Millimeter says that Clint Eastwood seriously considered shooting his latest two films using HD Digital Cinema cameras, and decided that film still held the advantage. In pre-production for “Flags of our Fathers” and the upcoming “Letters from Iwo Jima”, Eastwood and DP Tom Stern tested high-definition cameras vs film. In the end, they chose to stay with 35mm film for these two projects, but remained positive about the state of digital filmmaking.

“I looked at all the [available] digital cameras, and tested them against film to see if the digitalage was here completely,� Eastwood recently told Millimeter. “I know, some day, that will be it. But for this project, I felt HD did not hold up quite enough compared to film for the way I wanted it to look. It obviously had some advantages, but I just felt I couldn’t control atmospheres as well—I couldn’t get quite as deep into the blacks as I wanted. So I decided to shoot film. It was almost like they needed to go another millimeter before HD gets to where I want it to be.

Additionally, they chose to go with Digital Intermediates by Technicolor, a first for Eastwood. And there was some use of HDV camcorders for various insert and POV style shots. The crew sealed several Sony HVR-Z1U HDV camcorders inside machine-gun ammo cases, set them to record at 25fps, and had them carried by extras during certain battle scenes.

“I just told them to carry the boxes, and not to pay any attention to them. If an explosion went off, they could drop them. I even had them make them waterproof, so they could just drop them in the water. But I didn’t tell the extras why we wanted them to carry the boxes. I didn’t want them to start thinking about it, because that would ruin what we were trying to capture. We eventually filmed out those shots, and they came out real nice.�

The production team tested the gamut of SD/HD/HDV cameras available, and decided on the Z1U for availability and recording time contraints reasons. They decided to live with HDV’s compression artifacts because SD cameras didn’t offer enough resolution and high-end cameras were too big for the application.

“We are interested in [Panasonic’s] HVX-200 with the P2 cards and the FireStore [recording] system, but it wasn’t available when we were shooting Flags,� she says. “We could get those cameras by the time we got into Letters, but even with 8-gig P2 cards, the run time was not sufficient for the way Clint was shooting this stuff, and the FireStore was not yet available. So we stayed with the Sony cameras for both movies. HDV is obviously not comparable to 35mm film and anamorphic lenses, but with the process we used, followed by the digital intermediate, the footage mixed great with the rest of the movie.�

It will be interesting to see what tools Eastwood chooses to create his next film with.