Barber made the famous talking car look its best with two Sony F23 cameras in HD mode

Independent DP Jamie Barber used a Sony F23 camera to shoot all of the live action (day and night scenes) for the recent two-hour NBC television movie Knight Rider, recording footage to a Sony HDCAM SR deck.
One version of the car (three different ones were used during shooting) can be operated via remote control from a mile away. The F23 was also used in the studio for all of the visual-effects work. Several Iconix HD POV cameras were mounted inside the car for several scenes of the driverless car in action.



Using the camera handheld, on a Steadicam rig, and on tripods, Barber worked with a variety of Zeiss DigiPrime and DigiZoom lenses to capture a lot of wide-angle shots inside the car. He and the crew are waiting to hear if the pilot will be picked up for a full series run. (The original series ran for 90 episodes.) Steve Shill (Dexter, The Tudors), served as a co-producer and directed for Universal Media Studios and Dutch Oven Productions.

Q: Why was the Sony F23 chosen for this shoot?
A: I visited another set in Chicago where the F23 was being used, and I was quite impressed. Bob Primes was shooting a movie there and he was working on this scene where the actor was illuminated only by a small lamp. The bulb was in frame and it wasn’t flaring. I was blown away, the image was that stunning.

So, when we started talking about working on Knight Rider, I knew we would be using the small Iconix HD cameras inside the car and I realized we had to work with an HD camera that could match those images. So, recognizing that I would be shooting both inside and outside the car, and there would be a wide range or latitude of light, I wanted what I feel is the best camera for the job. The F23 has wide latitude, so it was perfect. We had two on the set.

Q: How did you feel the F23 performed?
A: We set it up and it worked very well. I found it very easy to use. I had a brilliant DIT in Derek Grover, and once he set them up we were off and running – sometimes quite literally. I wish we had used the camera’s off-speed shutter features, but I didn’t get the chance on this shoot.

Recording 4:2:2 on tape was also a big advantage, because there were times when space was limited so I could remove the back end of the camera to make it fit into tight spaces inside the car. The camera was used in uncompressed mode for the VFX work.

Q: What features stood out for you?
A: Well, again, I liked the camera’s dynamic range and generous latitude of exposure. When I was inside the car there were times when we would be driving down the road and we would be going in and out of clouds, so the light of the interior would stay constant but outside the windows changed drastically very quickly. The camera dealt with that so well. I didn’t have to worry about the image clipping. That was so much better than any other electronic camera I had used before.

The opening scene is lit dark and moody and the camera just handled it so well. Some parts of that scene were lit with several flashlights against a white board (when the actors are looking for the car in the dark) and the camera performed great.

That’s one of the problems when shooting HD. You get this wide range of light readings, the shadows are really low, and the brights are really high. Other HD cameras just don’t deal with that very well, and the image on screen ends up looking washed out or underexposed.

Q: What’s the biggest misconception about HD production?
A: The biggest misconception I find about HD is that I constantly hear that “the end product is going to look like video.” I say if you’re careful that’s just not the case. Today’s HD cameras really can emulate the look of film.

All of the footage we got looked great, it didn’t have that HD feel. The images looked soft, but not too soft and they had bigger range than normal. And when we blew it up it looked better than you’d expect.

It was funny – after the Knight Rider film aired on NBC [on February 17th], Derek texted me and said, “You nailed it. You’ve just killed the use of film in television.”