Cinematographer Feature

From Here to Infinity
By Jon Silberg
Mar 13, 2008, 07:21

When cinematographer and technical maven Scott Billups was hired to create portions of the Discovery Channel's Bone Detectives, he naturally sought out a camera that could provide crisp, robust imagery for the significant amount of greenscreen work that would be involved. Billups makes it a point to try out new imaging technology as it appears--he's shot with Sony's HDW-F900, Thomson's Viper, Panasonic's VariCam and the much-discussed RED ONE from RED Digital Cinema--so when the long-awaited Thomson Infinity camera became available, he was happy to test it. Though his first choice for the job would have been the RED, he explains, "It wasn't possible because of the recall [of the first set of RED cameras], but the Infinity worked out very well."

The show, hosted by Archaeologist Scotty Moore, takes a look at historical forensic cases--"Think CSI meets the world of archeology," Billups elaborates--and follows teams of scientists as they use clues and state-of-the-art technology to solve mysteries at sites including Egyptian tombs and Mayan burial grounds.

A significant portion of each episode consists of live-action elements shot in front of a greenscreen; the live action is later composited in post with CGI backgrounds. For Billups' episodes, those backgrounds were generated at his Hollywood Hills facility--Pixelmonger--in Mac-based software such as Autodesk Maya and E-on Software Vue.

For the greenscreen shoots, Billups would use actors in costume and lighting effects so Pixelmonger artists and compositors could subsequently track in the CGI backgrounds. "For the Mayan episode," he recalls, "we had guys jumping from boulder to boulder and walking through caves holding torches which illuminate the dead bodies strewn all over the place. For that we used interactive lighting effects. Different shows have different gags. For another Mayan show set outside, we had people in the foreground and then thousands more and huge temples in the background."

Billups shot some portions with an F900/3, but for two episodes--"Shadow of the Sun Lord" and "Celebration of Death"--he sought out a better image, which brought him to the Infinity. These episodes involved a greater amount of compositing of images under low-light conditions, such as cave and building interiors. "A clean signal is especially important in this kind of situation because noise can pick up the green bounce and contaminate the shadows," Billups explains.

"The F900 can be very noisy," he adds. "The Infinity is an order of magnitude cleaner. I've shot features with the F900 and the image can be nice, but it's grainy and it doesn't have the color space. It's 20-year-old technology. I don't mean the new 'R' version of the F900 or the F23--which is a monster camera--but I knew we could do better for these greenscreen shots than the F900."

Billups was among the first cinematographers to do anything with Thomson's Viper, so, he explains, "the Thomson people were very comfortable letting me try out the Infinity. Chroma key work is dependent on a good noise floor and good color space. That's it. Everything else is methodology, but those are the things you need technologically. The RED wasn't available. I couldn't get to the newer Sony cameras, and the Viper is older technology. It still gives a brilliant image, but it is not as clean for chroma key work as the newer systems. I wouldn't say it's in the top five cameras available anymore in terms of the cleanest image."

He stored the Infinity camera output on Iomega REV PRO drives using Thomson's proprietary codec; additionally, he recorded the camera's HD-SDI stream directly onto on-site Macs via an AJA 2K card. This workflow allowed editorial to work with the compressed material while Pixelmonger could composite with the purer output.

In addition to the image the Infinity, with its 14-bit A-to-D converter, can offer, Billups was also impressed by the camera's ease of use. "The single most outstanding feature with the Infinity is that a sixth grader could use it," he asserts. "I'm tired of unnecessarily obtuse and esoteric gear. To me, it's a mark of poorly made equipment. If you need a manual to operate it, it's poorly designed. Try to change the black level on an F900. What about adjusting the angle of the knee. Or name anything. You have to go into the matrix, and then you're lost. There are 6,000 options in the F900 matrix! With the Infinity, everything is easy to understand and well thought out."

Billups, wanting the purest image possible, set his gain at -3dB and adjusted black level, white level and knee to allow the camera to do as little image processing as possible. Since he had complete control over lighting the stage, he could keep the illumination consistent to within one stop over and under the key. "You could get away with lighting to three stops over or under," he says, though he adds that doing so would introduce noise and undermine the cleanliness of the image. Of the Infinity, Billups sums up, "It's one of the easiest cameras to use. It has a very clean signal with very low noise, and the image has a textured feel to it. It's not 'video-y' unless you specifically shoot it that way."

Bone Detectives premiered on the Discovery Channel in January and is scheduled for release on DVD and Blu-ray in the near future.




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