There’s a discussion going on in my HDR Timelapse group over at Vimeo between another member and I about workflow for HDR timelapse video creation. For many it’s likely the nth degree of esoterica but it got me thinking.
It seems as time goes on the pursuit of perfection in our artistic endeavours becomes increasingly fervent. We analyse and tweak pixels to within an inch of their lives. We work to create perfect video output from absolutely imperfect input. Music is recorded and re-recorded and mixed and remixed till it’s so perfect it hurts. Why? Has it always been this way? Is perfection a good thing? Once we get it perfect, what else is there?
In the example of the conversation at Vimeo, the discussion surrounds the ideal workflow for creating HDR timelapse video from still photos. One of the bugaboos people have with this type of work is a think called ‘flicker’. Flicker is a perceptible change in light levels between frames – brighter, darker, brighter, darker and so on. Because the process compresses time, in serious instances it can have an almost stroboscopic effect. The goal, of course, is to create an output video that is flicker free. There are different methods for doing this. Some believe the way of capturing the stills plays the biggest part. There are de-flicker filters you can apply to video to deal with it in editing. Being new to the world of timelapse and HDR timelapse, I’m still working things out. The end result, if we’re lucky, is a perfect, flicker free video. Lucky? What’s wrong with a little flicker? Watch old movies and you see all kinds of flicker in them. Were directors and editors less concerned about it? Is it a matter that they didn’t understand it? Is it a matter that they didn’t have the tools to deal with it?
My guess is probably a combination of the first and the last.
Digital music now sounds perfect. But what’s wrong with a little pop and hiss from a vinyl record? I used to love dropping an old Glenn Miller or Artie Shaw 78 on the turntable. Now even that great old music has been ‘remastered’ to sound, well, perfect. Why? Is it really better?
Photography isn’t any different. We have better tools today to deal with imperfection and help us get to a perfect result. We sometimes spend inordinate amounts of time with countless layers and filters and plugins. We end up with image files (when did the word ‘photograph’ go out of fashion) of several hundred megabytes in size. Perhaps a multiple of 10 or more of the size of the original image file, er, photograph.
In movies we have CG this and CG that. It’s almost too difficult to tell what’s real and what’s computer generated. Is that really where the art of making films is going?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for getting the best possible result. But I’m not sure I’m in favour of perfection. It sometimes seems that in the strident pursuit of perfection we become far too analytical, cold, calculating. The process becomes more mathematical than artistic. I sometimes wonder whether we’re losing the art in pursuit of the math.
So what do you think? Is perfection a laudable goal? How far should we go in pursuit of it? Or is a little imperfection a good thing?
