Postworld

The Endless Battle: Production vs. Post

I belong to an Internet discussion group called the CML, or Cinematography Mailing List. This is a group that was started a little over 10 years ago by Geoff Boyle, a fine cinematographer from the U.K., and has since grown to thousands of members. The membership largely consists of industry professionals, primarily in the camera department, but also some who work in other areas of production and have a personal or professional interest in cinematography and the many things that surround it. There are many, many very informative and lively conversations on this group, and it sometimes gets a bit heated. When that happens, the cause is often (certainly not always, but often) the endless misunderstandings between those working in production, and those working in post production.

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Collaboration

There seems to be a trend in recent years towards “do it yourself” post production, particularly on lower budgeted projects. The advent of ever cheaper technology – both on the camera side and on the post side – has helped to bring this about. And for many, the mere presence of these things has helped put them in a position to create projects that they could never have considered in years past. The development of high quality but relatively inexpensive cameras, exemplified by devices such as the Red One, the Sony EX1 and EX3, the Panasonic HVX200, and more recently the video enabled digital SLR’s from Canon (in particular the 5D and 7D models) allows individuals with talent and the right skills to create images that can rival those from much more expensive devices in many ways. And the lowering of the cost of entry for professional quality editing, compositing, and color correction systems allows those same people to finish their projects at a reasonable level of quality. Even sound editing and mixing can now be done on desktop computers with excellent results, given sensible room conditions. So the question isn’t can this be done, because obviously, it can. The question is should it be done?

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Death of film for TV is greatly exaggerrated

If you ask the average person – in or out of the television industry – whether film is still being used for television series in the U.S., the answer would probably be no. The prevailing wisdom (especially in Europe, for some reason) seems to be that film for television production is basically dead, that all television series have moved to digital formats for production. Prevailing wisdom perhaps, except that it’s just not true. Film production is still very much a part of the picture for US television, both in dramas and comedies. If you look at the current prime time schedule, and add up the totals, you would find that out of 71 shows – including all current prime time dramas and sitcoms on both the major broadcast networks and the major cable networks – 43 are on shot on various digital cameras, and 28 are shot on film (both 35mm and 16mm). Now, if you eliminate the sitcoms – which have been shot almost exclusively on video since the mid 1990’s – and just look at dramas, out of  57 shows, 33 are on digital, and 24 are on film. So for dramas, that means that 42% are still shot on film. That’s clearly a much lower number than in the past, but it’s still quite significant. Now, if you look at shows that are new (i.e., in their first season) out of 10 shows, 9 of them are digital. One might look at this as a trend, and one would probably be correct. Clearly there is a movement towards digital that can’t be ignored. But once again, if you dig a bit deeper, the pilot season that produced those 10 new shows was severely affected by the failure of the Screen Actors Guild – which has exclusive jurisdiction over television shows that are shot on film – to sign a new contract. This in turn led the studios to shoot nearly all pilots this year under a contract with AFTRA, the “other” performers’ union that has shared jurisdiction with SAG for any program that is shot on any medium other than film, in order to ensure that the pilots could be completed without the threat of an actors’ strike. Would any of these pilots have gone to film in a “normal” year? Who knows? But it would not be unreasonable to conclude that at least some of them might have.

In any case, and contrary to popular belief, film production is still alive and well for US television, although it is clearly no longer the dominant medium, even for prime time dramas. To see the complete list, go here.

Welcome!

Welcome to Postworld, the personal blog of Mike Most. Here you’ll find my views on all things related to the film and television industry (and maybe even some other stuff..), but particularly regarding post production. There’s a lot going on in our industry these days, and a lot of claims being made, and sorting through the hype to find the truth is a big part of what I hope to accomplish here. If you’ve got any questions you’d like me to touch on, feel free to send me an email and I’ll try to answer them. In the meantime, enjoy.