Pixel shock.

So I’m sitting in a room, surrounded by a mess of wires and about a half a million dollars worth of fancy equipment. There are two things that I find notable about it.

First, all of this cutting edge technology--with its fans and glowing displays and the rumor about being originally developed for spy satellites-- is for the mere purpose of putting a moving picture on your TV screen. You’ll hopefully spend two hours watching, and then turn it off and say “Well, that was nice.”

The second notable thing: None of it works.

It’s kind of an amazing thing to see, actually. A tech’s been called in, he’s frantically switching out cables, his cell phone keeps ringing and he tries to continue troubleshooting while taking verbal “suggestions” from his bosses. My boss stops by every few minutes, asking when it will be fixed, and I have to find another way to tell him “I don’t know” that doesn’t make me sound ignorant. The scheduler at the color house calls every hour or so, wondering when it will be fixed, because we are six hours late for our session which costs $450 an hour.

Welcome to life in HD. After years of the FCC’s gleaming promises of better tv for everyone, I’m now Post Supervisor on a show that needs to deliver in HD. It’s my first HD show, the picture’s locked, and we’re working in 1280x720, sixty frames a second. It feels like the edit bay is held together by duct tape.

While our problem is a little extreme, it’s not out of the norm, and finding the answers to the questions has been really hard; someone may be able to tell you the differences between the sixteen different HD formats, but each format has its own little bugs. Good luck finding someone who’s actually finished a project in all sixteen. In fact, one of the best ways to tell if someone is actually an expert in HD is if they tell you “It’s all so new, no one knows anything.”

All of this has given me a new party line about HD for my personal projects: Not yet. Unless you already have a delivery requirement, only use HD for acquisition. Edit it in a way so that you can later remaster it in HD (which may mean generating HD graphics and down converting them), but don’t go through the effort of an HD finish if this is spec – buyers and festival judges will be looking at a regular DVD anyway.

Instead, finish it in NTSC anamorphic. A regular DVD player can take advantage of it, and it’s what you’d do with your HD master, anyway. Why suffer the pains of the extra disk space and buggy software in order for a format that no one can see, anyway?

Andy