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16x9 Productions - In The News
Kristen Cox, HD Pioneer
HD Production Then and Now
DMN Interview by Charlie White
In this exclusive DMN interview, Kristen Cox, CEO of 16x9 Productions, tells DMN's Charlie White about the intricacies of HD production. Recently inducted into the Academy of Digital Television Pioneers, Cox has produced over 60 HD productions, and gives us perspective on where HD has been and where it's going.
DMN: You started with HD a long time ago. You were HD when HD wasn't cool, right?
Cox: That's true. I started in '95. It was more cool then than it was in the late 80s, but it still wasn't very cool.
DMN: So you were one of the first ones to start with HD, weren't you?
Cox: I was among the first producers, absolutely. Of course, the production pioneers were Randall Dark, Barry Rebo and David Niles. I started working for Randall Dark's company, HD Vision in '95. At that time, HD was still very much, in some circles, a taboo subject, and in others it was totally far-fetched.
DMN: When you first started, what did you shoot with, and how did you ever edit this stuff? It was on reel-to-reel, wasn't it?
Cox: When I first started, the analog decks were the first generation. I didn't work with them. I worked with the digital decks. So it was either a choice of a [Sony] HDB-1000 1-inch open reel, digital deck, or the UniHi, which had just come out. So whenever we went into the field, we would take a UniHi deck, and then either the HDC-300 tube camera or the brand new HDC-500 HD camera. If it was a remote shoot, we'd take inverters, and marine batteries. We couldn't go more than 300 yards from the truck or power source without degrading the signal. It was a nightmare. And then whenever we were editing, of course, everything was linear in the HD edit suite. It was painstaking. There was no color correction. There was no pre-read. It was just a painstaking linear process.
