HD FOOTAGE LARGE AND SMALL
by Paula Lumbard
April celebrated the sixth anniversary of when I tied my life to High Definition cinematography by starting FootageBank HD, the first footage licensing company dedicated to HD native content. It’s been a fantastic ride with a bullet-like speed that I do not think will slow.
Broadcasters around the world are demanding all their top productions in high definition. To service this growth industry, the need for high definition footage continues to grow exponentially. Each month the number of feature films shot in HD grows, and all network as well as most cable productions are finishing in HD. It does not matter if clients are making a trade show, point of purchase video (now using vertical and horizontal content), or a spot for Nike that will air on the Internet as well as in theaters and television. They are all finishing in a high definition format.
We are more than twenty years into HD’s technological development and the public has learned to “speak HD.” We at FootageBank HD are no longer explaining to our clients the difference between interlaced and progressive formats, or whether or not HD is “here to stay.”
Our current clients prefer footage captured in native 1920 x 1080 format at a progressive frame rate (rather than interlaced). This, at times, has created a problem for the end user of footage. The thirty frames per second interlaced format has been chosen by many of our documentary shooters as it allows them to capture a real life feel in scenes with motion, speed, and content from the natural world.
With 90% of our clients ordering in 24p (really 23.98PsF), progressive frame rate content is dominating this particular “format war”. When I have a choice I tell our DP’s to shoot progressive. Many of them are now re-shooting footage in 24p that they had previously submitted to FootageBank HD in 1080i. This does not mean we do not accept footage shot in the interlaced format. We do, but find it currently sells less frequently when clients have a choice to source a shot from a progressive rather than interlaced master.
FootageBank HD was founded with the mission to represent producers and cinematographers who live on the outer edge of cinematic exploration. They tend to be futurists such as Barry Clark, President of Telenova Productions, and James Mathers, Cinematographer and President of the Digital Cinema Society. These men and dozens more people like them such as Randall Dark and Dave Stump have worked on the frontier of high definition technology always looking to the next horizon of even higher resolution digital cinematography. They are pioneers who help forge potential opportunities such as creating content (whether clips, short films or full scale productions), for digital delivery and multicasting to platforms large and small.
Webisode, mobisode, minisode, broadband, podcast, webcast, mobicast: these words are flooding the newswires, blogs, websites and trade publications that cover business trends and development in the media, entertainment and communication sectors. More and more producers of content are accessing their media in an electronic environment and short form programming is being created specifically to inform, entertain, and market to what is now called the “web centered” viewer.
Television is no longer the first medium that viewers under 30 go to for news and entertainment. In addition, television is no longer the first medium that marketers look to sell their products. Product marketing has changed from a “push” to a “ pull” model; away from pushing your product to the viewers to “pulling the viewers” to the product by creating media viewers want to see.
Programming targeting the web-centered viewing market is expected to explode in the next 12-24 months, and I believe the pace has been quickened by the recent WGA strike. Network producers are now creating webisodes as well as episodes of their television programs. Major commercial brands from Ford, to Hershey’s Chocolate, to Norelco are developing short form programming directed at selected demographics of those consumers who access their media in smaller bits and bytes from a mobile platform. This creates opportunity for shooters.
More and more cinematographers are contacting me asking if we will accept footage created with the new smaller HD cameras such as the Panasonic P2 and Sony XD-Cams.
As of yet our clients are hesitant to accept footage from most of these cameras because most use an interframe compression. However, footage shot with the smaller HDV and HD digital cameras is ideal for web content producers creating product for mobile media be it cell phones, hand held video players or computer screens. FootageBank HD is currently developing a product line specifically targeted to the web and mobile media buyer. Our royalty free 16 x 9 e-commerce website called footagehead will launch in June. We are building the site with the web media producer in mind. footagehead will offer a whole new line of downloadable footage shot by the professionals we represent using these small versatile cameras.
These smaller cameras are allowing our DP’s to bring to the table footage not usually accessible to us like the most extreme sports, hard to reach locations, and other extreme content such as documentation of war and conflict around the world. We are converting this content from digital files shot on the P2 to HD D5. It will take the next several months to see if our clients such as shows like Weeds, 24, Men in Trees and Ugly Betty are receptive to this specific image workflow. I expect the acceptance of converted footage will grow as viewers become acclimated to seeing images with varying pixel ratios while watching footage on their computers thereby increasing their tolerance for mixed pixel ratios in their television viewing.
FootageBank HD also offers reduced rates for web media projects that are finishing in HD and need HD master content.
While we test converting HD digital files captured by P2 cameras, we are simultaneously preparing to offer our HD clients footage shot with the new “large format” cameras such as the RED ONE Camera. FootageBank HD formed the Red Camera Collective in collaboration with the Digital Cinema Society (DCS), a nonprofit corporation dedicated to educating and informing the entertainment industry about digital motion picture production, post, delivery, and exhibition. FootageBank HD is representing DCS RED ONE shooters for stock licensing and will be donating 5% of our earnings to the Digital Cinema Society. Already we are working with RED ONE owners to build a portfolio of content so we will be ready for the emerging client base wanting content in 2K and 4K native files.
As you can see, the landscape of opportunities is expanding with what seems like the speed of light. 
