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excited to see what you got.

But I don't like the betrayal of dailies.

I don't like going in and seeing and getting, you know, swept up

with a performance and then seeing it go out of focus on

a 25- foot screen and knowing that there's no way to retrieve that.

What I didn't like about film was that feeling midway through

the day, end of the day:

"Did we get anything today?

I don't even remember.

Did we get"-

It didn't feel like we put the

flag in it 'cause you couldn't see.

It's like painting with the lights off.

But the DP would tell you,

"It's not-the lights aren't off.

It's in my head."

It's in his head.

Well, that's great, but I'm operating the camera.

I'm picking the lenses.

I'm judging the performances.

A digital camera does not use film.

Instead, it has an electronic sensor, or chip, behind the lens.

The sensor is made up of millions of tiny picture

elements, or "pixels" for short.

When light enters the camera, it hits the pixels and creates

individual electronic charges.

These charges are measured and

converted into digital data that

represent the image.

Grains of film, they're just

constantly moving, you know?

And so the result is a kind of

fuzziness, whereas with the

pixel count, it's a very finite,

accurate, exact thing.

So we're gonna do one action

for dolly and camera.

I think that worked last time.

And action.

With digital cameras and monitors, you are able to see

exactly what you are recording on set as you are shooting.

That's nice.

Unlike film cameras, you don't have to wait a day to see what you've captured.

They are no longer "dailies."

They are "immediatelies."

You sit round the back of the set or in a tent

somewhere looking at this huge monitor and making adjustments

from that, which I actually quite like, because it means you're seeing the picture

exactly as it is.

And with the old film capture,

it was overnight, and sometimes

you'd go to bed and think,

"I wonder if I got that right," you know?

Or you'd say, "I think we

need more backlight," and he'd

say, "don't worry.

It'll look great in dailies."

They know as well as anybody

that you go to dailies and say,

"I really think there should be

more backlight in there."

But if you do it on the set,

you can just stand there and

say, "no, more backlight."

Okay, cut.

And they do it.

And I'd say, "Okay, now that's

exactly the way I want it

'cause that's exactly the way it's gonna be in the movie theater."

People speak about "thank god, I can see what I'm getting now.

I don't have to wait until

tomorrow.

I can see if it's in focus.

I know what I'm getting."

If you're watching a monitor

on set and you feel that you're

really seeing what you've got,

I think you're fooling yourself.

The audience is gonna watch that

film on a screen that is, you know, a thousand times bigger than that.

You know, you're watching it on a large tv.

Yes, you see what you're getting.

It's right there.

The problem for me is that I still think you need to see rushes later.

I think, in order to concentrate

with the performances or just

the movement, and that's-

I still think you need to

see them at a special time.

The process of shooting film

was the director of

photography's art and secret.

And today, the cinematographer

is monitored on a digital shoot,

and everything that they're

doing can be seen, criticized,

and questioned.

It's very destructive sometimes.

I've worked with a couple of actors that insist on looking at every take.

With one of the actors, I was

able to talk him out of it

because it was making his

performances very self-conscious.

Right.

I also am convinced that everybody's just looking at their hair.

One of the great pleasures of

being a cameraman was that the

people- the suits and the

producers- well, they all think

they know how to act, they all

think they know how to write,

they all think they know how to

direct, but they knew they

didn't know how to shoot.

So if they really got on you,

you could say, "here, here's the

meter; you do it,"

and that would shut them up.

But now, they're beginning to think they can shoot.

It's not like it used to be.

There are cinematographers

who became cinematographers

because they love the voodoo of it.

They love it when the director

says to them, "All right, down

in that corner- are we gonna be

able to see that or is that

gonna kind of melt away?"

And they'd get to go,

"just wait until tomorrow.

It's gonna be amazing.

you're gonna love it."

And I've had those experiences.

I've sat in dailies and I've

gone, "oh."

You know, some of Darius Khondji's work on se7en, you would just go, "wow."

But there is an equal amount of

times that you'd go- I would

look at it and say, "What the f***?"

Now with digital cameras,

everyone could see exactly what

things were going to look like.

that changes the way you light it.

It may even change your

performance because it creates

a different feeling in the whole thing.

It gives us more scope to be creative.

That's what's exciting.

That's, to me, was what the digital revolution in cameras is all about.

In 1969, at Bell Labs in New Jersey, George Smith and Willard Boyle

came up with the idea for the charged coupled device,

and the first ccd chip was created.

One of the things that makes

the CCD unique is its ability to

perform specialized functions

such as acting as a camera.

The image that you see on the TV

screen of both of us is being

produced by this small CCD camera, which is directly in front of us, here.

In the early 1970s after a visit to Bell Labs, Sony started investing in and

developing products using the CCD technology.

The chairman and founder- Akio Morita, who was the

founder of Sony- he was always enamored with hollywood and it

was his dream to design an electronic camera that could

create images that were the equivalent, if not better than,

Record what you want when you want, and watch-

by the mid- 1980s, Sony was producing its first

consumer- quality ccd camcorders.

In the 1990s, small,

standard- definition cameras

began recording digitally.

They were first used cinematically when they were

embraced by the dogma 95 movement out of Denmark.

Can you speak a little bit about- well, where did you first

come into digital-

actually by chance because we

made this thing called

"dogma 95," and we made some

rules, and one of them was that

the thing has to be filmed in

academy 35 millimeter,

and then one of them said it had

to be a handheld camera also.

And then I said, "but if that

is the case, then we can also

use video."

And that was just at the same time as these cameras kind of appeared.

Anthony Dod Mantle was the

DP who shot the first dogma

film, Thomas Vinterberg's

Celebration.

Well, was the appeal also of

digital video the lightness of

the camera, the way that you

could move it-

I'll tell you where that

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