The DV Revolution - Other Considerations

[Richard Brown]

One other note, one of the areas which separates professional 
production from "home movies" is the attention a film set gives to 
sound. Always assume, even when shooting with a DV camera, that you 
will be recording your audio separately, preferably feeding the content 
also to the camera's inputs (both the aforementioned PD-150 and 
Panasonic come with XLR connections, and the Canon is easily adapted to 
XLR), but you will want the audio recording to timecode DAT, or perhaps 
even pro level MiniDisc in the field. Having good field audio, 
including basic necessities such as room tone and other wild recordings 
any experienced production mixer will do as a matter of course, simply 
provide quality in the final mix. Amongst the limitations of the 
prosumer cameras is their lack of timecode sync facilities, not to 
mention good, but non-professional audio circuitry.  However, the 
digital formats involved generally can survive such "unlocked" 
recordings for the time interval of a single take. Bumping a copy of 
the professional mix onto the camera's onboard tracks, combined with 
proper use of a production clapper slate, will make syncing/checking 
the audio a fairly simple task. It will also identify drift when it 
occurs, allowing you to fix it. You just digitize the DV (DVCAM in the 
case of the PD-150 or the Panasonic) into your editor like Final Cut 
Pro, and drop the matching DAT/MiniDisc recording on another (pair) of 
track(s). In editors like FCP, bumping the pro audio into sync is easy. 
Then, dump the camera recorded audio and continue. Remember that after 
editing, you'll probably be taking the audio via OMF to a digital audio 
workstation (DAW) like ProTools or Nuendo (a new version is arriving 
soon).

Another, equally critical aspect, in professional production, is the 
lighting, which hopefully works in concert with other details: set 
design, art direction, blocking, camera movement. If you are a 
documentarian, then this does not necessarily apply. In DV production, 
you have the option of using "Film Look" post processing, which is most 
forgiving to footage that has been shot with care. Often, on set, 
you'll be shooting in manual exposure mode, hopefully lighting to both 
a waveform/vectorscope and a decent broadcast monitor. In this 
situation, a D.P. with video experience and a good Gaffer would be a 
truly wise decision.

Just a note or two, FWIW,

Richard Brown