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 WG&R FURNITURE, LEADING MIDWEST RETAILER, SHOOTING LOCAL COMMERCIALS IN HD WITH PANASONIC VARICAM® CAMERA
Purchases HD Cinema Camera, Portable DVCPRO HD VTR
and HD LCD Monitors for Production Arm
SECAUCUS, NJ (June 18, 2004) – WG&R Furniture Company (Green Bay, WI), the largest, fastest-growing furniture retailer in northeast Wisconsin, has made a major investment in Panasonic’s AJ-HDC27 VariCam® HD Cinema™ camera and other HD equipment to shoot its local commercials in high definition.
WG&R made the purchase, consisting of VariCam, the AJ-HD130 portable DVCPRO HD deck, the 9-inch BT-LH900 and 17-inch BT-LH1700 HD LCD monitors, for its subsidiary, PIXALMAX PRODUCTIONS. The facility’s main charge is producing commercial spots for WG&R’s furniture lines that are broadcast throughout the upper Midwest.
PIXELMAX is an 8,400-square-foot production studio featuring a 61-foot corner sweep. Staff consists of two video/film producers, an in-house media buyer for both print and TV, two print graphic design artists, a senior digital still photographer, photographer’s assistant, pre-press manager and two in-house designer/stylists.
“Building PIXELMAX and our decision to upgrade to High Definition video were the most logical evolutions of WG&R Furniture’s in-house marketing capabilities,” said senior producer/director Al Hotchkiss. “Having direct control over creative execution, quality of production and the convenience of having all of our marketing tools under one roof gives us a competitive advantage in our marketplace.”
Recounting the decision to move into HD production, Hotchkiss said, “Our first need was to internalize all still photography of our merchandise for print, which justified building a studio and buying the digital photography equipment. Second, we wanted to increase the quality of our video image. It was our original camera and edit system—DVCPRO25 gear purchased in 1998--that put us on the map, so to speak, and enabled us to become self-sufficient in producing our own TV spots.”
He added, “Our decision to go with Panasonic HD equipment was pretty simple…price and reputation. I’ve always been a fan of Panasonic cameras and the way they capture and treat color. After seeing the VariCam side by side with a Sony HDCAM camera, I was even more convinced. Our work is intended for broadcast, so the significant higher price tag for pixel advantage didn’t make sense. In the end, the image, flexibility and cost of the VariCam won out.”
Panasonic’s AJ-HDC27 VariCam replicates many of the key features of film-based image acquisition, including 24-frame progressive scan images, time lapse recording, and a wide range of variable frame rates (4-fps to 60-fps in single-frame increments) for “overcranked” and “undercranked” off-speed in-camera effects. The AJ-HDC27 VariCam also features CineGamma™ software that permits Panasonic’s HD Cinema camera systems to more closely match the latitude of film stocks.
“A typical shoot for WG&R presents many challenges, especially while the store is open and customers are milling about.” Hotchkiss explained. “The big problem with furniture showrooms, especially those the size of WG&R’s is the drop off in light. You can only light so much of the showroom within the field of view before you get significant drop-off and cavernous areas that look like closet doors, not a bustling retail environment. Then you have to factor in the intense light level changes--especially in video--between the bright white of a lampshade and sofa fabrics that obsessively absorb light. The contrast is unbelievable. The VariCam is more forgiving in this high contrast environment, much like film. I can go into the camera setups on-location and fine tune the detail in these areas; I also find that I need less light than our previous camera. The VariCam has a unique way of making even available light look good!”
“I haven’t really changed my lighting style vs. shooting DVCPRO25,” he continued. “If anything, the VariCam has enhanced it. When you achieve a certain level of proficiency with digital video cameras, you pretty much have figured out how to cheat the camera in seeing a softer image with lighting techniques and lens filters. Having worked with the DVCPRO format for the last 6 years, I became a master at softening the camera in my pursuit of achieving a ‘film look.’
“The VariCam demands fewer filters and can accommodate soft or hard lighting styles, which amazes me. I find myself using no filters at all and less ‘cookie’-type lighting on set. Natural shadows look natural again, not the harsh video shadows that we all try to minimize. A hard rim light from a tungsten source is magically interpreted by the VariCam as a natural looking, bright source, as let’s say, through a window. That’s the other thing that
amazes me. The VariCam gives tungsten lighting a cooler HMI look which, in my opinion, is a more natural looking light source. It’s important to us because we are shooting furniture in home sets in our studio, and it allows us to make these home environments look more believable.”
Addressing VariCam’s imaging capabilities, Hotchkiss said, “Color reproduction is everything in the furniture and fashion business, and so is lack of moiré! I like a lot of chrominance and I get more than I need from the camera. In one shot, we may be shooting an off-red sofa, somewhere between true red and heading toward magenta. Fashion fabrics are weird like that and most cameras will skew this color too blue. The VariCam tends to be extremely accurate in handling ‘off’ colors like these, and with very rich color representation.
“Once in a while you’ll get a color that any camera will have a hard time reproducing. Recently, we shot a sofa which was a creamy green color, and it must have been somewhere in the color spectrum ‘black hole’ because it registered as brown through the camera. Rather than accept the consequence and shoot for color correction in post, I was able to accurately target the color using the color correction setup within the camera to address the issue. The CCU remote control made this relatively easy.”
Hotchkiss said that, while he’s done some off-speed shooting for motion effects, he doesn’t yet have variable frame rate conversion capabilities. “I expect the next upgrade to CinéWave in our edit system to feature this,” he said. “We do shoot at 24p for a true film look, which looks great.”
WG&R spots are shot entirely on HD, posted in uncompressed HD and downconverted to component analog for broadcast. “Luckily, we were able to completely invest in everything HD from start to finish, including our NLE edit system,” the producer/director noted. “We went with the Final Cut Pro NLE system with Pinnacle CinéWave card, because we felt it was the best HD desktop edit system for the money. It’s uniquely configured and optimized for HD, but can easily switch to standard-definition edit mode. Our Panasonic AJ-HD130 gives us this flexibility, as we can feed the NLE with an HD/SDI signal and at the same time feed our router with the real-time, downconverted signal. This is a meaningful convenience as the footage shot on the VariCam can be used in SD productions in our non-HD edit suite.”
While currently there is only one station in Green Bay that offers local HD programming, Hotchkiss said that he intends to take advantage of this with upcoming Summer Olympic Games programming. “The challenge is that the station can’t accept our
DVCPRO HD tape, but with the versatility of the AJ-HD130 field deck, we’ll simply take the
deck to them and directly transfer the HD spots to their server.”
“VariCam has taken us one step closer to film,” he concluded. “There’s no comparison between what we used to shoot and what we are shooting with the Varicam-- one look at an HD monitor and you instantly see why. It's quite amazing what you can make a $399 sofa look like with the VariCam! The one comment I consistently get when people see our room shots in HD is ‘It looks like you can just walk into the scene’ or ‘You can almost touch the furniture.’ I’d like to think that it’s a comment on my lighting and shooting ability, but knowing how easy the VariCam has made my life, I’ll credit the camera just this one time.”
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