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Digital Havana
By Guy Cimbalo
January 26, 2004 10:04 AM PST

On January 9, 2003 Luis Remesar returned to Havana, the city of his birth, after a 38 year absence. He brought his wife, a Panasonic EZ-1 digital camera, and a shotgun mike; together, they made Regreso, a 57 minute digital diary of their week in Cuba.

Though Regreso was originally intended to document Remesar's reunion with his father, it soon became much more. Remesar said, "The idea was to see Cuba through my dad's eyes, a man who has lived there all his life and remains a revolutionary. But when we got there, we realized very quickly that the people we were meeting for the first time, the young people there, were the interesting story, along with my reuniting with my dad. But to see their point of view, to see how they lived, to see how their lives had shifted from the '60s through the '90s, that became really interesting."

Remesar and his wife, M.E. Dolan, co-producer and co-director of the film, sought to capture the spirit of a drastically changed Havana to take the fading pulse of a city ravaged by years of neglect. Focusing especially on a young Cuban couple with whom Remesar and Dolan lived while there, the film puts a face on the difficulties Cubans have experienced since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Through such interviews, as well as extensive footage of Havana, Regreso achieves an intimacy and familiarity rare in such attempts. Remesar believes that he could only have accomplished such a level of rapprochement through the use of digital video. With minimal equipment, going digital allowed Remesar and Dolan a convenience and comfort impossible elsewhere. "We didn't want to intimidate people," Remesar said, "We wanted it to be as small format as possible so that we could get people to open up."

And then there was the small matter of the government. As Remesar put it, "Had I gone down there with a beta cam and a lighting kit, I would have had to get a permit. They would have to screen my video before I took it out. But when we got to the airport, we realized there's a million tourists with little video cameras all over the place. So that's what we were. We were just tourists." In many ways, the use of digital video allowed Remesar to create a genuinely underground movie, evading red tape and censorship with only a hand-held video camera.

Though Remesar has six years of experience as an Avid editor, this was his first time working with a digital camera. And after shooting 14 hours of footage in a week's time, he was totally sold on the format. Remesar said of the Panasonic EZ-1, "The picture quality is absolutely fantastic. It's a really tiny camera that delivers a great picture. I'm used to shooting with elephant video cameras and, in the studio, that required a lot of light. These cameras, you can shoot by firelight, by candlelight and get some pretty decent stuff. And when you transfer it to film, the graininess actually looks very nice. I pretty much wouldn't shoot anything but digital right now."

When it came to editing the film, however, Remesar stumbled out of the gate. Working off a 400 MHz G-3 Tower, he edited the first eight minutes in Premiere, which he found didn't offer the flexibility he was looking for. So on the first day of its release, Remesar purchased Final Cut Pro and was very pleased with the results. Re-editing the film from scratch, he found the Final Cut interface perfect for his uses. "There were a few hitches," he says, "but 2-Pop was just incredibly useful in helping me sort through them."

The only real problem Remesar did find while editing the film was a result of his decision to shoot in a theatrical aspect ratio, 16:9. Anticipating both a transfer to film and the emergence of HDTV, the aspect ratio was recommended to Remesar by Film Team, an Austin-based transfer house. Unfortunately, at the time, Final Cut Pro didn't handle the format all that well.

Although Promax recently released a set of plug-ins that eliminate Remesar's problem, when he was editing the film a year ago, there was no real solution. He explained, "The way DV handles 16:9 is, the footage still looks 4:3, but it's squeezed so that it's stretched vertically. So when you play the footage back through a deck that unstretches it, when it gets to the rendered footage, it appears stretched." Remesar's only answer was to reformat and re-render the entire film in Final Cut Pro, a process which took three days. But he is realistic about such concerns "The difference between a $150,000 Avid system and a $1,000 Final Cut Pro system makes the waiting while you're rendering pretty much worth it."

It was also in post-production that Remesar discovered the advantages of having shot progressive scan. He said, "I like the quality of (progressive scan) on video screen, and I like the way it transfers to film. Progressive scan is, to me, much more pleasing than interlaced video on an aesthetic level. It's so much more pleasing to the eye, so much closer to film. We made a one-minute transfer to film (at 4MC), and I put together footage that I thought was going to be the worst in terms of artifacts: vertical motion, panning, vertical lines. But there were none in our transfer. I find progressive scan infinitely preferable."

With the film only recently finished, Regreso has just been accepted to the Santa Barbara Film Festival, and Remesar is investigating funding for a transfer to film. So what's next for Remesar and his wife? Disney is interested in one of their scripts, a "Cuban love story, sort of a Romeo and Juliet set during the Bay of Pigs." And through their production company, Coyote Path Productions, the couple are busy developing projects that feature Latino characters and scenes for a mainstream audience.

Beyond that, there is little question that Remesar has caught the digital bug. He, his wife, and a friend from Seattle have formed a separate production company to produce digital films. Their aim is to make features on DV, shot in 16:9, with no-name talent, and a budget under $200,000. If Regreso is any indication, those few components will go a very long way.