Why Many Shooters Can't Focus HD Correctly.

Few underwater cinematographers are as celebrated or as meticulous as Campbell. In 1998, after 20 years of shooting 16mm film as well as videos for television productions, he plunged into the world of HD cinematography and has never looked back. He runs his own production company out of Santa Barbara, CA, and often appears as a featured speaker at film festivals, such as the prestigious Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival in Wyoming and Wildscreen, in Bristol, England.
Many of his award-winning productions on white sharks, giant mantas, and other marine creatures appear on Discovery, National Geographic, and other channels worldwide. Nine years ago, he produced and shot the first-ever HD show for Discovery Hong Kong on the Lost Civilization of Yanaguni, Japan, and in 2004 he produced and shot the very first HD show for the History Channel, about the sinking of the I-169 submarine in Truk Lagoon.

Campbell now uses two Sony F900R HD cameras, a Sanken mic mounted on the camera, and IDX batteries. He travels with eight IDX ENDURA (E-10) lithium ion batteries and a minimal lighting kit that includes HMIs for underwater segments and a Dedo light kit and soft boxes for topside. Footage is cut offline on an Apple G5 workstation running Final Cut Pro, and then onlined in an HD suite in Burbank.

Q: Many people are moving to tapeless cameras, such as Sony’s XDCAM and Panasonic’s P2 solid-state recording system. Why stay on tape?

A: I don’t think solid state has arrived yet. These solid-state systems are compressed, which does not offer the kind of quality achieved by large format tape cameras at this particular time. Is it the future? Yes. But it probably won’t happen for another 3 or more years. Compressed formats are Okay for standard television viewing. It will be some time before we see disc technology where you can put 40-plus minutes of full, uncompressed 1080i on a disc, which is what we get now with tapes.

Q: For some of your longer dives, battery power must be a concern. How do you prepare for a long shoot?

A: We like the IDX batteries because they are dependable and long lasting in a compact size. Their size allows us to stack two batteries together and extend our running time even further, which is critical when we spend hours underwater on closed-circuit rebreathers to capture animal behavior. If you’re working in 150-200 feet of water, you need to know that those batteries are going to last for the duration of the dive. We also find that the IDX batteries are considerably lighter than a standard-sized battery. If you stack two of them, they are not much heavier than the single brick from other companies that we used to use.

We switched to IDX two years ago on the recommendation of Band Pro, and they’ve performed flawlessly. They travel well and pack easily thanks to their lighter weight and smaller size. Weight is a major concern for us considering we travel 10,000 miles from home on most assignments.

Q: IDX is a relative newcomer to the battery industry. Why do you trust them?
A: I think people tend to shy away from anything new. They’d rather use something less efficient as long as they know it’s going to work. One of the reasons we’ve experienced such success is that we’re willing to take risks and work with new, innovative equipment. Nine years ago, when we started shooting HD, everyone we had worked with, including National Geographic, Discovery, and even the BBC, suggested we were wasting our time with the HD format. It was never going to be a household name. Not buying into that philosophy, we continued to carefully shoot and log a library that is now nearly 500 tapes strong and is represented by the BBC as well as FootageBank in LA. And footage sales are booming.

Q: What’s the biggest misconception about HD production?
A: I’ve always heard that HD is expensive to work with. The fact is we’ve found it to be less expensive than film without sacrificing quality, easier to deal with in the field, and simply unbeatable underwater. I also think that one of the reasons that cinematographers who switch from film to HD run into difficulty has to do with the critical focus in the HD format.

There’s a 25 percent margin of error with standard definition in which focus is acceptable. That margin is narrowed to a scant 1 percent in the HD format, which leaves no room for sloppy cinematography. With SD, and for much of what television requires, you can get away with less-than-critical focus. That’s okay, but with HD it’s not, especially if you expect your pictures to be viewed on a big screen. So my advice when shooting HD is to always consider that your images will be seen on the big silver screen. You should shoot for perfection all the time.

If you don’t take the time to learn how to shoot HD, you’re not going to get the vibrant colors and tack-sharpness that HD is capable of delivering.

For more information on IDX batteries, visit http://www.idxtek.com/.