Three obsolete video formats at Versailles, recorded straight to solid state

Todd Banhazl shot Olivia Rodrigo's "drop dead" for Petra Collins on three formats that no rental house advertises any more, and the reasoning is the opposite of what you would assume.

Cameras Betacam (base look) · Panasonic MS4 MiniDV · a small HDCam

Why the HDCam only because it accepted a skateboard wide-angle adapter the Betacam lens would not take

Recording analogue recorders bypassed; signal straight to digital, onto SxS solid state

Pipeline interlaced 50 held end to end, output 50p

Rental RVZ, Paris

Location Versailles

The part everyone gets wrong

The real trick is just we bypassed the analog recorders and we went straight to digital recording… we weren't looking for it to look vintage. We were looking for actually the beautiful quality of the camera signal itself to be the look.

That distinction is the whole job. A Betacam tape adds generational noise, dropouts and wear, which is what a plugin imitates. The camera head does something different: a specific sensor, a specific gamma, a specific colour science, and a specific interlaced motion signature. Take the head and throw away the tape and you get the part that cannot be faked.

The fight was in post

It's outputted at 50 P, maybe 50i, which that's the trick… It was really hard to make sure that through the pipeline, through editorial, through final outputs, through VFX cleanup, that it maintained the 50 progressive timeline output, because if it dropped anywhere, then the new outputs would have that sort of like stuck staticy jittery motion.

Interlaced material survives an edit only if every stage of the chain is told to leave it alone. One tool silently deinterlacing is enough to ruin it, and you will not notice until the final export.

The lighting was made of wood

The gaffer's "woodies": muslin-covered wooden panels filled with forty to eighty dimmed tungsten bulbs, up to eight feet by eight feet. LED Source Fours front-lit the chandeliers, a trick Banhazl attributes to Suspiria, throwing hard shadows onto the walls. Vortex units uplit the curtains. An LED muslin ball hung on a boom.

The Betacam flew on Steadicam and was rigged to a vehicle. A 16mm camera sat on set, loaded, and was never used: insurance in case a nervous label demanded something safer.

Two things we cannot tell you

The shoot length is genuinely uncertain. Banhazl says "This was two days if I remember correct" and then immediately doubts himself on tape, so we are not printing a number. And no budget figure exists for this video anywhere we can reach.

Crew named in the source: Vincent (1st AC), an unnamed gaffer and Steadicam operator. Colourist Sofie Borup and editor Sofia Kerpan at Modern Post, per Company 3's published credits list.