a study concluded that 35mm has up to 1400 lines of resolution, vs 1080 or 720 for HD.
This guy says you’d need more than 5300x4000 resolution to equal 35mm, film grain and all.
Wikipedia states that 35 mm original camera negative motion picture film can resolve up to 6,000 lines.
Seems like a no-brainer if you can afford it. Same thing with photography- you might never print anything bigger than 4x6, but common sense tells you to use the highest res possible, so you have more information to work with. You can always crop a photo, or downconvert a video.
I can see what you’re getting at, but there are many good and valid reasons for choosing film over digital formats. The existing infrastructure being one, the “look” of 35mm and existing knowledge of how to light it being another. A 35mm film will look smoother and more “film” like than something filmed on HD, which is crisper and clearer, but also flatter.
Depth of view is one of the chief complaints against HD. Other people still hold to the 35mms arguably better colour palette. Of course HD film technology, habits and quirks are still being researched and improved upon, but there are noticeable differences between a movie shot on film and one shot on video. They mostly come down to taste and desired expression, in the end.
“Depth of view” ? Do you mean Contrast Ratio, or Depth of Field (I suspect the former) ?
Sure. I actually said it backwards. It mighta been more clear had I said, " High Def isn’t 35mm", since so many people kinda wish it were.
Lines of resolution are only a part of the story. In the case of film, you have an organic imaging medium being shown by dint of light shot through a matching medium. In the case of H.D., there is nothing organic about the recording process.
In the case of H.D. originated and 35mm projected, of course, there’s this weird mix. Witness the somewhat “flat” feel of " Superman Returns". Shot on the Panavision Genesis H.D. camera, either shown in H.D. or shown in 35mm transfer prints.
It didn’t look like film, even though it was screened on film sometimes. Make sense?