yeah you're right brook - i was being at least a little flippant, which is a 
stupid idea for an email list. i do think it has mainly terrible qualities as a 
format, but as i was saying that's more personal than an objective assessment, 
and as technology has changed over time, those feelings are probably quite 
age-related. and there are masters making masterpieces with any medium or 
format, of course. 

i agree with flick that hi8 is great as far as video formats go. degradation 
and the way the colours bleed all over the place (caused both by the format and 
the cheap lenses those cameras all used) are two of my favourite features, but 
clearly technical 'flaws'. i do disagree with one thing though, which is that i 
hated DV long before i'd even heard of HD (because i'd seen super8!), but as 
flick also says he appreciated it because of working with hi8 for so long 
beforehand. i guess those relationships with a medium are, as the title 
suggests, relationships, and relationships are personal. 

edwin



Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2011 22:26:00 -0700
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Frameworks] 16:9 vs 4:3

If you see DV work by Ernie Gehr, Leighton Pierce, or others who really pushed 
the aesthetics of that medium and still say it "looked like shit"... something 
else is going on.
Brook


On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 4:18 PM, Flick Harrison <[email protected]> wrote:

That's funny - Edwin - I started out in Hi8 and when DV tape arrived we thought 
it was dropped out of heaven.  You could copy and edit it a million times and 
never degrade?!?

The sound on Hi8 was so shitty... so very very shitty... like you had a towel 
stuffed into a tin can inside your speaker...
DV looks "like shit" only if you compare it to HD, and if "like shit" means 
"doesn't look like HD."  I have a hard time going backwards in format epochs, 
but after I re-orient I always grow to love it again.  

Hi8 had such a beautiful texture from the barely-discernible degradation, even 
after doing an expensive online edit from your camera original to a betacam 
master in a pro suite... desaturation, aliasing, and oooh the grain.  It 
actually took away the live-news immediacy of video, and when DV came out it 
was suddenly easier to shoot video but harder to make it look like narrative 
drama.


DV meanwhile was fun for docs, because it looked crisp and clear and the 
saturation was great, the recorded tape looked identical to a live feed, but it 
had a cheap edginess (maybe it was due to the pixel aspects you mentioned) that 
said: "independent."  I loved the colours on my Canon XL-1 and the stereo mic 
on that baby has never been matched.

-Flick










--* WHERE'S MY ARTICLE, WORLD?http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison
* FLICK's WEBSITE & BLOG: http://www.flickharrison.com 





_______________________________________________

FrameWorks mailing list

[email protected]

https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks




-- 
____________________________
Brook Hinton
Moving Image and Sound Maker
www.brookhinton.com

Associate Professor / Assistant Chair

Film Program at CCA
California College of the Arts
www.cca.edu/film



_______________________________________________
FrameWorks mailing list
[email protected]
https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks                        
                  
_______________________________________________
FrameWorks mailing list
[email protected]
https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks

Reply via email to