Lately I've been doing a number of experiments involving the proper aspect ratio to use in digital video for features.
The image we see on our standard TV screens is a format known as 4:3, or 1.33. It's 4 units wide by 3 units tall. The image we see in wide-screen TVs is usually 16:9, that is, 16 units wide by 9 units tall, or 1.78—a much wider picture. Some motion pictures are shot using this aspect ratio of 1.78, though most use even wider ones such as 1.85 or 2.35.
We want to shoot our features in digital because of many advantages that it offers, not least the ability to shoot at lower light levels, and so on. Lower light levels in turn allows set lights to burn at a lower wattage, which means that when you go on location you can otten plug the lights into ordinary house current.
That in turn means you don't have to haul a generator or generator truck around and have cables snaking around everywhere, all of which takes larger crews and then more people to feed the larger crews and on and on—the number in your crew can balloon up exponentially.
Also, digital allows the use of potentially much lighter cameras, as light as 4 pounds while still retaining many professional features. This makes the camera potentially much more mobile, while allowing the use of very light steadicam-type stabilizers.
That in turn can often eliminate the need for laying track in tracking shots, and the extra crew needed for that, and on and on. So potentially the crew can be much smaller, and thus also more mobile and flexible.
For these reasons and others, the Sony DSR PD-150 camcorder seems to be the best choice for our purposes. It's quite a professional camera and yet weights only 4 pounds fully loaded with a 9-hour battery.
Actually, we plan to use two of them, an A camera and a B camera, so that we can capture improvised scenes in various combinations of shots simultaneously.
Often a very interesting scene can arise from the technique of knowing that you want to get emotionally from point A to point B in a scene, but letting the actors improvise the dialogue and "business" to get there instead of reading from a script. But you have to capture the moment as it happens; there's no repeating it as with a scripted scene. Hence the use of two or more cameras.
The PD-150 can shoot in either 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio, but its CCD chips are natively 4:3. In careful tests, we've established that when shooting in 16:9 we lose about 10% of our resolution compared to shooting in 4:3. However, since we're going to be upsampling the image in the transfer to film, we want to keep as much resolution as possible.
So we've decided to shoot in 4:3 but compose each shot in 16:9 (by matting the viewfinder), and then view dailies in 16:9 on a wide-screen monitor. We'll edit in 4:3, but then have the film-transfer house letterbox the image and create a wide-screen image in the transfer to 35mm.
The PD-150 holds contrast quite well, it creates almost no moire patterns at all, and seems to handle professional full-spectrum fluorescent lights much better than other cameras. It resolves 340,000 pixels per CCD, only slightly less than the much heavier Sony DSR-300. In tests that we've done, the PD-150 has created some beautiful pictures.
Equally important, the camera's audio is professional, with XLR inputs, phantom power, manual gain, mike attenuation and so on.
So far, the results of shooting in 4:3 but composing in 16:9 with a very light but professional video camera seem very promising.
—jim sloman, 10/20/01
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