As broadcasters around the globe transfer to the HD format, stock footage companies scramble to fill the industry’s growing need.

‘Our Asian partners such as NHK and CCTV are already shooting entirely in HD, and the BBC will be shooting entirely in HD by 2010,’ says Jan Ross, SVP, BBC Motion Gallery.

The reason for the switch is quality. ‘HD is just amazing,’ says Brock Silversides, head of media commons at the University of Toronto. ‘There’s more authenticity than any other format. The more that’s shot and eventually ends up in archives, the better for everybody.’

‘There’s a real need for HD material,’ adds Elizabeth Klinck, producer and founding chair of the Visual Researchers Society of Canada. And Klinck is hoping that she and other visual researchers will be able to get their hands on some of it. ‘Some people are sitting on goldmines. They’ve shot material in the Arctic or other exotic places and haven’t yet made their additional footage available to libraries.’

Yet before HD footage makes it to the archives, it will have to be shot, broadcast and placed in stock libraries like those at FootageBank HD or Artbeats in the U.S., Canada’s CBC or National Film Board collections, or Germany’s Framepool.

Where the real challenge comes in for stock footage companies is in the conversion from film formats and aspect ratios to that of HD. And although HD is adaptable, converting older footage to the new format is a significant technical challenge.

‘One of the greatest issues lies with frame speed,’ says Ragnhild Milewski, the NFB’s agent, sales – stock footage and stills. ‘The NFB footage originated mostly in film, and thus its frame speed is 24 [fps]. Depending on what our clients want to do with our footage material, whether it is for television or another distribution outlet, we need to convert to HD at the right frame speed.’

Another issue at hand is how film and HD have different aspect ratios.

‘Going from 1:33 to 1:77 ratio is technically challenging,’ says Milewski. ‘You can either keep a full-screen image by cutting the image, or use the native resolution of the footage [pillar box] and keep the original format of the image. We have chosen the native resolution, which offers more options.’

‘It’s the same problem that CBC was mad about 25 years ago with Cinemascope,’ according to Jean-Pierre Lachapelle, who recently retired as head of preservation for Radio-Canada. ‘When you’re talking about HD, normally you’re talking about 16 x 9. If you’re talking film for CBC or Radio-Canada from 1952 [to 1984], everything was done in 4 x 3.

‘If you transfer a film on a scanner HD, even if you put it on HDCAM SR, you have to decide what you’re going to do before. Are you going to leave it on 4 x 3, or are you going to zoom in on it to make it 16 x 9? This is a big difference. If your choice is to zoom, you’re going to make new footage that never existed before. This happens on [new CBC] TV productions because producers are free to do what they want on their productions.’

If the producers choose to zoom, history can be rewritten, according to Lachapelle.

‘There’s a scene from 1981 when the PQ won the election. René Lévesque came to the microphone to say ‘merci,’ and on his left, you had [his influential minister] Lise Payette. But if you zoom, you won’t see Payette in the future,’ he says.

Despite the need for HD material, the BBC, CBC and other broadcasters aren’t commissioning new images willy-nilly.

‘We are shooting for broadcast needs, and that varies,’ comments Ross. ‘Everything from landscapes, natural history, war and entertainment are included.’

By contrast, U.S.-based Artbeats has been shooting material in HD since 1998, steadily building up a library of contemporary footage.

On the cutting edge of stock footage shooting is the hot new Red One camera.

Phil Bates, president and founder of Artbeats, is pleased that his company ‘stepped up the game once again [with Red]. This is the first time that royalty-free footage with resolutions higher than HD (3K and 4K) is available on the market.’

Bates recalls a recent Red stock footage shoot in the Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.

‘Each day began very early as we attempted to capture the beauty of the Tetons in the morning light,’ Bates explains. ‘From there, we drove various routes through both parks, looking for the perfect locations to set up a shot. The amazing thing about this particular shoot was that for each missed opportunity, another one would arise just a few miles down the road. For instance, on a morning when the light wasn’t ideal for shooting the mountains, we’d come upon a herd of elk grazing just off the road around the next bend. Each day a myriad of opportunities would unfold with very little down time in between.’