The Problem With HD (part 1)

Pity the fools who shot on video before the advent of HD. If they were shooting on video, they probably couldn't afford a stills photographer. Without good quality photographs, there was no way any of the footage could be used for print-publicity because standard-definition video only has a resolution of 72 dpi. Any print graphics designer knows that if it isn't 300dpi, it'll never make the cover of a magazine or be used prominently within an article. At 72dpi, it will look like crap.

Fast forward...2006.

Pity the fools who are shooting on HD, which looks to claim the place of both film *and* standard-definition video production. I hope to god they can afford a stills photographer because, somehow in the development of HD technology, no one ever asked the question: "What's the print resolution?". Guess what: it's still 72dpi. And yes, it looks like crap in print.

What blows me away is that, unlike film, a director will no longer be able to send a neg-clip (a single 35mm negative from the shoot) for publicity purposes. HD has conveniently done away with this...and in doing so it is slowly eroding the ability of filmmakers to publicise their films with good quality, print-ready images.

I don't imagine this will worry feature filmmakers who can budget for a stills photographer, but for those downtrodden documentary/low-budget feature filmmakers who were used to shooting on Super16 (and have now converted to HD), the prospects are particularly dim. Their budgets are slim and often enough it's simply not feasible to have someone shadowing you with a 35mm or good-quality digital still camera.

This isn't an academic concern: I've heard from documentary producers who missed out on front-page articles in magazines because all they had to rely on for PR were screen-grabs from an HD tape, artificially boosted to 300dpi.

It's one thing to finish your film - it's another thing to sell it, and beyond the hallowed cache of HD technology, the resolution bottleneck could become a crippling setback.