Impulse

When I first started doing video, I thought it would be an easy tran­si­tion from still pho­tog­ra­phy. They both cap­ture light through a lens, iris, and shut­ter. One moves; the other doesn’t. That’s no big dif­fer­ence, right? Wrong. I’ve been sur­prised by how very dif­fer­ent these two media are. I’ll be detail­ing these dif­fer­ences in a series of upcom­ing posts. For now, let’s start with some tech­ni­cal differences.

Cropping is incred­i­bly com­mon in still pho­tog­ra­phy. Most pho­tog­ra­phers crop their final images to a por­tion of the orig­i­nal image to strengthen the com­po­si­tion, or to elim­i­nate unwanted objects such as a band of mad clowns leap­ing into an oth­er­wise tran­quil frame. Still pho­tog­ra­phers get away with this because they cap­ture at such a high res­o­lu­tion that even if they print only a por­tion of the orig­i­nal, the final print will still be at a high enough res­o­lu­tion to look good. A 6 megapixel cam­era gives you 300 dots per inch in the final 8x10 print. 300dpi eas­ily sur­passes the eye’s abil­ity to see indi­vid­ual dots.
Video cam­eras, on the other hand, cap­ture images at the exact same res­o­lu­tion as the out­put medium. This res­o­lu­tion is pretty small: 720x480 for DV — that’s a whop­ping 0.3 megapix­els. If you crop and try to blow the image up to fill the screen, it looks ter­ri­ble. This means you don’t get to crop video. You’ve got to get it right in the cam­era the first time.

Still pho­tog­ra­phers also can res­cue images (aka “strengthen com­po­si­tion”) in pho­to­shop — eras­ing blem­ishes, fix­ing blown high­lights, mov­ing trees around, etc. They get away with this because they only have to fix one image. Video moves. Video has 30 frames per sec­ond with the same object appear­ing in dif­fer­ent posi­tions in each frame. If you’ve got a 30 sec­ond scene, you’ve got nine hun­dred images to go clean up.
That’s not to say that photoshop-like fixes are impos­si­ble — they’re just much harder. You’ve got to ani­mate your fix — mov­ing it around the screen, chang­ing its inten­sity as the object you’re fix­ing moves through the light. This is tedious and dif­fi­cult. If you look closely at the last scene of the Definition Fitness video[url], you’ll see that when the man looks straight at the cam­era, the right side of his face is com­pletely blown out. I “fixed” it by ani­mat­ing a skin-colored patch, mov­ing and mor­ph­ing it to fit the shape of his face as he talks. It took me about an hour to get right. It’d take me about 30 sec­onds if I had to do it for one image in pho­to­shop. Fixing images in video is expen­sive. You’ve got to get it right in the cam­era the first time. (sense the trend here?)

Related posts:

1. Video vs still pho­tog­ra­phy, pt 2
2. Video vs still pho­tog­ra­phy, pt 3
3. Video vs still pho­tog­ra­phy, pt 4
4. Camerawork and edit­ing RAAM
5. The per­fect story