In the course of the recent Robert De Niro thriller “15 Minutes,” a police officer played by Edward Burns chases a suspect, from a seedy New York hotel to across a crowded Times Square, and runs him down in a movie theater, where the chase concludes with a shootout.
It’s a sequence full of thunder and action, and worth all the trouble it took to film it on location, according to its director, John Herzfeld.
Indeed, as he spooled the scene out in the editing room a few months ago, he noticed just one problem: It didn’t belong in the movie. In the old days that would be the end of it. The sequence would be cut, the footage likely discarded.
If “15 Minutes” were to acquire a cult following, its fans might even refer to it as the legendary lost Times Square chase, like the legendary “Jitterbug” sequence from “The Wizard of Oz” or the rarely seen Linda Blair “spider walk” shot for “The Exorcist.”
But in Hollywood’s new era, which can be dated roughly from 1998, no sequence need be lost. Herzfeld recalls the spirit-lifting moment when, as he fretted over the loss of that favorite scene, his editor turned to him and said: “Well, John, it can go on the DVD.”
A big change
Computer-generated effects, video editing and digital photography already are revolutionizing Hollywood, but the technology that may do the most to change the way filmmakers conceive, shoot and market their films is the silvery 5-inch platter known formally as the “digital versatile disc.”
Industry surveys suggest that no new consumer technology has taken off as fast as the DVD, which was devised in 1995 by an international consortium of 10 electronics and entertainment companies.
The discs are the same size as audio compact discs and work in a similar way: The data instructing your television how to display a moving image are encoded as a stream of digital “ones” and “zeros.” These are represented on the disc by millions of microscopic pits, which are scanned by a laser beam inside the disc player and decoded.
Because there is no physical contact between the player and the disc surface, the ultimate image remains almost as sharp and clear as the original recording no matter how often it is played. In the U.S. alone, more than 13 million players have been purchased since 1997 and about 100,000 more are bought each week.
There is scarcely a major studio production of the last two years that has not been released on DVD and videotape simultaneously, and scarcely a video rental store in the country that isn’t turning over a larger share of its shelf space to the discs every month.
Each new release seems to be packed with more supplemental features: audio commentaries by director, cast and crew; behind-the-scenes documentaries.
Many include step-by-step explications of special effects by their designers, ranging from the computer-generated creatures of the latest space operas to the optical tricks that allowed Tom Cruise to leap from a 40th-floor office window in “Mission Impossible 2” and land safely on the ground.
More than a movie
Programs that give users a choice among soundtracks or camera angles are increasingly common.
The inclusion of sequences deleted from the finished movie, no matter how inconsequential, is almost de rigueur. The public’s thirst for such material has surprised the industry.
“We’re all happy to have anything extra they give us,” says film critic Roger Ebert, who taped a commentary track himself for the DVD of a film he admires, Alex Proyas’ “Dark City.”
For Ebert, as for any serious film lover, the most important feature of any DVD has to be the wide-screen format of the film–that is, it must be presented in its original “aspect ratio,” or screen shape, rather than cropped to fit the conventional TV.
“That’s my basic requirement,” he says.
The sheer novelty of the format means that films made after the DVD revolution have reaped most of the benefits so far; that’s why you won’t find as much care lavished on the DVD of “Annie Hall” as on, say, “Coyote Ugly.”
But studios and filmmakers are finding the popularity of the new medium hard to ignore. Directors who once battled over the right to approve a “final cut” of their films now ask for authority over the DVD as well. Cineastes clamor for the DVD release of such unavailable films as “Citizen Kane” and the “Godfather” trilogy.
Responding to a public campaign for the DVD release of the “Star Wars” movies, Lucasfilms felt compelled to explain publicly that work on “Star Wars: Episode II” has been consuming so much of George Lucas’ time that he can’t spare any to oversee the preparation of DVD versions of the rest of the saga.
“The films will definitely be released on DVD,” the statement says. “It’s just that we don’t yet know when.”
The medium has spawned a host of new professions in Hollywood. Digitizers convert a film to digital bits, and engineers write the software that allows users to skip from one feature to another at the click of a remote control.
Making less of more
The most important and delicate task in converting film to DVD may be simply making sure it fits. “We have a new member on our team–the compressionist,” says Robert Zemeckis, the director of such films as “Forrest Gump” and “Cast Away.”
Today’s DVDs are said to carry up to four hours of video, but that’s misleading. A full-size digital file of a two-hour movie would barely fit on 10 DVDs. Instead, films are typically compressed by removing up to 90 percent of the digital information and using higher mathematics to instruct the machine to display what’s missing.
This tricks the machine in a way similar to how the human eye is fooled into constructing a smoothly moving image out of a procession of 24 still frames per second–the rate at which film is unreeled.
But figuring out how to remove the excess bits without reducing image quality involves a unique combination of art and science. Today’s savviest filmmakers know that more damage can be done to a movie by a bad transfer than by any chemical disaster in a film lab.
Even before Zemeckis’ latest films are released, his on-staff compressionist is working with his producer and film editor to make sure he understands which elements of the image must be preserved in the conversion process and which are expendable.
“In video transfer you can manipulate the image much more than you can when you’re working on film,” says director Gore Verbinski, who spent the day before the recent premiere of his Brad Pitt-Julia Roberts vehicle “The Mexican” camped out at the video lab overseeing the film’s digital remastering.
Still, for many filmmakers, the complexities of managing the transfer are a small price to pay, compared with the DVD’s value as an archival medium.
None of the features associated with DVDs might have reached the general public were it not for an earlier, more experimental, medium–the laserdisc. Although laserdiscs and videotapes appeared together on the consumer market in 1978, the former never caught on. About the size of music LPs, laserdiscs were expensive to buy and rarely available for rental.
Unlike videotapes, they could not be recorded on at home. Because they carried only 30 to 60 minutes of video per side, they had to be flipped over in midmovie. They could be easily spoiled by warping or by a deterioration of the glue that held them together. By 1998 only about 2 million laserdisc players had been sold in the United States, compared with 85 million videocassette recorders.
