A rough technical overview.

It's no news to film makers everywhere that digital acquisition and post production is currently in a whirlwind of change, revolutionizing how films (how long can they be called that?) are shot, cut, manipulated and delivered. With Belladonna we're going the fully digital path. Shooting on a combination of HDCAM and 2k redcode on the RED one camera. It will be edited in Final Cut and graded in Apples still buggy and unfriendly Color. The resulting 2k dpx files will be transfered in Warsaw. Sound will be taking a much more conventional and well trodden path through (mostly wirelessly transmitted analog) time code synced double system sound , through Pro tools and on to a Dolby Mix.
The sections of the film that take place in the 15th Century have already been shot on HDCAM on a SONY hdw 900r ( with Panavision Hd zooms , ) from Panavision Warsaw. The current plan for shooting the remaining 80% of the film set in contemporary Australia will be to shoot on the RED one with the Birger EOS lens mount and Canon still autofocus lenses. Exciting since the first cameras with this configuration are about to be released in a couple of weeks and real world testing will reveal just how good this camera is. We're planning on shooting to CF cards. This I suspect is going to feel extremely odd, the whole crew working as normal and at the end of the day all you have to show for it are a bunch of tiny cards that you can slip into a pocket. No mags of film unloaded into the iconic film cans going off to the lab. At least with HDCAM you can see their labeled spines. Data centric workflows have all the tangible satisfaction of mp3s compared to reels of filmshaving vinyl LP's prescence. The images just disappear into the drives , where are they really?
An obvious advantage of the data being files rather than on tape is the ease of making multiple backups. Before leaving Poland we had the camera tapes cloned and then the masters had to endure the endless xraying of international travel, Now I 've never heard any stories of digital / magnetic media being corrupted by xrays but all the years of attempting to bring unprocessed film safely through airports leaves me with the feeling that there must be some risk involved. Any way the tapes are fine. Digitised into Final cut through a Blackmagic DecklinkHDpro card onto a 10 disc Macgurus Burly Raid as 8 bit Uncompressed . I should mention we're going 25P to simplify things, and indeed so far timecode has been our obedient friend .