Ten Rules for Great Hi8

The Hi8 footage Ron gathered on his video shoot looked great when he viewed it in New York, but was ruined when he played it back at home in San Francisco. Tom's once-in-a-lifetime Hi8 120s from Africa jammed and tore in the edit deck, which destroyed 50% of the footage. Kelly's video was fine when she logged it, but full of dropouts when she tried to edit. What went wrong?

"Hi8 is a consumer format," says independent film and video producer Paul Lundahl, owner of Practical Productions in San Francisco and self-described Hi8 fanatic evangelist. "There's a reason why Hi8 camcorders cost $2,000 and professional equipment costs $30,000-$40,000. You have to find workarounds for the limitations."

For years, Lundahl has been finding those workarounds. His Hi8 documentary "Anatomy of a Spring Roll" was broadcast nationally on PBS--no small achievement since PBS has a technical-specifications manual the size of the Columbus, Ohio phone book.

"[With Hi8,] we're dealing with technical tolerances so precise, it borders on the realm of spiritual," Lundahl says. As a teacher at a Bay Area video organization, he offers spiritual guidance for those seeking the elusive "broadcast quality" in the form of ten rules for the preparation, use and storage of Hi8 tape and equipment.

1. Avoid 120-minute Tape

   Many Hi8 users solve their problems of excessive dropouts and tapes jamming in professional machines by following this advice alone. Most 120s are nine microns thick, while many 90 minute tapes are 12 microns thick. Some professional machines don't compensate well for the thinner tape and different-sized reels, and they may jam or cause tearing with thinner tape stock.

   Lundahl also advises against using metal evaporated (ME) tape while editing. While it does provide improved image quality, it is more fragile, and like 120s, more prone to dropouts and problems during editing.
   

2. Pack your Tape Before Shooting

   Hi8 tape has a coating of metal-oxide particles which may become brittle and loose during storage. "Packing" the tape (fast forwarding to the end and then rewinding) causes loose particles to fall off. Without packing, it's likely that you'll record images over loose plates of oxide. During playback, the loose plates may fall off, leaving painful-looking dropouts. With a packed tape, you're still recording images over the area of missing oxide, but the dropout is minor and a time-base corrector (TBC) will usually compensate for it.
   

3. Test Equipment and Tape Stock

   Before you shoot, record five minutes of black and play it back, preferably in another machine. This will assure that the head alignment on your camera is correct and that you are not experiencing tracking problems.

   When viewing the five minutes of black, you should also be watching for dropouts, which will appear as breaks in the flow of black. The first two minutes of a tape are the weakest. While some dropouts are inevitable, you may wish to reconsider using a tape or batch of tapes if you are experiencing more than two dropouts per minute after that.

   Shoot some establishing shots when you first get out in the field, and then use the footage to check dropouts, white balance, and to monitor audio.

   Finally, if you have access to such equipment, have your video signal tested on a waveform monitor and vectorscope. The waveform monitor, which provides a graphic depiction of the video signal, helps you find the optimal contrast range. The vectorscope is a test instrument for adjusting color. Contact a production facility or the place from which you purchased your gear to learn who can perform these tests.

   Lundahl likes to have 10 tapes packed, tested, striped with color bars, and ready to go. "It doesn't take much time and it's worthwhile, especially in situations you'll never be able to shoot again--which is the case nearly every time you shoot."
   

4. Always Transport Tapes in Your Carry-on Luggage

   When you check a bag at the airport, it goes into the aircraft's cargo hold, where temperatures can plummet below zero during flight. If you put your videotapes into such a bag, you're potentially subjecting them to extreme changes in temperature. During such temperature changes, the oxide and tape backing contract and expand, but by different amounts. This difference in contraction and expansion is significant enough to actually flake off whole sheets of oxide.

   When Lundahl and his associates returned from Vietnam with the footage for "Anatomy of a Spring Roll," they carried 50 tapes in their carry-on bags and on their bodies.

   "That's another advantage to Hi8," he says. "All of your equipment can be packed in a small, very portable package."
   

5. Put Black or Color Bars on the First Two Minutes of Tape

   If you plan to broadcast your tape or simply are concerned about color accuracy during the transfer, stripe the first two minutes with color bars before going out into the field, where time or equipment may not be available.

   The first and last two minutes are where most tape stretching, and therefore most dropouts occur. Recording black or bars on the first two minutes and watching the tape-remaining indicator will prevent you from recording anything of vital importance in these vulnerable sections.
   

6. Check Playback on Other Machines

   The tracking signal on Hi8 tape occupies the same tape area as the video signal, and the tracking mechanism is small and precise. For these two reasons, the tracking sometimes slips.

   The videographer may be unaware of the problem, as the footage will play back properly on the camera that recorded it. But, when played on any other machine, the dubbed or edited video signal might appear shredded, distorted, or accompanied by warped-sounding audio. If this is the case with your camcorder, then you'll either have to use the camcorder as your source deck, or copy the footage to another format for editing.
   

7. Use Desiccants

   When transporting your gear from an air-conditioned hotel room to a hot, tropical environment, or from a warm house to the ski slope, pack your camera in a sealed plastic bag with desiccant. Let it change temperature gradually before removing it to shoot. Generally the wait is no longer than 30 minutes.

   "I know filmmakers who abandoned video because of dew problems," Lundahl says. "It's the condensation-on-a-glass-of-iced-tea factor. Desiccant is cheap and a great security blanket."
   

8. Use Work Dubs

   You should treat your raw footage like precious stock. To maintain the technical integrity and image quality of your original tape, your goal should be to play it as few times as possible. The first pass after shooting should be to create a work dub. Your work dub can handle the abuse as you log and make edit decisions, leaving your original pure for the edit master.

   If you're editing at a post-production facility, you can save time and money by transferring to the editing format (bumping) only those shots that you're going to use to make the edit master. Lundahl shoots on Hi8, post-stripes the footage with time code, and then makes a window dub of all the original footage with time code burned in.

   After creating an edit-decision list, he bumps up the selected shots to the editing format (Betacam) through a transcoding TBC. This process costs $110 an hour and up at most reputable facilities. If your shooting ratio is a carefully planned 10:1--10 hours of footage for a one-hour finished piece--you can save a significant amount of money.
   

9. Use the Y/C Connectors and a TBC

   Hi8 machines have Y/C connectors for transferring the brightness and color portions of the video signal separately from one machine to another. You should use these connectors instead of the standard composite connectors. If you don't, you lose the improved quality of Y/C that keeps color information separate from black and white. "You're taking the beautiful, clean, separated signal, squashing it all together, and expanding it again," says Lundahl.

   When editing, you should also run the signal through a TBC--especially if you're bumping up to a better editing format. "If you bump all of your source material through a transcoding TBC and edit in a true component format, you don't appear to go down a generation. Your edit master and finished dubs are almost identical to the original footage. Color or luminance problems also will look better."

   So what if you don't plan on using a post-production facility? A good TBC will still help, as it will get rid of most of the dreaded dropouts that Hi8 users often find themselves stuck with.
   

10. Store Your Tapes Safely

    In the 60s, video artists knew that storing big reels of 1" tape flat on a shelf led, in time, to creases on the edges. While the problem is less severe with smaller, lighter 8mm tape, the rule still applies: store upright in a vertical position, fully rewound, with the full reel on the bottom.

    While few videographers would store tapes in glaring sunlight, some do not take into consideration the movement of the sun during the day and the changing position of the sun throughout the year.

    "It happens all the time," Lundahl says. "You put your tape on a table one beautiful morning and over the course of the day, the sun goes by burning holes in your tape. It can get up to 110 degrees inside that little case."

    He also recommends repacking videos every six months to maintain tape quality.
    

Rules to Live By
Following the ten rules of Hi8 guarantees that high-quality productions are the norm instead of the occasional miracle.

"The thing that most excites me about Hi8, besides its image quality, is the fact that the low price changes the economic dynamics of a project. If you're shooting in Betacam or a traditional broadcast format, you need a serious amount of money up front. With Hi8, that curve is changed."

"Most great ideas never meet their audience," Lundahl says. "If you have a good idea, that idea deserves the widest distribution possible. Utilize the capabilities of Hi8 to work out your ideas and you can achieve a high-quality final piece."