I’ve spent hours bashing my head against the wall that is “what is the best way to shoot DV?”
The answer, it seems, depends on what you want to do with the finished product.
If you are shooting, as I am, DV on a camcorder that has the option of recording PAL in Progressive or Interlace mode, and you simply want to edit and distribute on DV then shoot Movie (Progressive) mode if you can and stick at 25fps. The Movie mode with the shutter speed set at 1/50 will give you a ‘film’ look. This look can be enhanced by your choices of shot, good lighting and some tweaking of colour and tone in post.
Alternatively, if you are shooting with the intention of transferring to film to distribute, then you should shoot in Normal (Interlace) mode and do nothing to the image to keep it as pristine as possible for the transfer to film.
Transferring to film seems to be slightly trickier for us PAL users than our American cousins. There are two main choices here: use Twixtor or Magic Bullet add ons for Adobe Premiere – quite a costly option, and tricksy insasmuch as the sound needs to be streteched independently of the images, or use DVFilm Maker software from DVFilm.com, though whether any UK houses will support this, I don’t know.
Of course, the purists claim that if your aiming to distribute on film you should shoot on film, which is fine if you’ve actually got a budget.
The question I’ve got to research now is, what do competitions and film festivals generally accept? Do they all accept DVDs? In which case sod the film option and make it look as nice as possible in PAL (after it’s only 1 frame a second extra!). Think I might put a call in to Screen South.
My head hurts.