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Flash press camera

By Christine Berrie

So RED just had their first public showing of their REDRay magic box. Some compression wizzardry made it possible to compress 4k video by the factor of 750 – resulting in 4k footage at a datarate that is half of standard definition miniDV. Basically you get a picture way, way, way better than HD at a fraction of BluRay’s data rate. This might just turn the whole delivery upside down, as it will enable distribution of high quality films via standard broadband. Also, digital cinema will not need proprietary distribution technology, because a feature film will fit on a standard DVD-R.

At the REDuser party in Las Vegas RED showed both uncompressed footage side-to-side with the same footage compressed with their technology. Uncompressed size was roughly 320GBs, while the REDRay version shrank down to 450MBs. Many reported as to not being able to tell the difference.

Some video footage from the REDuser party has been put online by Justin.tv.

I hope that it will only be a matter of time before 4k projectors come at an affordable price. Community cinemas could spring to life again, and small filmmakers could organize regionally to open up their own cinemas. Distribution of independent film will no longer be limited by cost.

What an exciting times we live in, my friends.

Found a great article by BSC and ASC member Roger Deakins, one of my favourite Directors of Photography.

With all our modern inventions and innovations, there are few films that manage to achieve the “quality” of Citizen Kane, though there are many that have far less grain and considerably higher resolution.

Every shot I have ever made has been a compromise in some way. That’s a sweeping statement, but true nonetheless. No image has ever been as good as the one I envisioned in my mind’s eye. Maybe that’s what keeps me going: just once, I want to see that image onscreen!

There has always been a disregard for preservation, whether it’s preservation of a historic site, the Dodo, the polar bear, or a film like Sid and Nancy.

The animators who “photographed” [Wall-E] worked in a three-dimensional world and covered the action in much the same way as a live-action film, but the directors of photography, Danielle Feinberg (lighting) and Jeremy Lasky (camera) – separate positions you might note – used no emulsion, no Fresnel lamps or diffusion, no Steadicam, no geared head, nor any other live-action tool. Nevertheless, theirs was a stunning cinematographic achievement. It’s true they had an advantage – they never had to battle fading daylight, conceal a light’s source or hide dolly tracks – but I would not hesitate to recommend them for ASC membership.

Read the full article here.

Hungry Man/Grey London has made this new commercial for Toshiba, employing 200 hidef cameras.

20.000 gigabyte of data. 2 1/2 million individually renamed frames. $4.7 million dollar.

Some background footage:

Some facts

• The TV ad was shot using 200 Toshiba Gigashot Cameras: the highest number of moving image cameras ever used in a film sequence
• This particular technique, viewing looping action in 360 degrees, has never been done before
• The rig was custom built weighing approximately half a tonne, including 200 cameras and electronics
• The rig measures 14m diameter circle and 1.8m high
• The 200 cameras were all triggered using a single remote control
• Once the rig was built, four focus pullers spent three days focusing and aligning all 200 cameras
• The time spent processing footage from 200 cameras was over four weeks – 24 hours a day seven days a week!
• New offline and online editing software had to be specifically built for the job
• In terms of data, this is one of the biggest jobs a post-production house has ever taken on – 20TB of data

Credits

Production Company: Hungry Man LTD
Director: Mitch Stratton
Editor and editing company: The Whitehouse / Christophe Williams
Post-production company: The Mill
Music: Crystal Castles – Air War
Voice-over: Kira Lauren

(from the Press Release)

Sam had some bad luck with his Canon 17-85mm lens, which retails for about 500 dollars. Rather than just throwing it away (or worse: selling it on eBay), he followed his inquisitive nature, and took the beast apart. Visit his post for more pictures.

In the past months I have written about a number of upcoming exciting technologies, namely the ability to enhance video using high-res stills, a new lens that will allow you to chose the focus in post production and of course an on-line lens cleaning tool.

Video sensors have a lower contrast range than film, meaning how much darkness and highlights they can record. This manifests itself in blown out windows, and noisy shadows.

4 million ND filters

Video sensors also have the tendancy of getting an always increasing pixel count. 4k cameras are already being sold by the thousands, and next year will see 3k video cameras aimed at the mass market and professional cameras exceeding 5k resolutions. At the same time digital cinema maxes out at 4k resolution (with many cinemas opting for the more affordable 2k solution). Technically, it is possible to make 16k cameras. But isn’t that just overkill?

Well, some smart minds have come up with a novel concept. Rather than using the extra – but essentially unneeded – resolution as such, why not use it for something else, more useful. Why not cover every other pixel of the sensor with a tiny ND (neutral density) filter? That way one could extend the contrast ratio of that sensor by several stops. Thus yielding a higher contrast ratio than film.

This is exciting!

Dogs will be a cameraman’s best friends

Robots are also on their way into our lives. One particular type of robot will be of great help for documentary film makers, and other shooters out in the wild. A robotic dog that acts as a mule.

BigDog runs at 4 mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble, and carries a 340 lb load.

Ever increasing demand for moving pictures

Pretty much every web site nowadays has some video on it. Soon every company will have a presentation video, and manuals are getting pushed aside for instructional videos. And now, e-ink is taking a first leap into mainstream. Esquire will distribute 100.000 copies of its October magazine with an e-paper cover that includes moving type.

In other words: the demand for quality images increases; at the same time novel tools for their creation are added to our palette.

Exciting times, indeed.

As a follow-up on my previous post, here is a bit more information about that truly mesmerizing Adobe research project, which proposes to build lenses that act as multiple lenses. This will enable the camera to take multiple pictures at once, shifting the job of setting focus from the Focus Puller to the post production process.

Take Several Shots at Once With multiple eyes—Adobe’s prototype has 19—the light-field camera is even more perceptive. Each of its lenses is faced with a prism set at a unique angle, so it can take 19 pictures simultaneously, with each capturing a different part of the scene in focus. Each image uses a piece of the sensor, so a 100-megapixel camera will yield 19 5.2-megapixel shots.

Fill in the Blanks But the process doesn’t stop there. Adobe software can analyze the 19 captured photos and from them generate thousands of intermediate images so that each shot seamlessly morphs into those adjacent. Then images are layered, like thin sections, producing a three-dimensional simulation of the scene in which every piece of it is in focus.

Paint in Your Focus Because a light-field photograph is dynamic—virtually three-dimensional—focus can be selectively painted in with a “focus brush,” allowing the photographer to bring details from both foreground and background into focus—something that’s currently impossible in a single photo. Or future online photo sites could let viewers manipulate a photo’s focus as they choose.

(Excerpt from PopSci.com.)

As a former Focus Puller I find this very exciting, as the technology proposes to give the director so much more freedom in post. Ultimately, it will help to tell the story, and that is what camerawork should be all about. But also from a technical side, it appears that the age-old connection between aperture and depth-of-field ceases to exist. I can only begin to imagine the plethora of new creative uses this lens throws towards us camerapeople.

HD will feel like home movies

In stills photography, resolution has quickly increased from a mere 250.000 pixel to two-digit megapixels. The video world has been much more conservative. Until a few years back, there was only SD, which has about 1/4 megapixels. HD is just now starting to catch on, which delivers roughtly between 3/4 and under 2 megapixels. But already now, some camera producers are pushing forward with 2k and even higher resolutions. But my guess is that 4k will only the beginning.After having gotten used to DVD quality, old VHS films are almost painful to watch. Looks like the same will happen to HD in the not-too-far future…

Good for the ops

For an camera operator, the biggest handicap with the modern cameras are their viewfinders, which simply do not show all of the resolution that camera records. The Red One for example, shows the operator only a fraction of the total resolution. Which means that the operator can never be sure in critical focus situations. Now that Adobe Lens would relieve us from one worry.Now, for the career Focus Puller this does pose some trouble. That title might just fade out, and revert to “1st AC”. But I would suggest to learn more about the new workflows around digital acquisition, and I am sure there will always be enough work in the camera dep´t.

Nab is the yearly major event for anything connected with video/media production. I´ll make some wild(ish) guesses as to what might delect my fellow camera(wo)men

Sony / Panavision

It will be exciting to see how the big guys are going to react to the Red One camera. I would hope for an affordable 2k shoulder-mount camera, that supports higher frame rates, and has interchangeable lenses. Competitively priced against the Red. Sort of a Red light for ENG work.

Red

Red is a master of hype, and this NAB looks like Red might just steal the show again. They have announced 3 big and 3 minor news. With only a little bit of foundation, I will do some wild guessing as to what they might be

Majors

1. A palm sized 4k camera. This has already been announced, but none of the details are out. I would imagine that it is either a slightly downsized Red One camera, meaning aimed at the professional market. Or it could just be a more consumer-friendly priced camera, something for the video enthusiast.
2. 4k projector. Its been rumored a long time that Red would produce their own affordable solution for viewing 4k. With that in mind, it gives an extra layer to view the recently published Mythbuster video on Red.
3. This is the most mysterious one. Some suggest a time-reversal machine. I would guess that it could have something to do with the handling/archival of digital files. Harddisks are unreliable for long-term storage, DLT a bit cumbersome. At the same time, lack of a good archival system for file-based cinematography has been holding its development back.

Minors

1. Direct support for FCP, Avid, Premiere. Since Apple is not having a stand this year, we know that there won’t be a new Final Cut Pro/Studio coming out.
2. Red One Build 16. Greater colours, higher frame rates. But a faster boot-up time will come at a later time.
3. Optical viewfinder. PS Technik in Germany has already announced one, but wouldn’t it be great if Red had that option built-in?

The others

Will be interesting to see when other battery technologies become viable.There will be some new solutions for the tapeless workflow in post production.I guess also the tendency is that the workload shifts from the set to the post production. Adobe is just one of many players here, but they have come up with a very exciting concept around focus/depth of field:

Thanks to Ouriel’s very readable blog, I found out about Outbrain, which promises to be a great tool for bloggers of most platforms. Basically it lets users rate your content, and over time it can build a list of recommended article for each and every reader, according to his/her likes & dislikes.

I just started using it on my blog here, and hope you all can give it a workout by rating my posts. I get feedback on what you like and don’t like, and you will get (over time) recommendations and (pretty soon) better articles from me.

It’ll be good for you, too

Oh, and it only takes a (as in one) click. Thanks for your co-operation.

Here’s some camcorder marketing talk you can ignore:

1. 100x digital zoom – digital zoom enlarges your digital image, resulting in lower quality.
2. Software included – chose the software that suits you, not some feature-limited, outdated software that comes bundled with your camera.
3. Filming at 0 lux – no camera can film without light. The result is a grainy, colorless, low quality picture.
4. Electronic stabilizer – while promising sturdy pictures without a tripod, this really degrades your picture quality. Optical stabilization is what you want. Or – for best quality – a tripod.
5. Digital effects – this is really something you want to do in editing, not in-camera. Keep your options open!