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Is HD too HD? Article on TheAtlantic.com

Came across this interesting article via DVXuser.com on a commentary by a Jason Baily entitled “Are Indie Movies getting too pretty?” He talks about how everybody and their mother is shooting with a Red or Cannon HD camera and how he was relieved to see a movie shot on 16mm that looks grainy and blurry.

Don’t know about you but I don’t miss the days of blurry VHS style video one bit but as you know it’s all about the story. I watched this video a day ago and it was obviously shot on some shitty VHS camera but the story and rawness was excellent can’t find the youtube link but it was about a bunch of women who jumped into boxcars riding across part of the US – very entertaining. For me I think the biggest downfall of most cheap cameras is dynamic range and color. 16mm probably has the dynamic range of a $50k video camera and the color to match, sure, sharpness will be an issue. We can also add some effects in post, Magic Bullet Looks, to give it more of a stylized look and hey, how about using more than one type of camera 🙂 Interesting read none the less.

Here is the first paragraph:


When the opening images of Macdara Vallely’s Babygirl unreeled in front of me at the Tribeca Film Festival, they proved a bit of a shock to my glossed-over eyes. After several days of indie rom-coms and evocative documentaries photographed in smooth-as-silk high-definition video, here was a movie shot in Super 16mm—and it looked it. The image was grainy, grubby, dirty. Frankly, after four films a day in pristine HD, it was a little ugly. And that was something of a relief.

Head on over to the Atlantic to read the rest of the article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/04/are-indie-movies-getting-too-pretty/256367/

Written by: JASON BAILEY – Jason Bailey is a writer at Flavorpill.

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