Best way to shoot and crop for 1.85

[Will Turner]

Is it better to shoot full 5K with 1.85 crop on the side or 5K HD and crop the top and bottom? Does anyone have a good reason for either preference? Thanks guys!

 

[Terry VerHaar]

First question: why 1.85?

 

[Will Turner]

Why not? It works for the story we're telling very well. I shoot most of my stuff at 2.40 but this time around 1.85 is just the right way to go for the story.

We have a lot of shots of a couple coming together, and the extra room on each side of our actors at 2.40 just isn't right for this story. I went into the scout thinking we'd shoot with anamorphic lenses, but after some blocking and shot listing, spherical lenses and 1.85 just seemed like the right way to go.

I also couldn't find any x1.33 anamorphic lenses in time. So we went with Cooke S4s.

 

[Craig Parkes]

I would say 5KHD cropping top and bottom gives you more room for vertical repositions in post, which is the more common repo you have to do.

 

[Roger Singh]

I frame for 1.85 all the time. I used to just crop the sides. I set my frame lines to 1.85 and have a TV safe of 16:9. But when I know I'll be involved in post, I set the frame lines to 4440x2400. It gives me room all around to re-frame.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Is it better to shoot full 5K with 1.85 crop on the side or 5K HD and crop the top and bottom? Does anyone have a good reason for either preference? Thanks guys!

Ask your editor and post supervisor and see what works for the workflow. There's every chance they may want to mask on all four sides to give the director and DP the room to recompose the image later on.

If it were up to me, I'd say crop the top and bottom, which is pretty normal. But you can make several different arguments either way. Michael Cioni of LightIron Digital came up with a good workflow a few years ago for Girl in the Dragon Tattoo where they did crop 4K on all four sides for 2.40, which worked out very well:

http://library.creativecow.net/kaufman_debra/The-Girl-with-the-Dragon-Tattoo/1

Whatever you decide to do, make a framing chart and shoot it once a day to make sure the dailies people have a record of how everything needs to be framed for post.

BTW, note that there are quite a few major A-list DPs who are on record as being very upset about giving directors the ability to reguess and recompose the image in post. I agree with them that this could represent for them a loss of control of the image, but as long as the DP is part of the final color-correction pass, and gets to approve the final look and composition, then it "theoretically" should be OK.