While the 48 Hour rules state : “Films must be submitted on one of the following media: miniDV, DVD,”… blah, blah, blah,  this doesn’t apply for HD submissions.  For the 48 Hour San Diego is an HD town, and still the only one, so take advantage of this by shooting, editing and delivering in HD. So please plan ahead and practice the preparation of you film’s submission in an HD format that is ready to present.  All presentations will be at 1920×1080 resolution at either 23.976p (preferred i.e. standard 24p) or 59.94i (60i interlaced.)  Any films not conforming to the resolution or framerate will be converted to 1080p or 1080i (which ever fits best), even if you are shooting and editing in standard definition. Unfortunately due to the limited time between the finish line and presentation, plus the large number of entrants, we can’t spend very much time up-converting each non-HD film. So if image quality is of high importance to your team, please do your best to submit in the presentation format.

The presentation format is a CineForm MOV or AVI file — these are the only formats that the playback server can handle.  We making it easy for every team to produce a CineForm master by offering a free 30-day license to all teams.  This doesn’t mean you must use CineForm tools to edit your film, you can edit using any tools you like,  just export to the CineForm format which will work with 99% of video editing applications (please test this IN ADVANCE.) The CineForm export is very high quality and typically much faster to encode than distribution formats like H.264 or MPEG2/HDV — so it will only help you finish your HD film in time (of course do allow a little extra time for HD exports as they are slower than SD.)  The resulting CineForm files can be played back with standard tools like Window Media Player or QuickTime Player for final review.

HD submission formats

This year we aiming for CineForm only for HD submissions, so no DNxHD, ProRES, DVCPRO-HD, H.264, HDV or any other compressed or uncompressed format please. In some cases you may request an exemption (in advance) if you can’t produce a CineForm file. If you must submit in another HD format, we need to prearrange the format you use as we need to confirm that we can convert it for presentation.

Audio for all HD submission must be 48kHz 16-bit stereo.  This is all we can connect to the theater’s house audio.

Full Specs:

• Resolution 1920×1080, 16 by 9, square pixel
• Frame rate: 23.976 progressive (24p) or 59.94 interlaced (60i)
• Quality use 75% (Mac) or Filmscan 1 (PC) CineForm compression
• Audio 48000Hz 16-bit Stereo uncompressed

We recommend you use large enough thumbnail/flash drives which you can leave with the 48 hour organizer (drives will be returned later.)  This way you will not have to wait for the transfer times, as things will get busy at the finish line.  If you place your data on a FireWire drive, you may need to wait for the transfers to complete as managing tens of external hard drives will be a pain (particular considering all the power supply and cable needs.) If you go with thumbnail drive, you will need to prepare them in advance as thumb drives come formatted with FAT32 format, which is limited to 4GB files and will not likely fit a finished 48 Hour film.  Most HD submissions last year where between 4-8GB. Both Mac and PC native filesystems solve this problem, see details on reformating your thumb drive on your Mac or PC. Please prepare your thumbdrives in advance.  I would recommend a 16GB drive just-in-case your film is little on larger size — but go for one designed for speed (around $50,) that why you can export directly to it, and play it back from the thumb drive.

This one has plenty of speed and capacity:

Sandisk 16GB Cruzer Contour U3 USB Flash Drive # SDCZ8016GA75 / SDCZ8-016G-A75

Shooting SD but delivery HD

This is recommend if your source is a progressive camera, the upscaled results are quite nice in HD.  So edit within a 24p timeline and export to 1080p24, practice this — it can look nice. The result are often better is you do the export directly, than if we do the upconversion in the office, as the DV format used for SD exports losses a lot of color details that the HD output would preserve.  Another trick for progressive SD shooter, do a rough cut in SD (for edit speed) then import the final edit into an HD timeline, do your titles there, now all your timeline elements will be a sharp 1080p on your export (of course practice this.)

Classic SD submission formats

We will follow the 48 Hour Film Project guidelines for standard definition. No alternative formats for SD sources please.  Please read the official rules.

Why the new rules for HD?

This years tighter delivery guidelines for HD are to help streamline the presentation workflow. The first year we did HD, we had 47 films in 49 formats , it took 4 engineers 3 full days to remaster everything.  Last year, nearly 50% of HD films where in CineForm format, and the remaining conversions took only 1.5 days.  We are looking to complete the processing in under 8-hours, getting the formula down so that eventually other cities can have HD submissions.  Thank you for your help in making this happen.

For more information on the festival for San Diego please visit 48hourfilm.com/sandiego/

Tags: 48 Hour, Festival, Festival Submission, Film Project

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Tech Notes : Products : neohd, Tech Notes : Technology Related, Tech Notes: Product Related. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.