Digital Video - July 2008 - (Page 10) DV UPDATE One of the key collaborators who came on to the project after the first three episodes had been completed was composer Kurt Oldman. “Initially I was doing whatever I could to create my own ambient score in [Apple’s] Soundtrack, but it wasn’t great,” explains the director. “I put out a call on the Net for a composer, and Kurt answered, graciously offering to score the series. We decided to give him a shot, and the first night I went to his place to hear his take on it — I was really blown away. He took it to a whole new level and really knocked it out of the ballpark.” “Music is so important,” adds creator Hinchey. “Even in a radio jingle — if it’s working, it gets in your head. Good score is there to support the story and you don’t notice it. Both Eric and I are huge fans of composers like James Horner, Jerry Goldsmith and, of course, John Williams. We both had really specific ideas about what The Dirty Bomb Diaries should sound like, with a lot of inspiration taken from Harry Gregson-Williams, and Kurt just nailed that feeling we wanted.” Since the show was broadcast on the Internet, the duo has started to get some attention from Industry players. They joined forces with Zen Gesner and Rob Moran, producers at Good Surf Productions, who in turn hooked Hinchey and Tozzi up with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) to represent the show and shop it for a second season. “I really believe the Internet is the next untapped medium for entertainment,” opines Hinchey. “There is a lot out there, but the majority of it is comedy. Not that comedy is easy to create — because it’s not — but comedy is easy to watch. It’s nothing to sit at your desk and watch a two-minute funny video and tell your friends about it. Getting people to watch drama on the Internet is much more of a challenge, and I’d really like to be a pioneer in that field. I’d like to be the guy to really master dramatic content on the net — so we’ll see what happens.” DV CONSIDERING COMPRESSION MACROBLOCKING IS A PLAGUE UPON YOUR IMAGES. BY MICHAEL SILBERGLEID hend what’s in plain sight. On the production side, we shoot and edit the way we want the finished project to look, with hardly a thought as to how the distribution system will affect it. The problem is that as distributors (cable, telco, satellite) try to squeeze more channels into their bandwidth-limited lineup, something’s got to give. I t all started with a fade to black. Back in the later part of the last century, I noticed something very interesting: a fade to black on DirecTV looked like crap. During the fade, the picture would break up into macroblocks. Even now, with all the advances in MPEG-2 compression, I still notice these macroblocking errors on digitally compressed content. It has gotten better, fading to black no longer looks as horrible as it once did, but fast or randomly moving content, the kind that an MPEG encoder can’t handle very well, still looks horrible. Even bandwidth-intensive digital television can look horrible. Any program with action or random motion just chokes an MPEG encoder. A colony of ants looks like a pixilated painting. Camera whip pans fall apart, fast-motion looks cheap. The big question that you should be asking yourself, as a producer, director or editor, is: Can the audience see those errors as well? We know they can, but their brains may not be able to compredv july 2008 JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING IS DIGITAL DOESN’T MEAN IT CAN’T LOOK LIKE CRAP. The increase in macroblock errors has become a topic of interest for those who can see them, and that audience seems to be getting bigger. Through TheVideoGuru.com, I get a lot of consumer questions about DTV and HDTV. Now I’m seeing more and more e-mails regarding pixels and blocks and picture breakup. The distributors don’t seem to be bothered by it. When a subscriber complains, they’re told it must be the signal level going to the cable box. “We’ll send a technician out,” they’re told. The tech comes, measures the signal, maybe adds an amp to raise the signal or a tap to lower it, and leaves. The problem is, the macroblocking events keep happening. That’s not a signal problem, it’s an encoder problem. Visual information that’s too complex to properly encode for the selected bandwidth. And since distributors don’t appear to be increasing the bandwidth to their channels anytime soon, there’s only one thing you can do about it, and you’re not going to like it. You have to shoot and edit with distribution in mind. Yes, this is trampling on artistic freedom. You won’t be able to show the type of shots you might have shown in the good old-fashioned analog world. (Analog video hides a multitude of sins, especially those of digital). But the question is: Should you? Only you can answer that question. All I know is that digital is looking worse and worse by the day, it seems. Viewers are noticing. And the only person who might be able to do something about it is you. Remember, just because something is digital, doesn’t mean it can’t look like crap. www.dv.com 10 http://www.dv.com
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