60-Second Q&A: Independent Filmmaker/DP Robin D. Berg

As president of Berg Entertainment International (BEI) and director of more than 400 episodes of broadcast television, Robin Berg has used virtually every type of digital video camera in his career.
Lately, he’s been shooting above-water scenes for the Outdoor Channel’s Speargun Hunter series with the Sony PDW-F350 XDCAM HD camcorder. These images, stored on Sony’s 23.3 GB professional disc format, are combined with underwater footage shot by photographer (and world record spearfisherman) Terry Maas with Sony’s HVR-Z1U HDV camcorder; encased in a Bluefin Underwater housing built by a company called Light and Motion.

Creatively combining the file-based XDCAM HD and the HDV formats, Berg recently finished a documentary, based on a compilation of the series’ 13 episodes, that’s airing on the Outdoor Channel this month and won for Best Documentary at the Temecula Valley International Film and Music Festival in September.

The one-hour documentary was edited in Final Cut Pro on an Intel dual core 2.5 GHz G5 Power PC connected to 4.5 GB of SDRAM storage. Sony XDCAM transfer software via FireWire connections was used to get footage into FCP. BEI operates six edit bays as part of a busy post facility in Temecula, CA.

Berg said he’s enjoyed putting the XDCAM HD camera to the test – exposing it to saltwater spray, tight quarters, and wave-tossed seas – and it has performed reliably every time.

Q: Did you save money shooting on XDCAM HD discs, as opposed to using videotape?
A: Absolutely. At the 35 MBps rate for HD, you get up to 69 minutes on a disc, depending upon how much motion is in a shot. I’m averaging 65 minutes of high-quality HD on a $35 XDCAM disc. Looking at the overall project, it cut my media costs in half. I’ve been shooting on Panasonic VariCams, so videotape costs are not insignificant.

Also, once I shoot on an XDCAM disc, it becomes my archive format. I don’t have to dump it to something else to fit my workflow. Sony tells me the disc has a 50-year shelf life.

Q: How does the XDCAM HD footage look next to the HDV footage when projected on a large screen?
A: We shot the above-water segments with XDCAM HD at 35 Mbps and the underwater elements at 25 Mbps. Underwater, you are already shooting through water, so the images will look different. But everyone who saw both types of footage was stunned by the quality. Watching the documentary, when we go underwater the audience knows it’s underwater, so we didn’t necessarily require the stunning clarity of the XDCAM HD. But I still needed a 16:9 format that was much higher res than SD.

We took the footage to Visual Matrix in Santa Ana, which has a nice large-screen viewing room with a Barco projector. We wanted to see what the images looked like before they would be projected on a movie screen during the film festival. I couldn’t be happier.

Q: How did the XDCAM camera hold up to moisture?
A: The disc has a protective casing that prevents damage to the physical drive system. We didn’t have any problems with moisture. A Sony technician told me that if I happened to drop it in the salt water, all I had to do was retrieve it, wash it off with distilled water, dry it out, and it should work fine. Luckily I did not have to test that theory.

Speaking of moisture, many of the locations were incredibly humid, a tape-based camera would have had humidity indicators flashing constantly. With the XDCAM system, there is no tape running over a head, instead, the information is being burned into the disc at a very high temperature, completely eliminating that problem.

Q: What's the biggest misconception about or most challenging aspect of production?
A: I don’t find HD production to be any more challenging than what we do with standard definition. If someone is a great editor on a DV system, they will immediately grasp HD editing. The difference is storage and transfer rates.

All of the NLE software platforms are robust at this point. There were originally issues with long-GOP systems, like HDV and XDCAM, but all of the systems have caught up and can handle it with no problems. For a number of reasons, including bit rates, etc., I decided to run the HDV footage through a Miranda HD bridge-dec and convert it to uncompressed 1080i. I take the HD SDI signal out of the HD Bridge-dec into a Sony F70 XDCAM HD record deck, and then into Final Cut Pro. This way everything is brought into the NLE at 35 MBps so there’s no rendering or format issues. When delivering to the networks, however, I still have to lay the final project off to HDCAM videotape.

For all news and information on Sony XDCAM, visit the Studio Daily XDCAM Mini-Site here.