It was a good thing that we pushed shooting back to work more on the script. The latest draft of the script is leaps and bounds better than the 1st draft and even the draft before this one. Some downsides, though, more cast, more action and more animals. That will make things harder for producing and staying within a time schedule of 3 to 4 weeks.
Apparently, westerns are gaining a lot of interest recently so I am going to try my best to get shooting going in August. If we are able to do that then we can have a trailer cut even while we are shooting and possibly screen a rough cut of the film at AFM (American Film Market).
Some other things on the technical side. We will very likely be shooting this film digitally. For the less technical, there are a few formats to choose from when shooting digital.
You have standard definition which is 720 pixels wide by 480 pixels high, usually referred to as 720x480. Now depending on the camera and processing method used the signal can be either progressive or interlaced. If the signal is progressive it is normally written like so 480P.
In high definition your options are normally open to two choices, 1920x1080 or 1280x720. Frame rate can also play an issue in this giving you typical option of 24p, 25p, 30, 60 - both 30 fps (frames per second) and 60 fps vary between interlaced signals and progressive. Progressive is normally better (if you were wondering what the difference was).
In high definition the camera options have increased drastically in the past couple years.
For DVCPRO HD (typically 1280x720) there used to only be one option, now there are 3. Two of the cameras now allow for 1080p acquisition.
HDCAM is the more popular at 1920x1080. Star Wars was the ground breaking film to use these cameras, or if you want to get really technical, Once Upon a Time in Mexico. In the latest of the Star Wars saga, the newest of the Sony HDCAM cameras were used. The difference was in the color space provided. I could be wrong but I think the original HDCAM camera had a color space of 4:2:0, although it might have been 4:2:2. Anyway, the new cameras, which cost about $120,000, provided a 4:4:4 color space to work with.
With all that said, Panasonic's new HVX200 camera offers 1080p DVCPRO HD recording in a 4:2:2 color space typically only available on the $100,000 Sony HDCAM. We will likely use this camera to shoot with and post using the Cineform intermediate codec, which provides realtime editing with an 8bit or 10bit color space, equivalent to 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 respectively.
Things are getting exciting.
