Flight Line, Upcoming PBS Vietnam Memoir, Shot In Panasonic DVCPRO50

Flight Line, Upcoming PBS Vietnam Memoir, Shot In Panasonic DVCPRO50 Progressive Format

LOS ANGELES, CA (July 2000) -- "Flight Line: The Army Helicopter Pilots of Vietnam," an hour-long documentary with narration and on-screen appearances by Harrison Ford, was shot last month with Panasonic's AJ-PD900WA 2/3" DVCPRO50 Progressive camcorder. The war memoir, the recollections of young pilots who served from 1961 through 1975, will be nationally syndicated on PBS later this year, with a tentative air date of November 11th, Veterans Day. Flight Line is being funded by Bell Helicopter (Fort Worth TX), a division of Textron, and distributed by the National Educational Telecommunications Association.

The project is being produced by Chris Fetner and Jeremy Wood; the executive producer is Robert Mason, whose account of his own Vietnam service, "Chicken Hawk," was a bestseller in the early 1980's. Flight Line was shot in May; 100 hours of interviews with more than 20 veterans were recorded. The footage will be on-line mastered to Panasonic's D-5 full-bandwidth, 10-bit recording format for delivery to PBS.

"It was imperative that our acquisition format be digital, 16:9 and upgradeable to HD," said Fetner, whose uncle was a Vietnam helicopter pilot and and an inspiration for the project. "Certainly, we wanted to produce the best possible images for television broadcast but, just as importantly, the archival footage, which will be preserved at the National Vietnam War Museum in Mineral Wells, TX, had to be pristine and easily manipulated. Progressive recording was our ideal choice."

"I'm a longtime DVCPRO user and have consistently been impressed with the format's overall performance and cost-to-benefits ratio," he added. "We had to make efficient use of our time with Harrison Ford, whom we taped for wrap-around segments, and I had a lot of confidence in DVCPRO50-and that confidence was borne out by its impressive image quality."

Videographer Mark Kregel, long-experienced in using Panasonic's AJ-D700 25Mbps DVCPRO camcorder, shot all the interviews with the veterans, and was the assistant on the "Ford" shoot, which took place at an Army hangar in New Jersey. "I have been shooting with the Panasonic DVCPRO format about four years now, and my primary observation is how easy the AJ-PD900WA is to use, with handling and menu set-ups virtually identical to the AJ-D700," he said. "Anyone who is currently proficient with the DVCPRO family of cameras will be able to pick up this camera and run with it almost instantly.

"The camera handled soft lighting conditions extremely well and gave us beautiful and extremely crisp images. It was really a pleasure to see images of such quality coming out of such a small and compact camera package." "In the hangar, we were dealing with a very large space and a great deal of mixed lighting," Kregel continued. "The day started out as overcast and midway through the shoot we had sunlight pour in through skylights, but it didn't pose a great problem. The footage is really beautiful."

DVCPRO Progressive provides content creators a new means of acquiring and finishing in high resolution, while saving money by shooting on a nearly standard definition budget. DVCPRO Progressive offers 480 lines of Progressive Scan recording at a digital video data rate of 50Mbps, a low 5:1 DV-based compression ratio, 4:2:0 signal processing, four 16-bit 48 kHz uncompressed digital audio channels, and compatibility with 25Mbps DVCPRO, 50Mbps DVCPRO50 and 100Mbps DVCPRO HD.

DVCPRO Progressive produces spectacular images with full 4:2:2 detail, and 480 progressive scanned pictures compress better and more efficiently. With 60 complete frames per second, 480p delivers sports and live-action with film-like clarity and is the perfect medium for upconverting and inter-cutting with HDTV formats as well as for digital cinema (tape-to-film) applications.

Capable of recording either 16:9 or 4:3 images, the AJ-PD900WA DVCPRO Progressive camcorder features three 2/3-inch M-FIT CCDs and records 480 progressive scan images in 50Mbps and 480 interlace images in 50Mbps and 25Mbps. Other key features include 33 minutes of progressive recording, 10-bit digital processing, a signal-to-noise ratio of 63dB, and minimum illumination of 1.6 lux. Fully-operational at under 14 pounds, it consumes less than 28 watts of power and offers a bayonet mount for high definition or standard definition 2/3-inch lenses.

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