HD for Indies has quickly become one of the most important websites for digital filmmaking. Whether it be HD, DV, Apple or Adobe, the man behind the blog/site, Mike Curtis provides an experienced, thoughtful, unbiased, truly independent point of view, all the while learning and teaching with his readers. Mr. Curtis has been in digital media production for over 15 years producing content for everything from cell phones to Hollywood movies. He has recently partnered to create Color Cafe, a HD post-production house (based in Austin, TX) that has an emphasis on Color Correction with Indie Filmmakers in mind. My chat with him covered topics such as the future of HD; the positives and negatives of HD; how filmmakers can better plan their post-production workflows; archiving in the age of tapeless acquisition; Apple's Final Cut studio; Adobe;  upcoming technologies whether it be camera's, codecs or software; and the list goes on. Because of the length of the interview, the conversation will span over two installments.

So how did HD for Indies begin? I understand you were heavy into graphics and After Effects. How & why did you make the transition to writing and blogging everyday?

How did it begin! I had been doing motion graphics/ VFX/ compositing for years and was hitting two problems: one was burnout, and second was the glass ceiling in that market. I was looking for something new to leverage my skills and not be a commodity. A good friend, Craig Negoescu of OpenLabs, suggested that I should do something to "build the Mikey brand" and another friend suggested I do that by starting a blog. A few months before that, I'd realized that utilizing HD for indie filmmaking was a very interesting thing that I wanted to get into. Glue all those together, plus a desire to have all my research in one place, and HD For Indies was born.

Why HD specifically?

For starters, the DV revolution was well documented and well "fed" as a market - there wasn't a ton of new ground to cover there. HD was new, tricky, difficult and expensive - a good set of challenges to sink my software and hardware teeth into. Anybody can cut SD on whatever box they've got, but HD was quite different.

Many people dispute the validity of blogs, whether it is true journalism. And yet no once can argue the success or the relevance of your blog to digital filmmakers. Is the blog format best suited for topics such as this? Or is it something where you were the right man for the job, showing up at the right time?

I think it is more the latter - luck, timing, and an insane desire on my part to learn everything I could. Also, the fact that I gave myself permission to pull myself off the market and dedicate myself to research. Giving myself permission to go through a grad school program, but one of my own devising. No school is as up on this stuff as the web allows one to be.

As for the validity of blogs, I think it is a perfect fit for what I'm trying to do - extremely timely information, freed from advertising/sponsor influence. It is tremendously gratifying to be able to write whatever I want to about any subject I choose. I started with the nuts and bolts of the hardware/software, but I'm getting more interested in the rest of the equation - how are films distributed, what's the next gen distribution format, how will the Internet play into marketing, promoting, producing/making, and ultimately distributing indie movies. It would be fun to be more involved in multi-million dollar features, but I'm not there yet, so I serve this underserved market as best I can.

Funny you say you've been to college again, because I feel like I am in college again when I visit your site. There is so much to learn about HD that it is almost overwhelming.

It is overwhelming - just keeping track of all my newsfeeds and sources and responding to email could very well be a 6+ hour a day thing. So I have to be incredibly efficient about it if I want to do something else, such as my new biz ventures.

It seems like every other week a HD camera is born. HD captures a lot of mind share on online tech sites. And yet most of the public is far from from being able to watch true HD. If anything, the biggest growing trend in viewing video is to watch it online where quality is a non-issue. People seem okay with watching little 320x240 movies or shows. They why the transition? DV seems more than able to handle this new growth.

DV is perfectly adequate for creating content for online viewing with entirely acceptable results up to video sizes - 640x480 etc. Online distribution will be SD or smaller for the bulk of the market. However, in time, I think it is likely that as broadband gets out there more, there will be a bigger market for HD content. Look at Apple's HD movie trailers - which would you rather watch? Then it is just an issue of production costs and distribution (bandwidth bill) issues, both of which will improve over time.

I'm anticipating that Apple will have 960x720 HD downloadable movies available from an iTunes like store within the next couple of years. What they did for audio? It could happen for TV shows and Hollywood movies as well. Just takes time and broadband. Intel's Viiv hardware DRM home theater PC platform? Apple's all over that. Look at Front Row for a clue as to their direction. It isn't by accident that new iMacs have s-video outputs. Hopefully, the same way amateur content is available on podcasts, and professional content for sale on the store with iTunes, there will be a similar model for downloadable pro movies as well as freebie vodcast content. And, just like the Indie labels are getting in on the iTunes Store, eventually, smaller distributors for movies might get in on the movie store.

Plus, I predict a widget like the Airport Express, but instead of just audio, it'll do audio and video. Then any reasonably powerful Mac or PC (Mac first, of course) could download and stream H.264 content to the little box wirelessly to decode it and display on an SD or HD TV.

In some cases, HD is as expensive as shooting 16mm film. You cannot edit HD with old systems, you need the very best hardware. You also needs tons of storage for editing and archiving. Then there is the additional cost of hardware add-ons such as video cards, capture cards and so on. Not to mention the expensive HD camera's. For independent filmmakers, is this the right time to switch? I emphasize time because I am sure in the future, HD will be the norm. But for the next year, let us say, is it wise for the little guys to jump in?

I'd say it is certainly worth looking at. It isn't just the upfront costs, it is also the longevity. As the market switches to HD over time, do you want to be stuck with a standard def only master? You can uprez, but it looks crappy - like the difference between DV transferred to film and HD transferred to film. A big difference. For shelf life reasons, HD is a smart investment. But at what cost?

The argument that HD costs as much as 16mm is dated I feel. True several years ago, not any longer. True, you cannot edit HD with older systems. But at least you could edit offline and take it to somebody's nicer $10K to $25K system that could do your online. Look at the HDV cameras - they all offer the ability to downconvert to DV on the fly from the HDV tapes. Perfect for offline, your downcoverts are built in - no hard cost. It does take a pretty recent machine - on the Mac side, a "better" G5 from the last couple or so years in order to process the data.

HD capture cards have cratered down in cost - the basic DeckLink HD was $2000 last spring, is $600 now.

For the little guys, is HDV the simplest way to transition to HD?

Yes, but with some caveats - HDV is great bang for the buck, and I really consider it to be like this: As DV is to Digibeta, HDV is to HDCAM. It is similar, it looks good, but not as good as the professional brethren. If you lump the new Panasonic HVX200 in with the JVC, Sony, and Canon HDV cameras, Yes, that group of cameras is what indies should be considering.

I understand that HDV compresses on the fly. Does that worry you? Also, there are many questions whether HDV is true HD. What are your thoughts?

HDV compresses on the fly the same way that DV compresses on the fly. ALL digital tape formats, standard or high def, compress to some degree, it is just a matter of how much and how bad.

HDV's compression does cause me some concern - I'm not a shooter, but I'm hearing folks talking about the need for a fast shutter rate, or panning as slowly as possible. Between the small (1/3") CCDs and the MPEG-2 long GOP compression, fast motion isn't handled as well as on the bigger, more expensive HD cameras. HDV is best for controlled lighting (nights, indoors, well controlled outdoors), stable shots. Wanna shoot an indoor, people talking movie? HDV is a good candidate in terms of bang/buck. Want to shoot fast action on a beach or ski mountain? Not such a great choice.

You mentioned the Panasonic HVX200. It is an exciting camera. Do you see it changing the industry as some predict? In terms of the tapeless workflow.

Yes! I see it making a big change. The P2 cards are too expensive right now, but they'll come down in time. I am really looking forward to the Focus Enhancements DTE portable hard drive for that camera, due early next year. I think THAT will be the killer combo.

The ability to go tapeless has lots of advantages - personally, I hate dealing with timecode breaks, tapes, and capturing from tape. The ability to just drag over files, as shots, and not worry about all that tape management is hugely cool for post.

In the field, right now, with P2 cards costing what they do, it'll be a bit of a hassle for the first 6 months or so. But in time, all the old guard will get over there "Where's the tape!?" issues, and New School folk like me will embrace and rejoice (picture the old "Where's the beef?" lady for a snapshot of my attitude on this).

The other big advantage is freedom from tape speed limitations. One reason why cheap cameras can't do a native 24p (as opposed to weaving a 24p stream into a 30i tape flow) is because most cheap tape mechanisms are built to move tape at a constant speed with constant recording diagonals. Skipping the geekery, it means they can't really accomodate much change easily. Once you're recording to disk or memory, you're free of those limitations. That is part of why they can do 24p, 25p, 30p, 50p, 60p, 50i, 60i all in one camera (HVX200), as well as 480, 720, and 1080 resolutions. It is soooo freeing from a hardware design perspective. I absolutely expect tapeless, either to solid state, optical disk (XDCAM) or hard drives to be the way of the future.

It changes your archiving needs from "put that tape on the shelf with a label" into "back it up onto whatever medium you choose", which can be complicated and offers a variety of concerns, challenges, and new workflow issues. But frankly, for the very digital folks of the last 10 years, especially, folks like myself that were creating digital video assets from scratch on computer that never hit tape, it is no big deal - we've already been dealing with these things.

I am glad you mention archiving because the college I attended is considering a transition to the tapeless workflow. It scares them. Hard drives fail very easily.

I'm talking to an educational institution and getting ready to make recommendations. Hard drives do definitely fail, and as a long term archive they are sketchy - not just will they work, but will you have a machine to connect them to with the right port that will understand that data structure?

Do you think flash drives will be the answer?

Maybe down the road, but so far, at all times, at all capacities, data tape and optical disk are cheaper and competitive in terms of data transfer rates. Flash drives, presently, are too expensive and too small to adequately address that issue.

If someone were backing up their material, should they transfer their footage to more modern/ current formats? And what format would you currently recommend?

Depends on one's timeline horizon. For the best 5-10 years, I've been big on backing up my projects to a digital master - that is, a QuickTime file on a hard drive. I think FireWire and USB interfaces will be with us for at least 5-10 more years, so those flavors of drives are somewhat safe in terms of being able to plug them in (but will they work after 5 years on a shelf? That's a whole other question).

Is there a need for an lossless open-sourced format?

I sure wouldn't mind having a lossless open source format, if I felt that there would be software support on any platform I should so chose in the future. I am reluctant to recommend archiving to any particular videotape format, since I don't know enough about their shelf life longevity to say, as well as I know too much about how lossy all tape formats are to say dub it over to that to keep it alive longer. The market has yet to assert a dominant HD tape format for the long term that is also accessible/ useful/ affordable for Indies.

Check back tomorrow for part two of our interview with Mike Curtis, where we discuss HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray, Apple, Adobe, exciting hardware & software for video and the future of HDforIndies.

Update: Part two is here