Comparison of Camera vs. Boom Microphone

Here’s a quick comparison I did of recording dialog with an MKH60 Shotgun Microphone mounted on a camera vs. mounted on a boom.

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Do production values matter?

We had an interesting discussion at the last Boston Media Makers meeting on the topic “Do Production Values Matter?” We set aside 30 minutes for the discussion, and a lively discussion ensued that went on for over an hour. Here’s a little video excerpt from the discussion:

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Vlogging Session Handouts

Steve Garfield, Ravi Jain and I did a session today titled “The Rise of Citizen Media and Video Blogging” at the Camera Company’s 16th Annual Pro Video Show and here are links to the handouts (PDF files):

2006.03.10-VlogHandout.pdf (guided tour of video blogs and speaker bios)

2006.03.10-VlogResources.pdf (video blogging resource directory)

Notes on the Interview

Some documentary filmmakers do interviews while others perfer to observe people and eschew the interview (in the traditions of direct cinema and cinema verite) while other filmmakers prefer informal interviews (very often used in personal documentaries); this is a matter of style that is up to each filmmaker. There is no right or wrong here, good or bad, simply different schools of thought. I like to mix things up, and choose the approach that seems to make the most sense for the subject at hand. In documentary, most decisions start with the topic and subjects, always tempered by matters of personal style and budget. I’ve collected many tips and rules of thumb over the years, here’s my collection. I never apply them all at once, rules were meant to be broken, or at least applied selectively.

Interviewing Tips and Rules of Thumb

Preparation is key. Some knowledge of the subject is important. Be familiar with your subjects background and their work and whatever is relevant for your specific film.

Pre-interview on the phone to determine if this person is right for your film. Sometimes spontaneity is more important and you will not pre-interview. Make this decision on a case by case basis, or depending on the specific topic of your film and the nature of the interviews.

Rehearse your questions out loud to make sure there is no room for misunderstanding.

Don’t forget to get the personal release form signed and make sure you have name, address, phone, email, etc. in order to be able to contact them and stay in touch. Do this before the interview starts, no release, no interview. You need to have the rights to everything that ends up in your film, otherwise, you may run into trouble later. It’s simpler and easier to ask for a release to be signed than to track them down what could be years later.

Consider putting people together to talk, sometimes couples or groups give you more; sometimes disagreements yield good.

Keep your list of questions in a notebook.

Primarily good interviewing is about observation, empathy, and preparation (knowing as much as you can about the subject to start with)

Design questions carefully give the specific issues you want to discuss. Research and Preparation is key.

Decide what setting is best for your interviewee, their home, office, in the park, in their studio?

Explain clearly to your interviewee why you are shooting them.

Depending on your stylistic choices, instruct interviewees to include questions in their response, speaking in full sentences, this will make things much easier to edit. You may have to coach your subject on this, and approach it that way, rather than telling them they are doing something wrong, explain how it makes the editing easier.

Be natural in your interviewing, this comes from practice and genuine empathy for your subject.

Depending on your stylistic choices, if you are going to redirect or interrupt interviewees let them know this in advance, make it conversational, organic.

Listen actively and carefully to make sure answers can stand alone. This gets easier the more you interview.

Listen not only for what you want, but what the interviewee is really saying, don’t rush to the next question, if you don’t have something complete or coherent, ask the question again, or take another angle on the same question. It has been my experience than very often the second time around the answers are more coherent. This, of course, depends on the nature of the interview.

Avoid vague and general questions. Ask for details, specifics, examples: this makes the interview more interesting.

Ask interviewee not to look at the camera unless you are doing first-person address (see section below on the Interrotron).

Showing people in their own environment is often my preference, some people are better when they are walking around their own space and talking to you, the walking and talking interview can be very effective, especially with artists and craftspeople who work with things.

Don’t forget to cover the environmental context, this B-Roll can be very important.

Start with factual questions and keep the more intimate or emotional information for later when the subject is more comfortable with you and relaxed and with the situation.

Try to cover each issue in more than one way to give you the ability to cut in and out of the interview in order to tighten the material.

To get into a delicate area, you can use the devil’s advocate approach, for example, saying “some people would say there’s nothing special about personal documentary” and let the interviewee respond…

Another way to get into a sensitive topic is to start with a general question and then ask for specific examples.

Practice active listening: Getting deeper: try gentle “And…” and “Yes, go on…” and even silence. Don’t be afraid of silence, sometimes it’s the best way to get more from the interviewee. Sometimes if you allow some moments of silence after an interviewee has finished adding a question, look at them, approve with your gestures, but be quiet for a moment, they might be thinking and go into something else. And if they don’t, your sound editor will appreciate having little pieces of “room tone” that match closely what was said (ambient noise often changes over time, so recording room tone an hour later yields a very different sound).

As the interview has wound down and you feel you’ve gotten all that you need, I suggest you ask: “is there any question I should have asked that I’ve not asked today?” Sometimes people will go on a whole other tangent that relates to something important to them, and sometimes this is great footage, often people have nothing to add. But just in case your subject has been wanting to say something, give them the chance, it may turn out to be what you needed for the interview.

Always acknowledge what was successful about the exchange at the end of the interview.

Be very positive and thankful, yet don’t lead your subject to believe they are going to be in the film, if they ask, explain to them that the interview was successful, but it’s eventually up to the editor what ends up in the final film, but express you’re happy with what you’ve got. Basic respect is key in managing these relationships and situations.

First or Third Person Interviews?

The subjects gaze vector (where they are looking) depends on Placement of Camera, Intervieweee and, Interviewer. Determine the audience relationship with the interviewee and choose on-axis or off-axis interviews as appropriate, a.k.a. third-person and first-person address. Third Person Address: Interviewer off camera slightly to the left or right, or under the camera lens, interviewee is talking to an off-screen presence. First Person Address: Interviewer right in the camera lens (see Interrotron below), interviewee is talking right to the audience

Movies like The Fog of War (2003) and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997) feature interviews with a very unique quality in which the interviewee is looking straight into the camera, with facial reactions that are the result of very intimate communication with the interviewer. This is accomplished through the use of a device Errol Morris calls the “Interrotron.”

The Interrotron is basically a teleprompter, but instead of projecting text in front of the camera lens for the subject to read, it projects the face of the interviewer in the camera lens. This way the interviewer and interviewee can make direct eye contact with each other and the interviewee is reacting directly to the interviewer’s facial gestures. This results in interviews with a piercing sense of intimacy, as if the interviewee was talking not just into the camera lens, but directly to us, the viewers of the film. This is often called first-person address interviews, and with the Interrotron first-person interviews achieve their most intimate and direct expression.

I have used this approach for customer testimonial interviews with two cameras capturing the close-up and medium shots simultaneously. The customers speak directly to the viewer rather than an unseen third person as is typically done in most documentaries, industrials, and broadcast news magazines. This works for some films, yet there is a reason most films don’t use it, it’s the cinematic grammar of salespeople and hucksters, however, in the right context, it can be engaging and intimate, giving the audience the experience of people talking to them, rather than to an off screen presence.

Formal or Informal Interviews?

There are many different styles of interview, when it comes to formal interviews, lighting, the setting, and composition are important. I’m reminded of the following quotes:

“The image is the basis of the visual language of motion pictures … the camera can actively comment upon or interpret what it observes, making each frame a picture worth the proverbial thousand words … the camera is to the filmmaker what brushes and oils are to the painter” – Saul J. Turell and Jeff Lieberman (from notes for the series “The Art of Film”)

“…good close-ups radiate a tender human attitude in the contemplation of hidden things, a delicate solicitude, a gentle bending over the intimacies of life-in-the-miniature, a warm sensibility. Good close-ups are lyrical; it is the heart, not the eye, that has perceived them.”— Béla Balázs in Theory of the Film

“Much of life becomes background, but it is the province of art to throw buckets of light into the shadows and make life new again.” — Diane Ackerman in The Natural History of the Senses

Which I include here because they explain better than I could why I try to carefully light, compose, and design the setting for formal interviews, when I do formal interviews (they are not always the right way to go.

Parting Words

A good filmmaker is a lifelong student, it’s a journey that never ends. Take advice, listen to criticism, it’s the path to learning, and always teach something to others as well, you learn best what you have to teach the most.

These notes were originally compiled in June of 2004, revised and posted January 23, 2006.

Suggested DVX100 settings and information links

The DVX100 offers a wide range of options and settings. Here are my suggestions based on my experience shooting with the camera in my own work and with my students in several production classes, followed by my notes and pointers to DVX100 information resources.

Suggested DVX-100A Settings

• Vertical Detail Frequency: Thin [See Note 1]
• Vertical Detail: 0
• Detail: -3 [See Note 2]
• Detail Coring: 0 [See Note 3]
• Skin Detail: Off
• Chroma: 0
• Phase: +3
• Gamma: Cine Gamma
• Matrix: Cine Look
• Master Pedestal: -3 to -6
• Format: 4:3 or 16:9 LETTERBOX [See Note 4]
• Time Code: Record Run
• First Record: Preset (set Tape #)
• Shutter Speed: 1/48 [See Note 5]
• Exposure: Use spot meter (”Marker”) in camera, highlights with some textural detail at 90%, “middle grey” ay 45-55%, dark areas with textural detail at 10-15%
• Mode/Frame Rate: 24P or 24P Advanced [See Note 6]

Start by resetting all camera settings to their default values, then set your scene settings and then name and save them into one of the camera scene files. Double check settings each time you insert a new tape or power-up the camera. These settings are a starting point, you should do your own testing and establish the look appropriate for your project. Refer to the DVX-100A User Manual for more details.

Notes

1: Vertical Detail Frequency. If you are intending to do a video to film transfer, up-convert to HD, or plan to project at festivals and other venues that are using 720P projectors, use the Thin setting. This provides the full 480 lines of vertical resolution the DVX is capable of and yields a better image when the SD video is up-converted (start with the sharpest and best image you can). The problem is that most television monitors are interlaced and thus can’t handle the high resolution, so you see what’s called line twitter (as a result of interlacing), but if you’re using a progressive display, projector, going out to film, or able to do post-processing in post production, it’s the way to go. The Mid setting brings the vertical detail down to about 400 lines reducing the twitter artifacts on an interlaced display. The Thick setting offers about 360 lines without any artifacts and ideal for material intended for SD broadcast. You will notice the twitter effects of the Thin setting when looking at a scene with lots of fine detail on an interlaced display. Another alternative is to shoot with the Thin setting and process the video in post to lower the resolution if you need material for both up-conversion to HD an SD.

2: Detail. Detail enhances edges, too much and the image starts to look electronic and artificial, like oh too many bad wedding videos. Leave off unless you have a specific need for it. A slightly softer image is part of the film look. Exaggerated edge detail is part of the video look.

3: Detail Coring. When you enhance detail, you add noise, especially in the shadows. Detail Coring reduces the added noise.

4: Aspect Ratio. Shooting 4:3 of 16:9 letterboxed within the 4:3 frame assures it plays on every TV, if you choose squeeze, you limit your screening to televisions and projectors capable of 16:9, which is not yet universal, also, some experts suggest even if you want squeeze, the scalers you can use in post will do a better job than the scaler built into the camera for creating a squeezed 16:9 version. Shoot 4:3 with vertical detail set to thin and you can get an acceptable up-convert to 16:9 HD or film out.

5: Strobing. When shooting 24P, because you are “exposing” 24 frames per second (rather than 60 fields per second as with video) you will notice “strobing” when you do a fast pan. This can be reduced by panning slowly. The rule of thumb is it should take seven seconds for an object to cross the screen as you pan. Another approach is to move with the subject and distract the viewer’s attention from the strobing background. Another way to deal with strobing is to use a lower shutter speed, the default for the DVX is 1/48 when shooting 24P, you can lower it to 1/24, for example. This will increase motion blur (not always a bad thing, it’s kind of cool and another element of the film look). At the 1/24 shutter speed there is less strobing that at 1/48, however, more motion blur. Shooting at 30p exhibits less strobing, however, this format does not convert gracefully to other formats like film (24fps) or PAL (25fps).

6: Frame Rate and Scan Mode: For the standard video look, shoot 60i. For the film look, shoot 24P Standard or 24P Advanced. Unless you understand clearly why you want to shoot 24P Advanced, Shoot 24P Standard and capture your project at 60i in Final Cut Pro (or 30i in Avid Xpress Pro). 24P standard will provide you with the film look and the ease of editing a standard video project at 29.97fps. If you chose to shoot 24P Advanced, make sure you capture the project as 23.97. 24P advanced has advantages if you want a 24fps master. 24P advanced uses a 2:3:3:2 candence to encode 24p onto 60i video and then the editing system reconstitutes the 24fps video from the 60i. Your editing system needs to know how to handle this. It’s easier to simply shoot 24P standard which uses the standard video to film cadence of 2:3 and edit standard 29.97 (60i) video in your editing system. Test before you leap.

Recommended DVX100 Information Resources

• DVX100 Pages on DVinfo.net
• DVXuser Forums
• Adam Wilt’s DV FAQ
• Adam Wilt’s DVX Page
• Cinematography Mailing List index of Video/DV notes
• “AG-DVX100 Setup Menus” by Harry W. Foulds
• The DVX-100A Owner’s Manual
• The DVX Book by Barry Green (includes DVD with examples)