by Jamie Stuart
Here's the thing: Film acquisition and distribution are going digital. Got it? Great. Now that that's understood and out of the way, critics and journalists need to comprehend that the motion picture form is transitioning from a medium (celluloid) to a series of formats (digital data). And they need to know what those formats are, or they'll look dumb to the filmmakers who use them.
In reviews of Steven Soderbergh's
Che from its Cannes premiere, critics referred to its RED ONE-lensed imagery as everything from DV to HD to 4k. The proper format is the latter — though it was screened at Cannes in 2k. So let's break this down, because marketing needs have recently trumped technical standards.
The following is an extremely simplified version of where it's at.
Up until recently, HD (High-Definition) was a very specific standard consisting of a pixel aspect ratio of 1920x1080 — though various tape-based compressions usually squeezed the actual recorded image into something slightly smaller. HD was, by definition, what we call 1080 (as in 1080 pixels in height).
DV is a format best known for Mini-DV, which generally records at 720x480. Again, it's not a generic term — it's a specific format. Mini-DV tapes are those tiny ones that took over home video recording, as well as functioning as the initial format for prosumer filmmaking. Several other formats have been based around DV, such as the larger DVCAM and DVCPRO. Another Mini-DV-based format is HDV, again, a format unto itself. The idea in HDV is to compress a 1280x720 image onto a Mini-DV tape.
Now, starting with HDV and moving into standard 720p, a sort of middle-ground format was established. 720p is certainly a larger, higher-resolution image than Mini-DV, but not nearly as good as 1080. (I shoot 720p using a Panasonic AG-HPX200, which allows filmmakers to record tapeless to P2 cards, or, in my case, to a FireStore hard drive.)
Above all of those formats, first comes 2k, at 2048x1080, which is the current aim for standard theatrical projection. David Fincher has shot his last two movies (
Zodiac and
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) in uncompressed 4:4:4 2k.
Above 2k is 4k, the format that Soderbergh shot
Che in. 4k's size is 4096x2160. A 4k image offers 4-times the resolution of 2k. RED,
the company that manufactured Soderbergh's camera, will soon be releasing cameras designed to shoot 3k as well as 5k.
Got all that?
So here's where the problem comes in: consumers. Consumers are dumb. Lazy. They don't have time to deal with all these esoteric aspect ratios. So what have the electronics companies started doing? They've started marketing "HD" as a generic format for anything higher than standard definition, as in a standard TV.
By doing this, by lumping HDV, 720p, 1080p, 2k and 4k together everything has been simplified. In this scenario, a 720p HDTV is not all that different from a 1080p HDTV. But don't worry. You won't notice the difference! And this way, even though your Blu-ray disks are coming at an HD standard of 1080p, we'll sell you downloadable HD movies that are only 720p. HD is now a generic term.
Only it isn't. And as stereoscopic 3-D further encroaches on the acquisition and distribution of movies, we've got yet another format to worry about.
The point is, as confusing as all of this sounds, if you're a critic or journalist, it's your job to know and understand these things. You need to know them the same way as in the past you needed to know the difference between Super-8, 16mm, Super-16, 35mm (1.66:1, 1.85:1, 2.35:1, etc.), and 70mm. And if you don't know the difference between any of those things you're incompetent.
If your job is to analyze and critique movies, then you need to know what it is you're looking at. It's just that simple. And, for the time being, it just happens to be occasionally confusing.
So...get to it.
Filmmaker Jamie Stuart has developed shorts for several years through his production business, The Mutiny Company. Working almost entirely on his own, Stuart has carved out his own niche in the film community, documenting the festival environment with experimental shorts for Movie City News, Filmmaker magazine, Focus Features and others. In this series of columns, Jamie examines the way that new technologies have aided his personal adventures in filmmaking. Read his last entry here.