PRACTICAL DV FILMMAKING

Practical DV FilmMaking

• Overview
• Inside video
• Films and how they work
• Pre-production
• Production tools
• Production aesthetics
• Post-production tools
• Post-production aesthetics
• Careers and distribution
• Mapping the industry
• Glossary of film and video terms

Each step of the curve is recorded as a number and this can then be reproduced more accurately than the analog signal on the left.

offers what many are looking for at the price they can afford, while VHS was neither quality nor did it have a specific 'look' as did 16 mm film. Why was VHS analog so bad? If you take a picture and photo­copy it you produce a version of the original. But if you want to re-copy it you lose some information and the resulting copy is less clear than the original. Repeat this process several times and you end up with a muddy, unclear image. With digital, you are approaching the picture wholly differently: imag­ine breaking the tonal values and colours of that photo down into numerical values, in turn represented by ones and zeros. You have then got a set of instructions for the make-up of that picture and can send these instructions anywhere. All that it requires is that the receiver has the same information as the sender in order to be able to reassemble the image from the numbers it is given. With the right decod­ing knowledge it will reconstruct the image. Furthermore, because it exists in terms of numbers, it can be manipulated more easily, so that a picture can be turned black and white by exchanging one set of numbers for another, while keeping the rest unchanged.

Why choose DV?

Picture resolution

In general, the resolution of a picture on DV is about 25 per cent better than a comparable image on S-VHS - the best consumer-level tape for analog - and has about twice the horizontal resolution of a VHS recording. Low-priced mini-DV offers about the same quality as Betacam, previously the high­est level analog format, which is a remarkable leap forward for the low-budget filmmaker.

Colour rendition

This refers to how well the format reproduces colour accurately. Analog is prone to vision 'noise' or interference, which smears and blurs colours. With DV, colour rendition is more true to what the digital camera first recorded. Edges are sharper and shapes more defined. But, as with analog, a lack of adequate light in DV filming quickly reduces quality. When you go up to better quality cameras - three-chip camcorders - things improve as the range of colour that can be recorded is larger, with each chip accommodating one of three colours rather than one chip having to cover all three.

Copying

DV offers greater quality control when copying