Hollywood Takes to Sony's Hi-Def Heavyweight
by Erik Jay

Jerome Tanner, a director who has worked on both mainstream Hollywood productions as well as award-winning adult films, uses the Sony HDW-900 CineAlta Hi-Definition camera. At about $103,000 it costs as much as a nice house in Iowa or a nice Mercedes in Beverly Hills.

The HDW-900 was the first hi-def camera to achieve mainstream acceptance from the Hollywood filmmakers who often follow the tech-savvy early adopters working in the adult genre. Tanner is not as much of a technophile as some of his colleagues—Axel Braun and Michael Ninn come immediately to mind—but is a well-regarded filmmaker who employs state-of-the-art technology (and the people who’ve mastered it) to get the results he envisions for his productions.

Say goodbye to telecine tedium

The Sony HDW-900, which Quentin Tarantino protégé Richard Rodriguez used to film “Once Upon a Time in Mexico” and “Spy Kids 2,” is renowned for “looking like film.” It records images in a format called 24p that, like film, records 24 complete frames per second; each frame has a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels for a true widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio. Digital tapes can store around 50 minutes of footage per tape.

By setting up the camera correctly, it is possible to achieve a visual dynamic range of around 10 stops of exposure. The footage captured on the HDW-900 can be immediately transferred to a computer-based editing and post-production environment through its serial digital interface (SDI) port. Because the entire process is completely digital, the problems associated with converting film through the “telecine” method are completely eliminated.

Digital cinema projection would complete the “digital film jigsaw puzzle” and allow for a fully digital film experience, all the way from movie set to theater. Absent digital theaters, however, today’s HDW-900 feature films go from the post production suite to a specialized facility; there they are scanned and printed onto 35mm film for theatrical release. Using hi-def for this process yields the best possible results because it shares the same frame rate as 35mm film—so every frame of the digital source can be copied to a frame of the celluloid print.

Fits in any workflow

If a production is bound for the smaller TV screen, a hi-def workflow allows a project shot at 24 frames progressive scan to be converted, seamlessly and “on the fly,” into any of the TV formats. Since it converts into any of the standard definitions (PAL, NTSC, etc), a 24p master provides a path to all the viewing formats a filmmaker may need.

So the HDW-900 output looks good—but how does it sound? In film production environments like adult that do not often budget for dialog replacement, capturing good audio during a shoot is critical. In a test conducted in 2003 by audio manufacturer Sound Devices, the Sony camera’s “audio performance (measured from analog input to the digital recording)” was judged to be “good to very good through the line inputs [and] better than most analog audio recorders.”

After exhaustive testing, the Sound Device engineers concluded that the HDW-900’s “performance surpasses a Beta SP camera by a wide margin,” and that for “dialog, music recording, and loud sound effects, the on-board audio is very usable, especially when hit with line level signals with good control of maximum level.” A good sound man on the crew, getting good signals from the microphones on the set, will thank the “big Sony” during post production—as will the actors, director and producers. The Sony HDW-900 makes all of them look, and sound, their best.

Published in XBiz Premiere magazine, July 2007.