VRSCOPE THE WIDE SCREEN DESKTOP MOVIE
by Alberto Veronese
 I think everybody is attracted to a wide screen viewing experience. Just think about the Lincoln Square cinema, IMAX theatres, the Transport Museum in Lucerne or the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. They all project movies on giant screens! The effect of a giant screen is superb: the audience remembers the work for years, that is why film makers want to work with wide screen. But what about re-creating this experience for Web audiences, without spending millions of dollars in equipment? I thought I should give it a try...
A normal digital video image is 720 pixels wide and 576 pixels high. The width to height ratio, called the Aspect Ratio, is equivalent to 4:3. It is possible to shoot video using a different ratio. The wide screen Aspect Ratio standard in the video industry is 16:9, which allows video producers to create a wide screen experience similar to film. Desktop movies donít have an Aspect Ratio standard and the experience of viewing a movie on a computer screen is quite different from Television or cinema. Furthermore, desktop movies differ in content, look , size and interactivety ó like QuickTime VR, which allows you to view 360 degree images. I endeavoured to produce a QuickTime movie so that anyone with a computer could download a wide screen desktop movie. Working for VRWAY made the project possible. We called it: VRSCOPE.
To shoot VRSCOPE, I used four Sony PC100E Digital Video Camera Recorders, which I mounted on a special home-made tripod head. The cameras pointed at 40-44 degrees from each other. To avoid any distortion between the images, I used the same focal length (corresponding to a 44-46 mm lance on a regular 35 mm camera), for each camera. The resulting field of view was 170-220 degrees wide; everything in front and around was in the shot! The Aspect Ratio of the movie ranged from 4:1 to 5:1. For landscapes with little action, I panned the four cameras around on their axis filming what was behind me and, eventually, got a 360 degree movie!
I felt more like a stage director than a cinematographer dealing with snippets, shot with one camera, in the standard film-language of wide shot, medium shot, close-up, crosscutting and the like. However , video makers and editors must remember that when shooting with four or more cameras, they must all have the same settings: video levels, chrome, exposure, focus, etc. This prevents time-consuming corrections at the editing stage. To edit VRSCOPE I used Final Cut Pro 1.2.5; stitching the video material took a long rendering time, though with the new version of FCP 2 combined with the Matrox RTMac Real Time Editing, this process should become more effective. The VRSCOPE experience proved exiting, I hope you enjoy the show!
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