NEW YORK - Director/DP Peter Kagan and his Streamline Content, here, used a Panasonic AG-HVX200 DVCPRO HD solid-state camcorder to shoot Subway’s latest spot featuring Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush. Get Inside the Five is a national, :30 commercial out of Hackensack, NJ’s Source Communications that finds Bush sitting on a bench, waiting for his assignment. At the time of the shoot, Bush had not yet been drafted by the New Orleans Saints, so his uniform is completely white, bearing the number 5 from his college days. The spot captures Bush’s energy and encourages viewers to check out Subway’s Web site (www.subwayfreshbuzz.com) where they can read Bush’s blog.
“Even though this was a national Subway spot starring Reggie Bush that promised to be cool, the minute the NFL draft happened, that’s it,” Kagan notes. “The commercial had a very limited shelf life and, therefore, a limited budget. So I thought it would be a great opportunity to use HD instead of film. And there was definitely a fresh buzz about the HVX200.”
He teamed with HVX200 owner Evin Grant, a director/DP in his own right, who served as HD technician on the Subway shoot and the production workflow designer. Kagan intended to shoot 720pN at multiple frame rates and shutter angles. He needed to output both HD and Digital Betacam versions of his footage, the latter required for post production.
Grant’s set-up allowed Kagan to shoot with one HVX200 camera while a second acted as a record/playback head for a Digital Betacam deck. “As soon as Peter was done with a P2 card, we’d download to a RAID array through a laptop, then go into the other HVX200 and play it out with the SD downconverting option on the camera recording into the Digital Betacam deck,” Grant explains.
Kagan used two 8GB and one 4GB P2 cards for the shoot. “When we downloaded the cards we got scratch disks for Evin and myself and downconverted Digital Betacam tapes for the Avid editor just like the tapes he would have gotten from a film-to-tape transfer,” he notes.
“The editor began cutting away the next morning, and I was delighted to keep my disk, which was essentially a digital clone of the dailies. Every director wants to do a director’s cut, and I’m always trying to get negative back from the ad agency.”
Kagan outfitted the HVX200 out with his Arri 4x5 matte box and Chrosziel follow focus. “I was pleased to be able to take gear from my Aaton package and apply it to the HVX200,” he says. “With these accessories, the camera looks and feels formidable. It’s truly the digital equivalent of a film camera.”
Kagan shot mostly at 24pN but shifted to 60fps when Bush “was flying around the frame, running at the camera and dodging and jumping over the camera and lens.”
The HVX200 (www.panasonic.com/broadcast) can record in 1080i and 720p in 100 Mbps DVCPRO HD quality, and has the ability to capture images in 21 record modes. The DVCPRO HD format offers users cost-effective, intra-frame compression, where each frame stands on its own for editing, and its full 4:2:2 color sampling allows the image to hold up under color correction.