Visual
Effects Techniques for HD:
An Interview with Scott Billups
By Tom Soper
Featured Interview – Scott Billups,
Visual Effects Interview by Tom Soper
Scott
Billups is a visual effects guru, a DP, a director,
a producer, an author of guides on filmmaking like Digital
Moviemaking, now in its second edition, and a filmmaker
in his own right, who recently completed a motion picture, Mid-Century,
featuring Faye Dunaway and John Glover.
You have said, “The future of cinema is
digital.” What’s holding us up from
going digital right now?
Nothing. I just saw Pirates of the Caribbean,
which we did some work on, projected on a digital projector
and it looked spectacular. The tools are all there,
it’s just the politics. And the audiences notice
a difference and now they are expressing a preference for
digital presentation. They’re getting to the
point where they can tell the difference and want digital. The
subtle nuance of grained film emulsion is getting replaced
by HD clarity. You see something like Spy Kids which
is ideally suited for HD acquisition and presentation,
there’s colors up on the screen that you can’t
get on film and there’s a certain vibrancy. And
now an enormous share of the market has grown up with those
saturated values. So they like to see digital cinema.
The younger people who’ve been playing computer
games, you mean?
Yeah, don’t you agree?
But when we’re working in digital, 24 Progressive
is still a standard especially when shooting actors,
because it makes them look better.
Oh, I agree, but the thing that really makes them look
better is shooting them with a longer lens, shooting them
with depth of field. So you put a lot of light on
them at close range so that it falls off in a brilliant
style. Then you generate, through the use of density
filters, the same depth of field as you’d get with
film, that’s how you work with HD in a cinematic
environment. If you just shoot people straight onto
HD they look like they were shot on video.
The HD I’ve seen on HD monitors can suffer
sometimes because the background is a little distracting
because it’s so clean and so present.
Yeah, that’s right, but you have to understand that
we have a glut right now, an enormous amount of videographers
coming into the film business, via HD, and my book I guess,
so I’m a little responsible for it. If these
people are too set in their ways to retool then they’re
a liability. The question is: Can they rethink the
way they look at a shot? The way they build and light
a shot? If you can upgrade the way you look at and
build a scene, then you can move from the video world into
the cinema world but if you can’t you’re just
going to waste a lot of people’s time. The
film guys are the guys who are really kicking it. They
take HD and they see it as electronic film and they still
work with the same lights and their favorite gaffers, their
favorite grips and they still build and cut and shape and
form the light, and they look at the HD signal and they
look at depth of field and they throw neutral densities
in there. They’re much more comfortable with
filtration and shooting HD. Without a healthy dollop
of filtration, HD is only expensive video.
You’re very much an advocate of using film
methodology but using HD to replace the film camera?
Absolutely, all my books are about how to take that film
methodology and condense it down to a few people. If
the budget demands you can cut the number of people on
a crew, but you can’t eliminate any of the jobs. Every
job function in conventional production methodology is
established and that is how this system works. You
eliminate your sound guy and use the on-camera mic, well,
you just screwed yourself. And it will be evident. Don’t
pull focus, but just use auto focus. Great, it’s
going to look like it. Anything you pick from conventional
production practices you’re shortcutting craft.
I’m coming to end of post production on
a feature project we shot on mini DV and we edited on FCP
3. How could we get the best
master out of the tapes we shot?
Well, presuming you firewired into your Mac, so you’ve
got a frame size that is about 0.1 mb. You could
go to a higher end recording machine, like a DVCPro 50
machine with serial digital outputs, or a high end DVCAM
machines and you’d get twice the signal. By
using Serial Digital, not Firewire, and sticking to that
(using a Aja card,
or a Cinewave, or a Matrox box)
then you won’t get further degradation. Aja’s
Black Magic codec is probably the one of the best algorithms
but the Cinewave is the most versatile and with either
you could still use FCP.
And this would give us a less compressed signal,
meaning better resolution finally?
It’s not the compression so much as the transposition
that kills you because you’re changing it from a
native DV frame to a compressed, transposed, firewirable
frame, which is crushed. Same footprint, but just
crushed.
Manufacturers, of course, make a lot of noise
about the fact that Firewire can handle DV.
Yeah, it can handle it, but that’s a quantative
statement, not a qualitative one. Read the ads. Firewire
is not a video format it’s a data transfer format. Basically,
firewire to a Mac can only give you a nice off-line.
You’ve also said that a large part of the current
technical miracle is the quiver of available plug-ins
and in your book you recommend Magic
Bullet and Color
Finesse. Do you still stand by those recommendations?
They’re still standing up. We were beta testing
the new After
Effects and it pushes the image around really fast
and now with the new G5 you can process your interlaced
footage with the Bullet incredibly fast and it gives you
a real cinematic look. And as far as color timing
there are very few things out there better than Color Finesse. Although,
Final Cut Pro 4 is very, very good as well. Much
more sophisticated than on FCP3. But the thing is
Color Finesse has split screen which is how the real big
color timing machines work, like the Da Vinci. You
get clips from the shots you want to balance and you bring
in your live clip that you’re color balancing to,
that’s your reference frame, usually a nice tight
shot of someone’s face, and you color time using
either a monkey simple interface like color wheels, or
you have sliders, RGB based, YUV based. It gives
you ten different ways of augmenting and changing color,
each very sophisticated, powerful systems. And color
timing, perhaps more than resolution, is what really throws
an audience off. They won’t forgive unbalanced
color.
Weren’t you planning to take Mid-Century
to Cannes this year?
Yeah, I was all tied up in this Discovery series and since
I own the whole thing and don’t have investors over
my shoulder wanting a return I can wait for the right timing. I
want to do Cannes, it’s a personal thing. I’ve
always wanted to go to Cannes with something that I thought
was good for no other reason than I want to go to Cannes
with something that is good.
You’ve been in the film industry more than
25 years. Do you find this an exciting time to
be working?
Oh yeah. I was just shooting yesterday on the set
of Red
Riding Hood, which is just an amazing project. Randal
Kleiser (Grease, Honey I Blew Up the Kid)
is directing it. It’s a musical for kids and
we’re shooting it with Thompson
Vipers and recording direct to disk. The DP
is David Stump, and he’s really stacked the deck. He’s
got Joe Di Gennaro on camera A, Joe shot my movie, and
Sean Fairburn on camera B. Sean had to take some
time off to go shoot a car commercial so they asked me
to operate B camera.
What do you think of the Viper?
Oh, it’s excellent. The thing is that this
film is almost entirely shot on blue screen. But
rather than everything happening in post, both cameras
are registered to the computer CG using tracking heads. So
when the cameras move the 3D scene within the computer
moves. Wherever you look it’s totally locked
up with the environment. So, all they have to do
in post is pull the blue screen recorded onto a D5 and
do a very simple composite to get it locked together. It’s
pretty darn amazing.
So, while on set, you’re seeing a low res.
version of what you’re actually going to get?
Yeah, and not so low res. either. One main advantage
is that it cuts the takes down immensely. We did
this long crane move, where the wolf is dancing around
a pot with Little Red Riding Hood in it, and it’s
a long shot, about a three minute shot, and the director,
who has plenty of experience, looks up after the first
take and says, “we’ve got it, that’s
it, lets move on.” The thing is he’s
got a 50” plasma screen with a serial digital feed
and there’s nothing not to see. There’s
no gotcha’s. You have to go back and check
that you got your signal and there’s no drop, but
that’s all behind the scenes, cameras don’t
have to get involved in that, director doesn’t have
to get involved, DP doesn’t have to.
Lot of pressure on the engineer, then?
Yeah, there’s two engineering stations: there’s
the DIP who monitors the signal integrity and there’s
the engineer who operates the recorders and does the overlays
and manages the flow of the different stations, plus then
there’s the guy who makes sure the tracking, registration
and parallax in all the shots is correct and a station
of CG guys who are actually building the elements of the
scenery - the woods, Grandma’s house and all that
stuff and maintaining the nodal integrity and positioning
of it all. Unlike the cartoon films, like Who
Framed Roger Rabbit?, which was all done in post,
this is all happening right there. And because it’s
high end HD, you don’t have any film weave or scratches
to worry about and keep you awake at night.
With your book and the articles you write you’ve
encouraged a huge amount of people to jump into the film
world, via digital production. Do you have any
last pieces of advice for them?
This is the best profession there is. But there
are a lot of different things you could end up doing in
this business. I’m the worst person at taking
my own advise, but you can’t expect to have competence
at everything without a lot of experience working in all
the different stations. Any one of those stations,
if performed incorrectly, can cause you real problems with
your end result. Rodriguez is the only guy that is
truly pulling off doing everything on a big time scale. So,
until you’re on the level of Robert
Rodriguez you’ve got to have help.
Visual
Effects Techniques for HD
You’re very much an advocate of using film
methodology but using HD to replace the film camera?
So, while on set, you’re seeing a low res.
version of what you’re actually going to get?
