Interview
with David Niles Director/DP/Designer, Colossalvision
By Tom Soper
What are you working on now?
We have two cinema houses [at 26 Broadway in lower Manhattan] that are designed to show a 3D HD picture. The audience will experience an eighteen minute High Definition presentation that is a way of celebrating New York. And experience in a more sensorial way what happened down here on 9/11. In a way it’s a very uplifting piece. It’s not a documentary about 9/11, there’s no people jumping out of buildings, no buildings burning, nothing like that.
Is High Def the best tool you could be using for this project?
There’s nothing else I know of that could do it. We like the high frame rate. We use 24P but for a lot of it with the 3D effect we use a higher frame rate. Yes, two projectors, polarizing lenses, passive polarizing glasses for the audience. Projectors are beginning to outdo the capture rate of HD in the current cameras The present state of HD, HDCAM, DVCPRO 150 is what we call mezzanine level HD. It’s considerably pre-filtered and compressed at the recording device. The present generation of cameras are good, but strangely enough not nearly as good as our original cameras that go back almost twenty years.
How has HD production changed then over time?
Well, when I did Dreamtime [a Broadway show that featured HD projections alongside live actors on stage] in 1991, we were shooting with cameras that used Saticon pick up tubes, rather than CCD chips. Our basic imaging was 1inch format of the tube. We were recording to baseband uncompressed, either digital or analogue decks the size of telephone booths and the projection system was stacks of CRT projectors, which when tweaked perfectly, created images which are unsurpassed even today, except in brightness. We had audiences that could not tell the difference between a live character and someone on the screens. A lot of that had to do with optical illusion and distance from the screen and lighting but we were able to achieve the effect of having 50% of the production coming off a piece of tape.
How does the new project compare to the IMAX experience?
IMAX is an experience that has everything to do with size. To my eye it’s loaded with artifacts. 65 mm film is very sharp but when you’re looking at an eight story tall picture of it, I see grain and bob and weave and dust, 24 frame flicker. It’s immersive.
You’ve talked about the
immersive quality of HD as being more involving than
film?
I talk about it as a physiological distance. Everything we see or experience in a story telling process we have a physiological distance from. When you’re looking at a film, in a darkened room, where the picture is larger than you have a physiological distance to that message that’s coming to you. Let’s say that is X. When you look at a video on a television screen, an image that’s smaller than you are, less resolution than film but higher frame rate, you have a difference physiological distance and that would be about one half X. You’re actually closer to it. It’s the difference between watching NYPD Blue on television and COPS. COPS is a video shot and NYPD Blue is a film shoot. You can believe while you’re watching COPS that you’re sitting in the police car with the policemen and are part of the action. When you’re watching NYPD Blue you are a witness to what’s going on. POV 24 frame 35 mm film, doesn’t work very well. Motion strobing means it doesn’t really come off. Now HD is a third option to film and video. The equivalent of 60 frames but with a resolution that is comparable to 35 mm film. And HD has a physiological distance of one quarter X. You’re much closer again.
Has HD developed more because of the television or the film industry?
Well, in the early 80’s HBO spent a lot of money testing it. Took HD out to focus groups, shopping malls all over the country and compared it to Standard Definition television with the same content. We shot heavy weight boxing matches, sitcoms and all kind of narrow-casting fare, that is not broadcasting content but what’s on cable, and the results were overwhelming that consumers were willing to buy new equipment and pay a premium to see HD. But those percentages went way down when the content become network style content, advertising interrupted network TV. Consumers were not willing to spend more money, buy different television sets for that. This reinforced to the broadcasters that HDTV, although a marvelous technical innovation, offered no financial gains. So they wanted to keep HD away and they created a standards issue. They went to the FCC and asked for more bandwidth to broadcast HD. Bandwidth is a pie that must be divided, and of which there is no more to be had. The FCC said, “You have to compress the signal,” and everybody knew there were 12 different competing methods on how to do this, so… If you have to choose one method, you have to test them all, and testing takes a long time. Starting in 1989 we tested four systems for 6 years compressing HD into the narrow bandwidth for broadcasting. In 1995 we were there with a digital system created by General Instruments, and the FCC was ready to say yes, but then all the component firms said, “wait a minute, we’re going to consider all the possible permutations of this and put it all into a great big bundle called the Grand Alliance”. And of course they did, and the FFC approved what’s called the Grand Alliance table of HD formats, which has eighteen different standards: 720P, 1125, 24 frames, 30 frames and so on. That took 12 years. You have to always look at who’s financing to realize why things take so long. Television as it is right now doesn’t need to be better.
But the movie industry has pushed the development of HD?
It’s what’s driving the boat right now. As an acquisition alternative to 35 mm shooting everybody’s jumping on board 24P because it saves money. And not just in post-production. 35mm film is not very efficient in the shoot. You can only have a ten minute load, or 20, and every time you load the camera you have to check the gate, clean the gate. While you’re shooting, there is also a mystery of what’s actually on that film. We have representations but it’s not the actual image. With HD we look at the final image on set. We shoot with a camera now that shoots 24P, has a gamma curve that is nearly identical to print film and depending on how we lens it, and what the DP does, it will look like film. For all practical purposes today you can imitate what 35 mm film does seamlessly well.
But you feel that HD has capabilities
beyond this? That HD has more to offer ultimately
than film?
Historically, silent film ran at 16 or 18 frames a second. Sound film came along in the twenties and needed to go at a higher frame rate to get a sound quality that was useable. But that frame rate was determined by the least number of images you could possibly get away with and get that sound, because early film cost a lot of money. So a 24 frame standard was adopted, not because it was the best, but because it made economic sense. And then you have eighty years of 24 frame film with hundreds of thousands of projectors around the world that run at 24 frames per second. Alternatively, television comes along running at 60 frame rate. But actors on soap operas don’t look as good as actors on film because of the frame rate. Acting looks better at 24 frames per second. It’s like an embellishment. It’s like putting an actor on stage, not in a raw spotlight but with some filters on the lights, burned amber and some pink over here. But when you show what the actor sees you can start ramping that frame rate up, to get a viewer really involved, really inside the picture. This is another technical dimension. In the edit suite next door we edit lots of 24P, and we’ll have a director in there editing a 24P film and I might be making a copy of something on another monitor that’s in 1080i, and all of a sudden he’ll look over and go, “What’s that stuff! That’s terrific!” Trumble did studies in the 60’s when he was pushing Showscan, a 65 mm, 60 frame per second film. His theory was that the higher the frame rate the more the viewer perceives 3 dimensions in the picture, the more the picture seems to have depth. The slower the frame rate the flatter it is. He took a bunch of college kids and wired them up to a device to test them sensorially while he showed them 16 frame film, 24 frame, 60, 100 frame and 120 frame film, and he got a curve that was low at 16, 24, 30, really speeded up around 60, then flattened out 100 and doesn’t go any higher. Our eyes see at about 100 frames a second if you could translate the process. So 60 frame HD is a jump-off-the-screen revolution . People are mesmerized by flying through the Grand Canyon, flowers opening up, things you wouldn’t give 2 minutes to on television. It’s a new dimension to the story telling process. Varying the frame rate.
It’s like the way an
editor will increase the rate of cuts?
Yes, but at a movie house, you’re looking at 24 frames a second, that’s it.
Have you learned rules for working in the physiological distance of HD?
Dreamtime is where I started thinking about this. At intermission I would go upstairs and talk to hundreds of people about: What did they see? What did they feel? I was pumping into the piece, as we were doing it, this idea of multi-layered communication. There is a story line but there’s also four or five other things going on more subliminally – using what I call “emotional roller-coasters”. Creating an expectation here and ending up over here. Holding something out here, getting attention to jump here. Get the audience bouncing around changes them emotionally and weaves a secondary story, not the literal story at all. I could get the whole audience to see exactly the same thing and it wasn’t there. We have hundreds of taped testimonials of people saying how much they liked the fight scene in the middle and there is no fight scene.
Can we expect that in the new piece too?
9/11 is created in the viewer’s eye not up on the screen. What was 9/11? There will never be September 10th in this country ever again. Here’s this great moment of reflection. Hundreds of thousands of people ran for their lives that day. I was a hundred feet away from the second tower when I saw that plane hit. But few people above Fourteenth Street understand it, it’s completely different. I spent months talking to some of the 10,000 people a day going to ground zero. And I found out people aren’t coming down here as voyeurs to see how much destruction there was, they are coming down here to connect. The woman that cried in front of her television set in Oklahoma understood the amplitude of what this is. It’s beyond the two buildings falling down. And this is not to take away from the victims or their families, but this is about everybody, and that has a lot to do with what we’re doing: it’s a way of most people getting their arms around it. And it’s actually uplifting, because the sun did rise the next day.
