Hi Shailee,

1. It is still expensive when it comes to doing reverse telecine...
about 10-12 lakhs for a 90 min film. If you go DV for economic reason,
that is not economical!! even if you shoot 5:1 ratio in S16 negative
for a 90 min film, it will cost you only about Rs.Two lakhs [2,000,00]
for the negative.. so why go for digital? [The talk about HD/DV you
dont have to worry about number of takes is silly... If you are going
to have 10-15 takes for ech shot, you are going to spend more than
double the time for shooting and that means almost doubling your total
production cost :-), and limitations seem to bring in the best in
actors - according to an Australian study.]

2. Shooting in HD Digital Cameras are not so easy. You need to take
care of many electronic functions... And to have a monitor in dark
ambience in outdoor shoot is tough.

3. If you are considering the portability of small DV cameras like
PD170 or DVX 100 or XL etc, due to your mis-en-scene concepts, then
you should accept that DV is not film and you wont get that colours
and latitude like in a film negative.

4. All this HD hype is more about distribution and projection of
cinema! What does it matter to a Hollywood film when they are spending
Millions of Dollars [100-300] for a film. The total cost of the
negative will be less than $60000, even if they shoot 20:1 ratio!!! So
for the producer it is of no value in a big budget film. Or In a
Bollywood film of Rs.5000 lakhs [50 crores] they are spending only
about 15-20 lakhs for film negative. So why should a big producer go
for HD with its linitations?

After all if you go DV way and do reverse telecine, it is self
defeating. I would suggest you to go rather the S16 way.

Yes you can go the DV path and if so, stay there till the end. I mean
you also do your projection from DV, using a good video projector. Now
a days you can easily fill a big cinema screen with a video projector.
And it looks nice too.

Sunny Joseph ISC
Cinematographer



> shooting a feature in digitial
> >video and doing a reverse telecine to 35mm from the final edit as a
> >possibility .