Leitner's Cinematography Corner

Sony SxS Pro card, 32GB of eggs in one basket, meant to be emptied sooner or later.

Since this is Cinematography Corner #13, I thought I’d share a cautionary tale bristling with misadventure and dunder-headed mistakes.

I had the privilege of touring Canon headquarters in Tokyo in November 2008, and one take-away from this visit was that solid-state flash recording is not only here to stay but positioned in product road maps to replace tape, sooner than later. And not just in consumer and low-end professional camcorders—as past months have demonstrated.

So I am entirely reconciled to this eventuality. The same can’t be said, however, of a lot of producers I know. There’s a certain nagging detail that troubles them: If videotape is no longer used, what will be treated as the original? And is there a bulletproof way to store ephemeral digital video files over the long term?

I wish there were simple answers to these valid concerns. Archiving is a nettlesome topic in our file-based era in which physical media are mere bit buckets, divorced from any connection to image quality.

No recording medium was ever idiot-proofed. Cans of exposed film, for instance, were inadvertently opened and flashed. Videocassettes were susceptible to strong magnetic fields.

However, for the most part videocassettes provided immunity to mishandling. Their hard shells, low-friction rollers, shuttered holes, and spring-loaded lids successfully protected fragile videotape as it spooled into a VTR’s tape path and back again.

Best of all, from a producer’s standpoint, videotape shot in the field was a tangible product. It was a thing, an artifact representing 30 or 60 minutes’ worth of filming. You could hand it to an editor, put it on a shelf, archive it. Like wampum or beads, it wasn’t money per se but embodied considerable value.

By contrast, when you’re capturing digital video files to a flash memory card, then offloading them to a drive, they might as well be fairy dust.

That’s why years of habit in the field—ejecting videocassettes from the camera, marking them, collecting and organizing them, knowing they’ll preserve the images the crew worked so hard to create—can lead to complacency and mishap.

Last week I produced a brief two-day shoot in Miami. The director/DP was shooting 720p slo-mo on a beach with a Sony PMW-EX1R. He’s experienced and knows what he’s doing. We only needed one day of shooting but had scheduled two just in case. Weather, performance, gremlins, you never know.

Footage from the first day was great. To view it that night, we captured it to an iMac (borrowed from a friend) using Sony’s PDZKP1 XDCAM Transfer Plug-In for Apple Final Cut Pro. This step swaps the original MPEG-4 file wrapper (.mp4) for a QuickTime (.mov) file wrapper and imports the resulting files into the browser window of FCP.

(Note to Sony. Please take a page from JVC’s GY-HM100U and GY-HM700UXTU camcorders, both of which borrow your XDCAM EX codec and offer a choice of either .mp4 or .mov file wrappers. Recording directly to QuickTime files is a revelation in simplicity. It eliminates this wonky XDCAM Transfer step altogether. What a joy it would be to view EX files immediately on the Mac desktop or even directly from the EX camcorder itself, connected via USB 2.0.)

Anyway, back to my cautionary tale.

The first day’s dailies, viewed the first night, were great. They told us, however, that an extreme facial close-up was needed. The next day we waited for sunset and the perfect lighting for our subject. Since we had considerable space left on the 32GB SxS card used the previous day, we continued to record to it, filling it with our final shots.

After the sun dropped, we wrapped and raced to the Fort Lauderdale airport to catch our plane back to New York.

Weather in New York was awful, delaying flights up and down the East Coast. Instead of arriving on time after midnight, the director/DP and I each arrived home at 4 a.m. Exhausted, of course.

Before he went to bed, the director/DP connected the EX1R to his Mac tower, opened Final Cut and XDCAM Transfer, and began the time-consuming procedure of ingest and conversion of .mp4 files into QuickTime files. Then he crashed to bed.

When he awoke four hours later, sleepy but anxious to start the edit, he checked FCP’s browser, saw that all files had been transferred, played the first file to check—then, with the EX1R still connected via USB 2.0, dragged the camera’s BPAV folders, which contained the original .mp4 files, into the Mac’s trashcan, in order to empty the 32GB card for his next shoot.

I think you can guess where this is heading…

In sad fact, only about half of the .mp4 files had been ingested properly. The second half were indicated by file name as residing in FCP’s browser but upon examination contained 0MB. The sleep-challenged director/DP had only played back the first few files as a check and had missed this anomaly.

Why did we not take the time to immediately back up the contents of the 32GB card after the second day’s shoot? My carelessness. I know better. Mad rush to the airport or not.

Why did the exhausted director/DP start the XDCAM Transfer process before he went to sleep and not wait until he was refreshed and clear-headed?

Why did he not first make a copy of the original BPAV folders and commence the transfer process from the copy, instead of transferring directly from the EX1R, with no backup?

Why on earth did he try to clear the 32GB SxS card without first fully backing it up?

Mistakes will be made. Always and forever.

Wait until you’ve been juggling flights, multiple productions, fluctuating funds, film festival deadlines, a family, an AWOL actor, countless technical challenges—bundled with an artist’s anxiety to plunge in head first.

Had we been shooting videotape…

Thankfully the first day’s shoot, the most important, had been preserved on my friend’s iMac in Miami. The director/DP had done a rough edit that first night, so we knew already which files we needed in New York. Our Miami friend uploaded them to my .Mac site, so we were back in business within a day.

What about those close-ups of the actress’s eyes lit by the setting sun? Were the deleted files able to be restored from the erased SxS card? Stay tuned.