Digital Video - February 2008 - (Page 8) DV UPDATE SHORTS ing,” he says. “The same shots that are very effective in the documentary, created powerful still imagery. There is one shot of a soldier crouched down with his finger in his ear as a grenade explodes and you see a something metal being ejected. I was at about 125th of a second for that. “At another time,” he adds, “I was onboard an Apache [helicopter] while it was firing rockets and I jacked the shutter way up so I could grab the rocket coming right out of the tube on the side. I ended up with not just one but multiple shots of the rocket stopped in motion coming out of the barrels of the rockets. If I were shooting with a still camera I would have been depending on pure luck hoping I’d get one shot like that.” Kesterson and Leeson devised a post workflow prior to their embed with the National Guard. The HDV tapes were first imported into iMovie (they later switched to Final Cut Pro). Leeson would edit clips down in preparation for the documentary. Then, he used iDive cataloging software from the French company Aquafadas to begin the process of searching for that magnum moment within the video. “Going through all the video frame-by-frame would obviously be a very laborious process,” Kesterson says. “iDive goes through your video and grabs one frame per second, and they’re improving it to go faster. So, before long, you’ve got hundreds of frames to look at. If we think there might be a better frame on the tape, we’ll scrub through the clip in 24p mode and look for it.” They’d then select the image (which is interlaced — the 24p mode is constructed via the data and Sony’s HDV codec) and then process that through a tool Leeson helped develop at the Dallas Morning News. Referred to internally as the “voodoo tool,” this helps maximize the data for still work and gives it that particular look that doesn’t quite look like the product of a still camera but also doesn’t feel like what viewers are used to as the look of a frame grab. Finally, still images are cleaned up in PhotoShop. “We use a variety of different methods depending on the particular image,” Kesterson says. “Sometimes the deinterlace tool helps, for example, and other times it hurts. We approach the shots differently though we always apply the journalistic idea that we can’t alter the image. If it’s not the kind of thing that could have been done in a traditional darkroom without elaborate effects, we won’t do it to our frames.” Though Kesterson loved traditional still photography and continues to hold onto his 35mm Nikon F3s, he says he couldn’t imagine doing this kind of work any other way. “We can develop so many tiers of media at once,” he says. “We are making video that can be broadcast, used for podcasts and streaming, sold to pay-per-view or released on DVD or even blown up to 35mm and shown theatrically. And, at the same time, we are creating stills that can also be used on the Web or in print.” Kesterson concludes, “I definitely think the future of photojournalism is the video camera.” www.dv.com standard for capturing moving imagery but are frequently too slow to freeze motion enough for a decent still photo. For this reason, Kesterson made extensive use of the camera’s variable shutter. Kesterson went from as slow as 1/15th to as fast as 1/5000th, depending on the situation. If he wanted to freeze the rotor blades of a helicopter, he would use a very fast shutter speed; if he was after a sense of debris from an explosion flying past a soldier, a much slower speed would be employed, just as he would do with a traditional still camera. Generally, Kesterson dialed in 1/125th or 1/180th for most of his work. Though changing shutter speeds and the amount of motion blur from shot to shot will alter the way the video looks, Kesterson asserts that the finished video has a consistent look throughout. “One of the most profound moments image-wise happened during Operation Mountain Thrust in July of 2006, when I was working with American, Afghan and Canadian soldiers during some of the most intense fight- PHOTO FINISH In regard to our story in the January issue about the use off Canon’s XH A1 HD camcorder by photographer Tom Van Dyke at the Chicago Tribune — “Read All About It,” p 10 — DV, unfortunately, did not receive this image of Van Dyke until just after press time. Photo by Jose Moré, Chicago Tribune. 8 dv january 2008 http://www.dv.com
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