First Feature Film Shot for the Pocket PC

Independent filmmaker Rob Reilly's new comedy “Back to Manhattan” is one of the funniest gangster films of the year. However, chances are you will never see it in a theater—and Rob wouldn't have it any other way! In fact, he's more interested in getting his film into your pocket than on the screen of your local Cineplex. So, he took pains to frame his epic seventy-five minute film for the small screens of portable media players and Pocket PCs—not forty-foot theater screens. The results are stunning! Rob's film looks and sounds great, without any of the visual artifacts, color shifts, and audio inconsistencies that plague most full-screen files converted to small-screen formats. (Editor's note: As used in this article, “portable media player” is a generic term describing a portable device that plays video and audio, including the new Portable Media Center devices described in this issue, Pocket PCs, and devices that do not use the Windows Mobile OS.)

“There are three major problems with getting films on Pocket PCs and portable players,” said Rob at his New York studio. “First, because there are no commercial mobile titles available, users without the right skills produce their own poorly-converted mobile videos based on DVDs. Second, since movies are not originally mastered for mobile players, nothing about a theatrical release meshes with what works with portable media. Third and most troubling, users are being forced to break federal copyright laws when they transcode movies because the movies are protected by copyrights and locked with copy-protection. Some users feel they are protected by media fair use laws, but the truth is fair use is no protection against arrest and prosecution for copyright infringement.”

Rob Reilly, writer and director of Back To Manhattan, on location in NYC.

Shooting a film for the Pocket PC

One of the first problems Rob had to solve was finding the correct frame rate. For over 80 years, film has routinely been shot at 24 frames per second (fps). Most studies show that 15 fps is the minimum frame rate that will allow users to perceive smooth motion. Rob chose to shoot at 30fps, which works well with DVD players, the latest Pocket PCs, and the emerging Portable Media Players. In addition, it's backwardly compatible with earlier 15fps Pocket PCs and even works with some other PDAs.

The next problem is associated with the modern trend towards edgy, handheld camera work. “That is a major problem with mobile media because the more motion you have, the larger your file sizes are.” Rob explained. “That is not a problem on a DVD, which has as much as 17,000 Megabytes (MB) of storage. But it is a major problem when you are trying to fit your feature film on a 256MB storage card. To deal with that, most of my shots were either stabilized or done wide angle to minimize unnecessary camera movement.”

According to Rob, aspect ratio is another “gotcha.” All Pocket PCs and mobile players use standard TV framing, which is a 4x3 rectangle. Widescreen films are as much as 7x3, so you either have to drop half of the film's frame to fill the mobile screen or lose the use of half of your screen's active area to show all of the frame. Rob decided to use the standard 4x3 frame (1.33 aspect ratio) in his work. Rob also tends to favor close-ups so that his stories are easier to follow on smaller screens.