By Jon Silberg, July 29, 2010
Christopher Frey and Peter H. Chang are fascinated by the capabilities of high-definition television, as well as future display systems still in their infancy. In creating Lightscapes, a half-hour series on Discovery HD Theater, the two set out to present images that are beautiful on today's TVs and will hold up when viewed in 4K resolution in the future.
Lightscapes Trailer
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Lightscapes presents landscapes and buildings from all over the world transformed by large-scale lighting displays. It is among the network's many programs designed to highlight the HD experience, but footage for the show was actually shot with a RED camera and Canon EOS 5D Mk II DSLR at a resolution far greater than the 1080i Discovery HD Theater broadcast.
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From Lightscapes episode 1 at Grand Ise Shrine, Japan
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How did you decide on the subject of your first episode, the artistic lighting display by Akira Hasegawa at the Grand Ise Shrine?
Christopher Frey: My company, Cross Media International, has offices in San Francisco and Tokyo, which was how we met the artist. He does beautiful things with light. It was questionable whether we could really capture his work, but Peter did amazing things shooting the time-lapse material with the Canon DSLR. The time-lapse footage takes up more than half of the first episode.
How did you use the 5D?
Peter H. Chang: The time-lapse sequences were captured at 5.6K resolution RAW, which is more than 10 times the resolution of standard 1920x1080 HD. For me, having a camera that size that's so portable and unobtrusive with that kind of image quality was perfect.
Frey: The first episode captures ceremonies on Grand Ise Shrine's Uji Bridge and culminates with thousands of individuals crossing the bridge with candlelit red lanterns. For the shot of the bridge and thousands of people coming across with those red lanterns, it was amazing that Peter was there with this small camera, running around to different banks of the river and quickly changing setups. I don't think we could have done the production with larger cameras and the number of people that would have been required.
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From Lightscapes episode 1 at Grand Ise Shrine, Japan
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So you took stills and strung them together later as time-lapse sequences. But half the show is live action. How did you shoot that?
Chang: If we had shot the live-action footage in HD resolution, it would have been jarring to cut between the two. The closest thing we came up with that made sense for the situation was the RED camera. That shoots 4K .r3d files.
Tell us about your editing workflow.
Chang: I built all the time-lapse sequences using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, edited everything in Premiere CS4, and did all the color grading in a beta version of CS5 using the new version of REDspace color that lets me work with the native .r3d files without any transcoding. I built the show in 4K and created a separate sequence timeline specifically for the broadcast master in 1080. Working in 1080 definitely speeds things up. It takes a lot of processing power to work with the 4K!
Do you feel it was worthwhile to work that way rather than just converting everything to 1080, since that's the delivery spec?
Frey: Definitely. Companies will always want to show off the new displays in their full glory. We're already at a point where 4K resolution exists, and I think there's going to be more demand. I'm glad we have 4K content with Lightscapes. Hopefully we'll be out there with 3D content before too long.
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