What I also find is that productions have money in the budget for shooting and basic editing, but they sometimes don’t realize that if they shoot on HD tape, there may be a lot of downstream costs they’re not prepared for-everything from making down-converted dubs for the edit system [most editing systems choke on uncompressed HD] to doing a conform with expensive online-suite and deck-rental costs. So XDCAM saves you even more money in the long run. And it looks phenomenal. That’s why I feel comfortable recommending it.

Q: What type of workflow do you use?
A: It varies depending on the project, but one thing that’s fairly constant is getting either proxies or full-res dailies into editorial ASAP. Working on Wherever You Are, at the end of each day I’d have an assistant editor take a camera and copy the data onto two hard drives-one for the Final Cut edit, and the other for storing the raw data. The physical XDCAM disc serves as a second backup and sits on the shelf as an archive. Because the transfer is so fast, there was enough time to do a rough-assembly and bring it in the next day. And the economics are impressive. Using two cameras, we shot up to six hours of footage a day-that’s six disks at about $30 each-and I can output to any resolution I need, up to 1920×1080. If you compare that to 35mm film production, that’s almost 35,000 feet of film, so you’re probably talking $30,000 for stock, processing and dailies transfer. Of course, if we had been shooting in film we probably wouldn’t have shot as much material. But then the editor wouldn’t have had as many performance choices either.

During the production of behind-the-scenes elements for an EPK project, I flew to Texas with Director Eli Kabillio of Mad Dog Films, shot during the day, uploaded our footage (at 2x speed) while having dinner at the airport, and then proceeded to edit the footage on a laptop on the plane home that night. We simply played back the files directly from the camera using its FireWire connection to a 17-inch PowerBook (and mini G-raid drive) and were well on the way to a rough cut by the time we landed. It’s easy because Final Cut can edit the files natively.

Q: How does the physical XDCAM disc stand up to daily production, and is 23 GB enough capacity for you?
A: The cassette acts as a first line of defense against dust and moisture. I’ve never dropped a disc, so I can’t say whether it would be affected, but I’ve never had one fail on me. I’m a whole lot more worried when I shoot on DV or HDV videotape, because it’s skinny little tape in a fragile case. A tape deck is much more likely to screw up the media than a laser-disc system. I don’t think there’s any professional out there who hasn’t lost a tape to a bad VTR transport system. And I no longer worry about whether the camera original has bumped up against a magnet. I’m happy those days are mostly behind me now.

The ability to upload the XD disk in half real time means not having to wait to get it into an edit system. I always try to copy the files to a hard drive within 24 hours, no matter where I am in the world. It just makes the data that much more accessible (and faster) to laptop computers and editing systems. And clients love being able to look at beautiful, full-res selects the next day.

As far as capacity, I get about 65 minutes of HD footage at 35 Mbps on a single-sided disc. Sony is now coming out with a double-sided Blu-ray Disc, but for me that’s a mixed blessing. Yes, I get more capacity and thus more shooting time, but I like to take a break every hour. With twice the capacity, I can see a producer wanting me to continue to shoot longer handheld takes. I don’t see a problem with having to put the camera down to change disc every hour or so. I’m only human.

Of course when shooting a live event on a tripod or jib arm, it’s convenient to have the extra filming time without having to stagger “tape changes” between cameras. And if I were working in post and wanted to output a two-hour show, the longer disc would certainly be a blessing.

Q: The XDCAM HD format is 4:2:0, while many other tape-based cameras use 4:2:2. Does image quality suffer?
A: At 35 Mbps, the footage I get looks stunning. Every time I go into an edit suite, I’m amazed at how good it looks. It’s a tribute to how well Sony has designed the compression algorithms. Even when you look at it on a 20-foot screen it holds up. This camera has no right to look this good for so little money.

I will say that other cameras, like Sony’s F900R, have better color depth and better sharpness, which works better for green screen shoots. However, I’d bet that 95 percent of viewers would not be able to tell the difference between the two. It certainly is not a stark difference in image quality, like there is between XDCAM HD and HDV.

Q: In your opinion, what’s the biggest misconception about HD production?
A: I think too many professionals don’t realize that there’s a lot of stuff that you don’t see in the viewfinder that is very noticeable on the screen. The biggest misconception is that you can monitor an HD image on a small monitor, because you really can’t. In my opinion, you really need to have a big full-resolution monitor on set.

Even with the XDCAM HD camera, which has an SD viewfinder, it doesn’t really tell you everything. You get surprised every now and then when you come back to the edit room. Sometimes they are good surprises and sometimes they’re bad.