Tim Boelter

From the day we decided to do this trip it was a risky venture. The act of spending money on a trip rather than making money on a trip is a risk in itself. I really have to believe that going to China and driving the Silk Road is worth passing up a paycheck and trip to Everest. Some people or should I say most people think the act of climbing Everest is easily more risky than driving the Silk Road, and perhaps they are right, however I have had plenty of experience climbing and filming on mountains and I can now say from experience that dealing with the dust and sand in the Taklimakan Desert has been more challenging than dealing with the altitude and cold on mountains. This is just my own personal belief, others may think differently.

We were going into the world’s harshest desert with camera equipment released on the market literally months before the trip. How this equipment would function in a very hot, cold, dusty, and bumpy environment was something I would have to find out in the field. Another issue I would have to deal with is the new workflow of shooting onto a P2 card and then storing this digital footage onto a one-terabyte firewire drive.

Due to product unavailability I was limited to using only two P2 cards. Without additional accessories like the Firestore FS-100 and the Panasonic P2 Store (which both were not available at the time of my departure) the amount of footage I could capture at any given time period was only16-minutes. With the additional help of the Firestore and the P2 store I would have been able to get a total of 176 minutes of HD footage during one outing. Instead I would have to download footage onto my laptop and then copy it to the external firewire drive either in the vehicle using a DC-AC inverter or while at the hotel using regular AC power.

The risk of shooting footage in this manner is that the footage is being stored on a hard drive that can easily fail in a very harsh environment. Because I needed all the hard drive space I could get, I didn’t have the luxury of being able to back up the footage onto a second drive. The camera does allow HD footage to be down converted to tape, but this would be in the SD format and not HD. Although images shot in HD look better being down converted to SD then if they were actually shot directly to tape in the SD format, the time element of doing the down conversion was too long. In most circumstances I think this would not have been a problem, but we were having a hard enough time getting at least four hours of sleep per night.

So shooting to a hard drive is something most camera operators would not want to rely on. Loosing hard earned footage because a hard drive failed is not good and that kind of risk is something most cinematographers cannot afford to take. Tape based systems are still highly preferred among the best photographers, so what I was doing here was certainly a risk. And with each spine jarring bump in the road, all I could think about was that hard drive packed away in my pelican case at the rear of the vehicle.

But in the end, everything performed flawlessly. And the footage I have is nothing short of breathtaking. I’m currently putting some of it together and will be posting it to our website.

Cheers,
Tim

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