THE MAGIC WORD; FOR FEATURE AND DOCUMENTARY MAKERS, DIGITAL MEANS NEW OPPORTUNITY.

Byline: David Bloom Daily News Staff Writer

Whether dodging Chinese security agents in Tibet, following a hyperkinetic New York tour guide or catching San Francisco junkies shooting up, inexpensive and unobtrusive digital video cameras are changing the way documentarians and independent filmmakers are doing their jobs.

And soon enough, the burgeoning digital revolution will transform everything else in the moviemaking business, whether it's the shooting of the second ``Star Wars'' prequel, editing virtually any film, tweaking it in post-production, even distributing it to audiences and projecting it in a theater.

But where this revolution's first shots are being heard is in the low end, where relatively cheap cameras and computer-based editing systems are giving no- and low-budget filmmakers powerful new tools to create their projects with verve and imagination.

``For some people, it allows them to control every aspect of their film,'' said Jonathan Wells, editor of Res magazine, which focuses on the digital filmmaking explosion.

Take Bennett Miller, who followed the offbeat tour guide Timothy ``Speed'' Levitch around New York in ``The Cruise.'' Using a tiny digital video camera, he said he could get up close with Levitch in ways never possible with the large crew needed to support a film-based camera.

``It was a good DV (digital video) subject,'' Miller said. ``Because to do an intimate portrait where you want to peel back the layers and get to the bottom of them, it's a lot more effective to do that without the spectacle of a film crew. I would say digital video was perfect for me, and perfect for that film.''

The decent-quality pictures that Paul Wagner could get even from a low-end digital camera made it possible for him to fool watchful Chinese security agents while shooting exterior scenes in Lhasa, Tibet's central square for the fictional film ``Windhorse.''

Despite tight Chinese control over the subjugated country, Wagner said the small digital camera he used ``allowed us to pose as tourists (while shooting scenes). It is a tourist camera, but it's of sufficient quality that it could (create footage good enough to) be blown up to 35mm film.''

And then there's Steve Okazaki, who spent more than two years following young heroin addicts around the streets and flops of San Francisco for ``Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street,'' which airs this week on HBO.

Soon after he began following the junkies, Okazaki switched from a traditional film camera and five-person crew to a small digital camera handled by one other person.

``It just changes the whole way of doing documentaries,'' said Okazaki, whose ``Days of Waiting'' won a 1991 Academy Award. ``I'd guess we'd have a third or half the access we had if we had used standard equipment.''

And unlike traditional film cameras and editing systems, these are cheap enough that people can own their own systems.

``For the cost of having a car - not even that expensive a car, for around $12,000 - an independent filmmaker can purchase a camera, get a computer with Firewire (high-speed connectors) and buy the software to make their own movies,'' said Maija Beeton, the advanced technology program director at the American Film Institute. ``That's why this whole thing has been described as a revolution, because of the ability to do it all in one place.''

The digital revolution is hitting biggest right now in film festivals such as Sundance, where Thomas Vinterberg's digitally shot and edited feature ``The Celebration'' and Miller's ``The Cruise'' were the talk of the show, said Robert Faust, director of the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, which starts this week.

The L.A. festival is holding panels on digital filmmaking next Sunday that will feature Wells, Miller and others, Faust said. In the future, he also anticipates his festival will be showing plenty of digital-only movies, using digital projectors in converted theaters, because the economics and flexibility are so compelling.

``People were making $50,000 features,'' Faust said. ``Now people can run into the Good Guys, (buy a $4,000 camera) and return it in 20 days and pay only a restocking charge. On the one hand, it's great and people can experiment without spending $200,000.''

On the other hand, it also means anyone can make a movie, even people who probably shouldn't, Faust said.

``It's going to be difficult for festivals because everyone will be running around thinking they're a filmmaker,'' Faust said. ``Once that floodgate opens up, people are going to be shooting their mother going about her day and trying to create a narrative from that and submitting it to festivals.''

The digital revolution has been a long time in coming. The first digital tweaking of a film frame happened two decades ago, Beeton said. It's just that now, virtually anyone can do it for a relatively small investment.

And you can do it extraordinarily well if you start using some of the more expensive high-end digital systems, using formats such as DVCAM, Digital Betacam or even high-definition video.

In fact, high-end digital's advantages are substantial enough that George Lucas said he will shoot the successor to ``Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace'' entirely in digital. As it is, he said, 95 percent of Episode 1 was digitally shot, processed and tweaked before being converted to film.

Douglas Trumbull, best-known for his groundbreaking special-effects work on ``2001: A Space Odyssey,'' has spent the past two years creating new digital tools so he can inexpensively make sophisticated special-effects movies literally in his own Massachusetts backyard studio.

If his system proves successful, filmmakers will be able to drop live actors into digitally created backdrops in so-called real time - as filming is happening, instead of weeks later during a laborious post-production process, he said.

``What I'm trying to do now is take a look at whether it's feasible to change the process of making low-budget films in my own studio and still not compromise my work,'' said Trumbull, who directed ``Brainstorm'' and ``Silent Running.''

Other filmmakers continue to look down on digital video as inferior to film. That's not surprising, said John Colette, head of technology at the Australian Film, TV and Radio School in Sydney.

``They've had a history of prejudice against digital video because of the association with television,'' said Colette, in town this weekend for a UCLA conference on digital tech's implications for teaching film students.

``It's the last media type (to face the digital revolution), because it's so data intensive,'' Colette said. ``But you got the same arguments all along the way: `Why do you need the word processor?' `Oh, compact discs will never sound as good as vinyl.' ''

The prejudices will ease, Colette said, as the technology improves. Right now, however, digital still has some downsides.

``The highest resolution and most sustainable high-res format is still film,'' Beeton said. ``As far as capturing data, DV still not at the level of 35mm film. There's a lot of hype around that, and that should be pointed out.''

But make no mistake, digital video is getting very good.

Sony's High Definition Data Center in Culver City, where digital edits are converted into 35mm film on multimillion-dollar electron-beam recorders, makes visitors try to figure out which of two strips of film was shot digitally and converted, and which was originally shot on film. It's virtually indistinguishable.

Converting a digital video product to 35mm film soon won't even be necessary, as several digital-only distribution alternatives are nearly viable.

The cheapest option for filmmakers will be distributing through the Internet, where people such as digital filmmaker Dan Clark of Hollywood believe dozens of sites will offer niche programming featuring very specialized kinds of films. First, however, more homes need high-speed connections to new digital TVs.

Another option is DVD - players are already connected to millions of American TVs and computers.

And in the next couple of years, theaters will start using digital projectors, such as those by CineComm Digital Cinema.

CineComm's system beams a digital film by satellite to a specially converted theater, which stores the movie's information on its computer hard drives.

With a few clicks, the movie then plays on a digital projector, looking just as the movie's creator saw it while taping and editing it. Just as important, it doesn't undergo the physical wear and tear that quickly degrades the quality of traditional film prints, said CineComm Chairman and CEO Michael B. Targoff at a recent demonstration.

``We're here to show this is not hype,'' Targoff said. ``The image you see is every bit as good as the first week of a clean print.''

And other than some slightly lower contrast in one side-by-side comparison, he was right.

``If you're a filmhead and care about cinema, we are all sitting at the edge of another revolution,'' said Clark, whose digital film ``The Item'' will be screened April 19 at UCLA. ``It's like being in film when talkies kicked in. It's exciting across the board, because the playing field has changed radically.''

CAPTION(S):

4 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Lights, DIGITAL camera, action

Hollywood on the verge of a filmmaking revolution

(2) Television is ahead of the curve when it comes to the use of digital cameras and formats. Above, a new sitcom called ``Sam 'n' Ella's,'' being produced in Burbank, is shot in the HDTV format.

(3) Bennett Miller's ``The Cruise,'' a documentary about New York tour guide Timothy ``Speed'' Levitch, was shot with a tiny digital camera.

(4) `What I'm trying to do now is take a look at whether it's feasible to change the process of making low-budget films in my own studio and still not compromise my work.'

Douglas Trumbull

did special effects for ``2001: A Space Odyssey''