Digital Video vs Film

You get your camera home, you set it up, you get tapes, you get spare batteries and you are ready to start shooting. You finish your shoot, much to the pleasure of all involved, and you are left with tapes of footage all mixed and jumbled around into no real discernable order. How do you go about editing it? You don?t, unless, like before, you have a lot of money or you are in the business.

So the home consumer was stuck with hours and hours of footage, but nothing to edit it down, for the gear simply cost too much; at times double the initial cost of the camera. The early 1990s saw the advent of digital cameras. Doors suddenly opened and the world was greeted with seemingly endless boundaries (in fact you are only bound by the available storage space you have).

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You can edit it all in the comfort of your own home with state of the art affordable editing programs for computers.

A wealth of options - When you shoot your feature on DV, you have a lot of options. It's a format that looks great on it's own, looks great with effects and even looks good when blown up to imitate real 35mm film. You can transfer your movie over the internet, make it available on CD-ROM or even now create DVDs with hours and hours of home video footage.

Easy re-shoots or audio dubbing ? With DV you can re-shoot within minutes of realizing components of your shot are wrong and even do audio dubs on site with the most basic of DV cameras. With only several hundred movie screens projecting from a digital source in the USA compared to well over 30,000 screens using traditional film projectors, the gap between the two in terms of audience exposure is massive. One of the greatest advantages of DV is the fact that straight out the box, you can simulate black and white film, which is amazing considering the immense cost of black and white film stock!

Some more advantages of DV over traditional film are:

Instant ?Dailies? ? Dailies is the term that refers to the whole days shooting. Many films have actually garnered more success and critical acclaim due to their story more so than their looks, i. ?Clerks?, ?Blair Witch Project? and many more. With DV you don't have to wait for the film to be processed to check to see if you have got the best shot. Not to mention the incredible price difference between film stock and a DV tape. You can view it pretty much instantly, and make changes if needed. Therefore its acceptance in the movie industry is tiny to say the least.

Smaller and cheaper equipment ? Compare the cost of a industry standard Sony camera with Panavision lenses (anywhere from $50,000 to $500,000) to a comparatively miniscule $800 - $2000 consumer level DV camera, and the advantages are astonishing.

Common topics in this essay:
Dailies Dailies, , Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Godfather Braveheart, Project DV, Steven Spielberg, budding filmmaker, film stock, black white film, black white, traditional film, dv camera, advantages dv, shooting dv, white film,

Approximate Word count = 808
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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