[Frameworks] 16:9 vs 4:3

Tue Nov 1 08:28:18 CDT 2011

I just wanted to say I've really enjoyed reading this thread and I'm glad I started it. I think DV, Super 8, HD are all great mediums and are routed into our culture historically in very unique ways that vary for each of us. It's strange that for me DV was the medium I grew up with and super 8 is something wonderful I found later whilst studying at uni. I had to hunt super 8 down and go on outings to nowhere in London to find out how it all worked! I really had no clue when I began about 5 years ago. Because I grew up in this DV age mechanical film just seemed alien to me. I mean I understood the basic principles but the layered stages of producing the images just baffled me. I was like right I stick this plastic cartridge in this camera... What! I can't look at the images I've shot straight away? There is no rewind button? I wont know what I've shot until it's developed? Come again I've just spent £12 for 3 minutes of film I can't even watch back? Ok then how do I develop this stuff then? I purchased my own developing stuff and got stuck in... chemicals go in, images come out! Amazing! But hang on I need a projector... Went and got one. Fired up my film and was truly delighted by the results! Now how do I get it on my computer to edit? Telecine? Can I do that myself? No, not really, well not if you want the images to look any good anyway. Send them off to be digitized and then finally it's editing time! 
It is funny now thinking back how confused I was when I started with film. But that cheap and easy to produce DV world that I grew up in just put up a smoke screen! I love super 8, and I love the process! All I need to do now is build my own telecine machine and I have it all at my fingertips! I'll have to start a new thread about DIY telecine....
But, thanks to all who added to this discussion! Kev  
From: ed___209 at hotmail.com
To: frameworks at jonasmekasfilms.com
Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2011 09:07:28 +0000
Subject: Re: [Frameworks] 16:9 vs 4:3

yeah you're right brook - i was being at least a little flippant, which is a stupid idea for an email list. i do think it has mainly terrible qualities as a format, but as i was saying that's more personal than an objective assessment, and as technology has changed over time, those feelings are probably quite age-related. and there are masters making masterpieces with any medium or format, of course. 

i agree with flick that hi8 is great as far as video formats go. degradation and the way the colours bleed all over the place (caused both by the format and the cheap lenses those cameras all used) are two of my favourite features, but clearly technical 'flaws'. i do disagree with one thing though, which is that i hated DV long before i'd even heard of HD (because i'd seen super8!), but as flick also says he appreciated it because of working with hi8 for so long beforehand. i guess those relationships with a medium are, as the title suggests, relationships, and relationships are personal. 

edwin

Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2011 22:26:00 -0700
From: bhinton at gmail.com
To: frameworks at jonasmekasfilms.com
Subject: Re: [Frameworks] 16:9 vs 4:3

If you see DV work by Ernie Gehr, Leighton Pierce, or others who really pushed the aesthetics of that medium and still say it "looked like shit"... something else is going on.
Brook

On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 4:18 PM, Flick Harrison <flick at flickharrison.com> wrote:

That's funny - Edwin - I started out in Hi8 and when DV tape arrived we thought it was dropped out of heaven.  You could copy and edit it a million times and never degrade?!?

The sound on Hi8 was so shitty... so very very shitty... like you had a towel stuffed into a tin can inside your speaker...
DV looks "like shit" only if you compare it to HD, and if "like shit" means "doesn't look like HD."  I have a hard time going backwards in format epochs, but after I re-orient I always grow to love it again.  

Hi8 had such a beautiful texture from the barely-discernible degradation, even after doing an expensive online edit from your camera original to a betacam master in a pro suite... desaturation, aliasing, and oooh the grain.  It actually took away the live-news immediacy of video, and when DV came out it was suddenly easier to shoot video but harder to make it look like narrative drama.

DV meanwhile was fun for docs, because it looked crisp and clear and the saturation was great, the recorded tape looked identical to a live feed, but it had a cheap edginess (maybe it was due to the pixel aspects you mentioned) that said: "independent."  I loved the colours on my Canon XL-1 and the stereo mic on that baby has never been matched.

-Flick

--* WHERE'S MY ARTICLE, WORLD?http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison
* FLICK's WEBSITE & BLOG: http://www.flickharrison.com 

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Brook Hinton
Moving Image and Sound Maker
www.brookhinton.com

Associate Professor / Assistant Chair

Film Program at CCA
California College of the Arts
www.cca.edu/film

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