DV.com has a story online and in their current issue about Robert Altman shooting his latest film, The Company, in HD format. While HD has its pros and cons, Altman, long a fan of using long takes with multiple cameras capturing page after page of dialog, really responded to the cost savings of digital tape which allowed him to shoot the equivalent of 20,000 feet of film per day.
The current model of the Sony / Panavision camera package is still a bit cumbersome. According to DP Andrew Dunn:
If we wanted to shoot in a corridor and then move upstairs with a film camera, you just lift up the camera and the tripod, grab a couple of batteries, go upstairs, and you're ready. With the HD system, there is all the cabling and the sound issues and monitoring. It seemed inordinately complicated. If I were to move upstairs with HD, it would probably take an hour and a half. I don't think it always has to be quite like that. But it's pretty cumbersome.
"When you're timing a movie negative traditionally, you can alter the color and density, but you can't do very much about contrast. And here we are with electronic color-correction changing contrast and changing light levels within a frame. We're timing the image off disk on a big screen that is projected. If I don't like the color of a light through a window or if somebody was standing in the shadows, we can separate that person and bring them to more prominence in lighting level. That is really exciting.
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