On Using HD-SDI to Get 4:2:2 Footage Out of Canon's XL H1

For the current season of John Edward Cross Country on WE tv, director of photography/engineer David Thaler was charged with devising a cost-effective solution to shoot live-to-tape in a studio and pick up ENG shots at the same time outside the studio. Two things made this different from standard live-to-tape shows: it had to be in HD, and it had to be ultra-portable so the crew could follow Edward around the country, recording shows and extra content for the Web site. The cameras Thaler ended up choosing for these eight-camera shoots – the compact HDV Canon XL H1 and G1 – seem, at first, slightly surprising. But Thaler notes the cameras’ HD-SDI outs, genlock, lens configuration and, of course, cost made them a perfect option for the job
Describe the challenges of shooting The John Edwards Show and talk about how you changed the solution for the shoot from what they had been doing.
We came on and the first episode we shot in a studio in New York. They were running the feeds out of the Sony Z1U camera, and they were calling the show live but they weren’t doing a line cut. So I thought, why not do a line cut and have it in full HD? When we went back in the studio they decided to step this up. We had eight cameras (Canon XL H1 and XL G1) – two on big dollies, one on a jib and two on studio tripods – and then a couple remote cameras roaming around. We sent timecode to all the cameras and locked them all together and ran all those cameras HD-SDI out to a Panasonic switcher, which has five inputs with a sixth DVI input. So we took the HD-SDI feeds out of the cameras going straight in to the switcher, going out through an AJA Io HD out to a laptop via FireWire 800 with off-the-shelf LaCie e-SATA drives. So for about $160 we were getting about 6 hours of 10-bit, full 1920×1080 HD in the ProRes codec.

So at the end of the day they had the whole line cut on that hard drive. Then we’d dump the ISO cameras off to it, we’d dump all the audio off onto it, so they would leave with one drive that had all that material on it. We were also backing up to tape, the Panasonic DVCPRO HD 100.

At the time there was no other real solution for what we needed. Other cameras of this size had no timecode and no SDI out. The HD-SDI out gives you the 4:2:2 color space you need for proper color-correction for a broadcast show. At the time there was no other camera in that price range with those features.

Besides the HD-SDI out, why was the Canon XL H1 a good solution for this shoot?
The client wanted to capture some of these road shows and also produce some content that they would own for the Web site. We needed something that would work in the controlled studio environment but also be able to fly around the country. I was able to bring thie flypack out to LA by myself: three cameras, the switcher, the AJ Io, the laptop, hard drives, everything but the tripods. We did a shoot there and then brought it to Vegas where I showed it at NAB.

Because we kept the cases and the weight to a certain restriction we could bring it on the plane with us, which is a huge advantage – to be able to just get off the plane, put it in the rental car and drive off.

Were the lens options also a factor in choosing the Canon cameras?
The first reason we went to the camera is the lenses. We had been putting primes on the Sony Z1U and we had to get this whole contraption just to mount a telephoto lens. We were shooting in a 5,000-seat arena, and the camera had to be placed in the back and still get closeups. So when were looking to change cameras we wanted a camera we could put a lens on without losing all this light and f-stops, because we were putting glass in front of glass. We got the cameras with that in mind but when we got the H1 cameras it had a long enough throw on it that we were able to use the lens that came with the camera. Even the G1, which you can’t take the lens off, has a wide end and a long throw to get tight.

Because of the camera’s small size we were able to mount two cameras side-by-side on the jib and had one wide and one tight so we could do moves and then dissolve between the two cameras.

Obviously the production needs to alter the line cut, which means going back to the HDV tapes recorded in the cameras. Were there issues or concerns cutting between the HD material and the HDV material?
We did tests where we looked at the footage out of the HD-SDI feed and compared it to the footage recorded to the tape and went back and forth in the timeline, and we could not see a difference between the two. It held up remarkably well. That said, I’m sure if there was a lot you needed to do in color-correction there would be some issues. But for this we were in a studio with a good lighting set-up, so everything looked great right out of the box.