A great interview with Rick McCallum on Episode II's digital cameras and digital theater projection. From Millimeter Magazine:

Last fall, George Lucas made a bit of history when he left the 35mm equipment behind and took Sony/Panavision 24p cameras into the Australian desert to shoot Star Wars: Episode II. Lucasfilm had already stirred up the digital pot in 1999, by premiering Episode I on four different digital projectors in New York and Los Angeles.

In this interview, Millimeter contributing editor Pete Putman talks to Lucasfilm producer Rick McCallum about the Australian HD shoot, digital dailies, digital production issues, and the current state of digital cinema.

Pete Putman: What impacts did shooting digitally on location have on your entire production process?
Rick McCallum: There was nothing negative and a lot of the positive issues I can be very specific about. First of all, to be able to reload the camera only twice in a day ? in other words, you put a tape in the morning before you start shooting, and at lunchtime, you take that tape out and put another tape in. I know that sounds ridiculous, but you've got to remember, the way in which we shoot ? we shoot 60 days ? it is imperative for George to have material. He does coverage, but he also shoots very quickly. We have rehearsals. Everybody knows exactly what their job is each day, and we rarely ever walk away from a day's shooting without accomplishing at least 36 setups a day. In a 12-hour day that means basically every 20 to 30 minutes we're moving a camera and we're on a new setup. If we're shooting with two 35mm cameras, and we reload 18, 19, 20 times a day or more, it still takes three to five minutes to reload, reset, recapture the moment again. We don't have that problem anymore.

If we're in the middle of a take and George wants to keep on going because the actors are struggling with marks or struggling with emotional issues, we just keep rolling.

The ability to have a tape in the Avid 60 minutes later is just extraordinary, especially if you're shooting in five different countries, like we do. I can't send rushes back from Tunisia, get them to London, develop the negative, then have the negative sent to a transfer facility, then have those tapes sent back to me in Tunisia without having that done in three to four days at the earliest. Now, it's in our editorial system instantly.

PP: You had no problems with the camera?
RM: None whatsoever, and that's the other thing I want to go into. That camera housing has been around for five-plus years, and it's been used by every major network and every single known of situation: rain, sleet, doesn't matter what. We did not have a single camera problem, and I have never been on a film where that's ever happened. In fact, I have never gone into the desert without an engineer.

On Episode I, when we wrapped at night, our camera engineer went through all of our cameras all night, and he'd have them all cleaned and ready for us the next morning. We did not have him on Episode II. We did have plenty of cameras as backup, but remember we were going through the first evolutionary stage of making a digital movie.

There were issues about negative insurance because there's no negative. So to make it more palpable to our insurance company, we created a clone HD master simultaneously while we were shooting with a second HDCAM machine. The one additional person we had was a video engineer, but we had one less loader.

Hit the link above for the full interview and thanks to CptTripps for heads up!