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Filed under: Post Production •

Controversial History Channel “WWII in HD” debate - THE TRUTH

PVC: What was the process of allowing your producers and editors to find and look through all of this material?

WWII in HD - RAVE REVIEWS from Frederic Lumiere on Vimeo.

FL: Here’s another interesting and very positive aspect of what we’ve done. One of the things we did was - for the National Archives for instance. The National Archives is massive! There is a massive amount of footage there. So one of the things we did was there’s only so much they can do with the logging. Now a lot of the logging is fine and it’s good, but a lot of it is either inaccurate or incomplete, and one of the things that we realized we needed to know, is that we needed to know every single piece of—Well, a good editor needs to know his content and a good producer needs to know his content, but when you’re talking about this much footage, there’s only so much you can get from the source that is sort of what is in those reels. And so, we had a virtual army of interns and researchers who looked at every frame of every film and logged it into a database. And the way we did that was that the RED camera would go to a RED file, but simultaneously, we’d go to an MPEG H.264 clip that would be useable by the database. So what this allowed us to do was, we then had a database, that was a networkable database that was accessible by every team player, where you could essentially go to the database - a FilemakerPro database - and type a query and say “Navy, air craft carrier, bombs.” And all of a sudden you’d have 35 entries that would come back from the query and each entry, not only can you read the entry at that point, but you can also view the clip realtime.

PVC: So the MPEG-4s are part of the database?

FL: Yes. They are being pulled by the Filemaker database from a directory that is linked to it and so the video clip will show up as you’re reading the log, so that was incredibly beneficial to the writers and producers and the editors to some extent, and the assistant editors because you could do some very detailed searches. You could go “Grenade launcher, Terawa, Marine, camel helmet” and out of those 3,000 hours of footage you’d be able to see there are three entries and here are the timecode entries where you can find those. That really helped us because one of the big challenges of this show was, because we kind of created a new genre. I know you said you were an editor and a lot of editors had a hard time with this show because it was very counter-intuitive editing for a documentary editor. Let me explain this. A documentary editor is trained to tell a story visually, the best he can with b-roll. That is really the first approach. So you find the best possible footage to illustrate what’s being told. Well that doesn’t work in this show. In this show, it’s a very different aim. In this show, what you want to do is create an experience which means sometimes you may have to give up a great shot if the shot is not compatible with the previous one, because you want to create these scenes that feel like an experience. So that means that you may need for instance, you need everything you can get your hands on of a ship in rough seas, and now you can start stitching those clips together that feels like it was shot by a cinematographer who was there to shoot a film and that is usually what I would tell the editor: “So if you were Michael Bay and you were going to cover the bombing of Tarawa, how would you do it?” You’ve seen the films. You know how they do it. With multiple camera angles. From the air. From the ground. From the right. From the left. You show the same explosion two or three times. That’s how we need to cover it. We need to create the illusion that this is an epic Hollywood feature. And that requires a incredible access to your footage and being very intimate. But no one can be intimate with 3,000 hours of footage.

PVC: How was the database able to reference the MPEG4 files? Can you actually embed MPEG4 into Filemaker?

FL: Yes you can. You just open a movie window and design it and have a regular path that is always the same and it will pull it right up. You just have to have a good naming convention so you know what you expect the film to be named, but it will come right up.

PVC: And this was placed on a large SAN or something so you’ve got 20 or 22 editors, plus producers and writers and everyone has access to this same database?

FL: Exactly.

PVC: Wow. That’s a great story. And I love the idea of a creating a documentary where you’re not trying to simply reference old footage in telling a historical story, but to use the footage as if you were creating a fresh, modern feature film where you are able to shoot exactly what you want, but since the event is past, you recreate that feeling of coverage as if you were trying to shoot this today.

  FL: I’ll give you an example, when we did Pearl Harbor it’s a perfect example. I’m sitting with Liz Reph (PICTURED TO THE RIGHT) - who’s one of the greatest producers in the business in my opinion. She’s done tons and tons of war documentaries. - and one of our lead editors, Sammy Jackson - Now you have to understand with Sammy Jackson, he has probably done Pearl Harbor 30 times already in different shows. Sammy Jackson has probably done every battle…you name a battle and he’s done it at least a half dozen times. So we’re sitting around a table with Sammy and Liz and we’re talking about Pearl Harbor. We have a good script here, but how are we going to cover it? How are we going to make Pearl Harbor feel verydifferent from the way it’s ever been treated before or any way you’ve ever done it, Sammy? So we’re brainstorming back and forth and then we come up with the idea of, “Think about 9/11. Everybody has a story about how they found out about 9/11, because it was such a traumatic and important moment in the American psyche. You’ll never forget about where you were when you found out about 9/11.” And then we started thinking about, back then - people’s stories about today about 9/11, they say “At first I thought it was a movie.” I was in Italy when 9/11 happened and I turned on the TV and I thought it was some Hollywood movie, so then there was this sense of realization. And today everything is instant you have the internet and CNN, but still the information is not complete. “Was it a plane? Was it a bomb? Was it a terrorist attack?” So we realized back in the 1940s it was probably very much like that. How did people find out about Pearl Harbor. So we tried to recreate those couple of days from 7am till night time when radio reports start coming in on the East Coast and West Coast, San Francisco, L.A. and how did people react? The slow spread of the panic. And we realized, here is the fresh way to show Pearl Harbor. Not only a really fresh way, but a really good way for people to really relate.

PVC: Right. And to get the emotion into it.

FL: That’s right. It makes me remember how I felt when I found out about 9/11. Because what we want to do is really make people feel. This could have been you and this is how they felt. They were real people, in color, not black and white, who had real feeling, real lives that were really impacted. And that’s why I think the show is so powerful, because we really made an effort to bring you back to that emotional state. So hopefully we were successful.

So that’s the interview. Please feel free to comment on this story and continue the debate over the best-practices of archival transfer and if you were part of the debate, please feel free to link this article to those who may have been arguing with the wrong set of facts.

The series is being rebroadcast right now on the History Channel. Check it out for yourself.

http://www.history.com/content/wwii-in-hd

By the way, the entire series was cut using Final Cut Pro and Edit Share and the color correction was done in house using Apple Color. I’ve only seen the color correction on web-compressed images so I’ll have to hold my criticism of the color correction done in-house. Some of the comments in the threads I read (especially on the colorist list) were not complimentary.

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The Prelinger/Henniger mistake and the Cintel/Cinetel confusion may be mine. I did the interview and in some instances had to guess on some spellings and meanings of words. (All word meaning is contextual.) I knew there was a Prelinger archive of historical footage. I thought maybe they also did film transfers, since they would probably know how to take care of archival film materials. I have friends who have worked at Henniger. He may have said either name. You can’t blame those mistakes on him. I take full responsibility.

I agree about the multiplexer comment. In my post to the CML and the TIG I specifically mentioned that while he said it was a telecine, it was actually a “film chain.” I’d only worked with one many years ago and I thought the whole unit was called the “film chain.” Thanks for the correction in terminology.

As for the cropping of the images, many would agree. This is an argument that directors of photography used to make (and still do) about seeing their essentially 16:9 images cropped to 4:3 back in the pre-widescreen days. I agree with you, though in the case of some of this footage, the shooter may not have been composing his images quite so carefully, since he was being shot at, so as long as you don’t crop away important information, or as long as your crop doesn’t ruin a careful composition, I disagree that it’s really such an abomination of the footage. I didn’t see the original footage for every shot, so I can’t comment other than to basically agree that if they wanted to create an historical document, then cropping the image just to make it look more “HD” is a bad choice. But following the idea that this is supposed to be an “experience” then the cropping can help keep you in that experience. The cropping argument from feature film DoPs is largely about the sanctity of the “theatrical experience.” But for Lumiere, the “experience” was one of experiencing the history, not the experience of the person who captured it. The original debate about Lumiere and his colleagues was that he had ruined all kinds of rare historical documents, for the majority of this work, it was done by other people. And the point is made that most of this footage is still there to be transferred by competent archivists if they so desire.

Thank you for your expertise in the matter and for your passionate response to the piece. I appreciate and value your opinion.

Posted by Steve Hullfish  on  11/18  at  10:37 AM

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Steve adds:

”  (CORRECTION - HENNINGER used a Spirit) which scans the film frame by frame.”

Actually, no.  The Spirit uses line-array sensors and scans film line-by-line, using a sprocket attached to a precision encoder to determine when each line is captured.  This works well for new film with no splices.  But spliced, repaired, shrunken, or otherwise damaged film will travel unevenly over the sprocket, which means that the lines are scanned in an irregular relationship to the film—frame geometry can vary frame to frame, leading to what is known as the “waterfall effect” as the image fluctuates in height and looks as if it’s being viewed through water.

C-Realitys and other Cintel machines also scan film line by line, but they us a clever but somewhat bizarre system where the film is illuminated by a precision, expensive CRT (picture tube) and that light passes through the film and is captured by three photomultiplier tubes or their solid-state successors.  These suffer from the same problems with shrunken and damaged film.

However, neither of these machines can do the same damage as a TP-66 or other projector in normal use.

Posted by Jeff Kreines  on  11/18  at  06:40 PM

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i don’t think that this looks HD at all. When it comes to historical videos and documentaries I believe they should be left in their original appearance. It helps to make it more historical looking.

Posted by hopefades  on  11/19  at  09:12 AM

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Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  11/20  at  08:18 AM

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Hello my name is Mike Fraticelli

I’d like to add a few comments to this discussion.
I’ve been working on a WWII Documentary for over 4 years now. I’m very familiar with the research and duplication process having done extensive research at both NARA and The Army War College. I won’t delve into the complex technical transfer process. But I can offer some educated feedback in regard to archival footage specifically concerning North Africa.

Unless I’m missing something, I did notice a few pieces of ‘Colorized’ footage. In fact I can probably identify the NARA reference number to the original footage which was definitely shot in Blk./Wht. I also remember seeing this same ‘Colorized’ footage on U Tube.

Why does this matter?

Unless I’ve misunderstood something, the Reda production ‘appeared’ to have made claims that their rare footage was originally in color, and of course transferred/converted in their unique process. I realize you don’t have to be an expert to recognize ‘Colorized’ footage. If I’ve missed something about the details of their claims, then perhaps someone can comment here.

The other thing, yes I agree that it would appear the preservation and duplicating process available to archivists and researchers at NARA seems to be unchanged. It would ‘appear’ no damage has been done to their footage, at least in regard to some claims here. NARA is a wonderful place to visit.

One last comment; And again, unless I’ve missed something, The Reda production people have launched a campaign to collect private film stock from anyone who would like to offer it. The only downside is that the material will be privately owned, and may not be in the public domain. But I suppose not everyone knows NARA will accept historical material, (I think). Whereas more people watch the History Channel. So I guess having it preserved by ‘someone’, ‘anyone’ is a good thing.

Thanks for the opportunity to comment
Mike

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  11/20  at  02:31 PM

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Wow, I used to work at Lou Reda Productions as Post Production Supervisor, April 1994 to March 2000.
I had modified the old RCA film chain to what you listed above. It was a 16mm RCA TP-66, 35mm Simplex XL, and a RCA slide projector, I took out the slide projector, and mounted a Ikegami HL-79E in its place, aimed at the optical splitter. I had tried to keep the old RCA Telecine camera going, including re-tubing it, but it was soooo old, it was very un-reliable. The Simplex 35mm sounded like a diesel engine because of the 3:2 pull down mechanism. Oh and we had a RCN 2” Quad deck and a Ampex VPR-3 with Zeus TBC, what a collection!

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  11/21  at  01:37 PM

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opps, I mean RCA Quad deck, my bad, I work for RCN-TV now.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  11/21  at  01:39 PM

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A little off topic, but for those of us who love WWI & WWII Video footage, the BBC had an amazing peiece of some lost footage from WWI. I cant find the link on the BBC anymore, but live leak has it, as Im sure other sites do as well. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=9dd_1288959592

Posted by chicagowebdesign  on  12/28  at  10:11 AM

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