American Cinematographer - August 2008 - 75

bility. I employed one 36" HD monitor that was A/B-switched back and forth between cameras. I think my biggest mistake was not having a digital-imaging technician for the shoot. He or she would have saved me endless hours in post, where I fought with mismatched cameras and countless other errors I made while wearing too many hats. As the show progresses, a lot of the action takes place in a computer control room. I wanted to maintain a lowkey look, motivating the light by the monitors and not using any specific color. I took 4' 2-bank Kino Flos and placed them low off to one side of an actor’s face to simulate light from the large interactive screens, which had not yet been designed. (The screens can be manipulated by touch.) This also worked well in making the scene a little more moody. I don’t think lighting was ever a factor in my decision-making process, although I did wonder how things would eventually translate after all the visual effects were complete. I wanted to employ the same skills and control I have shooting 35mm film for TV or features, and doing the post myself gave me that much more control. At the end of shooting, I edited the show using Final Cut Studio. I then had all the cut shots pulled from the HDCam tapes and put into Targa files on several hard drives; I did this at Keep Me Posted in Burbank. I used Newtek’s Lightwave 9.3 to build my models and light my backgrounds, then imported them into Adobe After Effects and did all my composite work. I spent a little over nine months compositing, building and rendering more than 1,000 shots for IQ-145. The next big hurdle was broadcast, and that’s where this whole process became tricky. The production work came naturally and was very similar to that of most low-budget shoots. I had to overcome a big learning curve acting as editor and visual-effects artist, but I really enjoyed the process. Next came delivery, and I had so many questions and so many concerns. There was no set standard — no direct formula — and everyone has a different pipeline and receiver (computer). When sending video out over the Net, you have to factor in connection speed, computer speed, graphics card, operating system and PC/Mac. I had to deliver a consistent image across a vast array of technical obstacles. Because I’d shot 90 percent of my show with digital backgrounds, maintaining the blacks was my first concern. As the image becomes milky and blacks get elevated, the backgrounds naturally separate from the foreground, leaving the composite to look like two separate elements instead of a whole. This is partly because of the compression used to send smooth images across the data lines; the more you compress, the faster and smoother it will play, especially with dial-up and low-bandwidth service. We needed to do some research and tests before we found our answer. Another factor that came into play was format delivery — AVI, MOV or Flash? What was the best format for conversion to one of these streaming media players, and what media players offered the best bang for the buck? Paying for a higher-end server was now a factor in finding our release capabilities. Simply throwing a video up on your Web site doesn’t always hack it. I also found that when I did an online da Vinci color correction, the correction didn’t always remain the same when I had to go from one format to the other. The corrections looked great on tape, but when I went back to a QuickTime file, things were too dark and the chroma was too hot. I soon employed my own correction system in Final Cut and Final Cut Color. After testing several mediaservice companies, we eventually found Dragonfly.com. Its groundbreaking technology helped get us off the ground, and over the course of several months of testing, we helped refine a great delivery system for media on the Web. Dragonfly encodes for progressive-download Web and mobile delivery at the highest possible quality in H.264 and FLV format. As you select an episode to view, you can use low, medium or high bandwidth. The player will then test your connection speed and send you optimal picture quality with glitch-free results. The high bandwidth delivers full-screen, HD-quality video. Dragonfly did amazing corrections for every download compression, keeping the blacks at the right level without raising chroma. This was an amazing experience for me, and I look forward to production of Season 2. I Episodes of IQ-145 can be viewed at www.IQ-145.com. Above left: The crew captures a greenscreen shot of Max (Jamie McShane) and Ben (Paul Johansson) as they square off in a hotel room. Above right: Nate (Thomas Dekker) learns of his future when he is blackmailed by Jake. American Cinematographer 75

http://Dragonfly.com http://www.IQ-145.com

American Cinematographer - August 2008

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