The Star Trek franchise, for instance, seriously considered switching to the Panavised version of Sony's 24p cameras around the time Voyager was winding down, and the new show, Enterprise, was prepping. This talk was so serious that a side-by-side comparison of images captured using the standard Voyager Panavision 35mm film package and the Sony/Panavision 24p system was commissioned.
“We thought the pictures were often good [with HD], but it was a non-starter,” says cinematographer Marvin Rush. “As soon as we saw how the 24p camera handled pyrotechnics, everybody agreed it wasn't right for our show. The camera just can't take overloads. If you shoot off pyrotechnics on set, you might lose three or four frames in film. You lose significantly more in 24p, and you resolve much less detail in the individual pieces of pyrotechnics than with film. Since we do a lot of close-up pyrotechnics, and often work in low light, we needed what only film could give us.”
Dan Curry, the show's visual effects producer, adds that the need to change speeds for effects' shots further discouraged them from using HD for the show. “When we shoot explosions, we want the option of shooting at many different frame rates,” says Curry. There are software programs that can artificially create the illusion of high-speed photography in post, while such techniques were unacceptable to Rush and Curry who needed to capture the detail of the effect at high speed for maximum quality.
The 24p cameras, “were also incapable of handling the kind of contrast we wanted to light for,” adds Rush. “We have bright sources two to three stops over [key]. The 24p camera clipped the highlights where the film held detail. Also, the camera itself was unwieldy. Not totally unusable, but unwieldy by comparison with the 35mm camera we use. We do a lot of handheld work, and we can transmit a signal wirelessly to a monitor. We couldn't do that with the 24p equipment we looked at.”
