Keith Walters

It makes you think of the early 2000s, when Sony was really the only game in town for "Digital Cinematography" cameras, yet for a very long time, not a single feature from Columbia Pictures (owned by Sony) was shot on video; it was 35mm negative all the way. It would be interesting to see what the actual current sales figures are for Red cameras. (Actual figures, NOT guesses from barstool "experts" 🤣). It could simply be that the market is now close to saturated, and it's getting harder and harder to come up with new models that are a big enough improvement over what people have already.

Hard to believe that the first post about Red was just on 18 years ago!

Originally, TV studio cameras typically had about an 8-stop (~1:256) dynamic range. 256 centimetres is about 8.5 feet, a little over the height of a typical living room ceiling. On the same scale, 17 stops would equate to a ceiling about 1.3 kilometres high, about eight-tenths of a mile!

I can't believe I'd never heard of Betty Brosner before! https://youtu.be/2HHTmPukoy8 Not sure what that has to do with Arri though....

A long time ago in a galaxy far away, TV production studios used to have special "standard TV" speakers, which were specifically designed to emulate the frequency response of the "average" mono speakers in mass-produced consumer TVs. Editors would routinely check the sound through both the "Mr Average" speakers and what was deemed to be "TV Hi Fi" in order to strike the best balance between the two. I don't know whether something similar was done for movie sound, having "Flea Pit" and Dolby Surround test speakers, but whatever, those days are clearly long gone. I have no trouble at all with the dialogue from TV shows made before about 1990, but after that, it seems that the assumption is that everybody has a dedicated Home Theatre room with full surround and mighty subwoofers. I routinely take insertable ear protectors to cinemas now. In fact, that could be a new consumer product: "HiFi" hearing protectors, that just attenuate the sound without "colouring" it in any way.

This one sounds more plausible @ US$300 for 1-99 pieces https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/WINAIT-1080-1044p-super-8-roll_60699531087.html No supplier offers them for anything like $48, so it's got to be BS.

https://www.shiees.com/product/transverter/?fbclid=IwAR0eruxbpFAkw4pkrGrllbDPQJu8Nabz5NKKdSx7gWlHyhjWoxRObu8NWwg This only just appeared in my Facebook feed. Has anybody else heard of it? Sounds too good to be true. The video looks suspiciously like CGI. There have been other "too good to be true" products advertised online that turned out to be scams. The best one was a DVD-VHS combo with implausibly good specs.... On closer examination you could see that the image wasn't of a real object.

I don't know how I missed this before ? They're up to episode 4 (available on YouTube) and episode 5 is in the pipeline. I found it very entertaining viewing. I always thought Red were full of it with regard to who actually made their sensors and other equipment, and this confirms it. But the big question remains: Why?!! All the major manufacturers of electronic cameras seem to have no problems revealing who actually makes their sensors, and I could fully believe an outfit such as Sony could plausibly make their own. Meanwhile, Apple are still haven't given up on overturning the Red "RAW" patents https://petapixel.com/2019/08/19/apple-goes-after-red-over-keystone-raw-video-patent/

A focussed image is made up of an infinite number of points of light that are produced by converging cone-shaped beams. At the point of maximum focus (the "focal plane") the photons are most tightly converged; either side of that, instead of points of light they produce circles, and the overall result is what we called a "blurred" image. The further you get away from the focal plane, the larger the part of the "cones" that is intersected, resulting in larger circles and less focus. If there is no iris fitted, the angle of these "cones" is specifically determined by the size of the front element of the lens. When an object is being imaged, photons from every point of light on its surface are going to strike the entire front surface of the lens, and eventually be re-converged into the "cones" striking the imaging surface. Obviously the size of the front element is going to determine the angle of these cones For example, a lens 2 inches in diameter is going to produce cones with twice the angle of one with a 1 inch diameter. Therefore, the out-of-focus "circles" are going to grow in size twice as fast with the 2 inch diameter lens as they would with the one inch diameter lens. In other words it has a much shallower depth of field. If you interpose an iris somewhere between the front element and the focal plane, it is going to have the effect of reducing the diameter of the front element, reducing the angle of the cones, and consequently increasing the depth of field. If you reduce the size of the aperture down to the size of a pinhole, then the angle of the cones will become extremely small, the photons will be almost parallel and it doesn't really matter where the image sensor is located; you have "infinite" depth of field. Which is exactly what you get with most small consumer cameras.

Cinema lenses are generally larger diameter to minimize the smallest available depth of field. That is, maximizing the de-focussing effect of parts of the subject not in the plane of optimal focus. You could have two lenses with the same focal length but one with a front element one-quarter the diameter of the other. The smaller one will behave more or less like the larger one stopped down by the iris, that is, with a wider depth of field. Cinematographers mostly use lenses with large front elements simply because there is no other practical way of capturing the shallow depth of field required for conveying the illusion of closeness to the subject. The only other way would be to use larger format film such as 65mm. That was one reason for the popularity of the Canon 5D - its oversize image sensor. Otherwise it's not a particularly great video camera.

This document gives a lot of information on lens types https://www.jaycar.com.au/medias/sys_master/9144062378014/Primer-Video-Camera-Basics-Jaycar.pdf

Looks like they pulled the plug: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/panavision-sim-saban-capital-acquisition-abandon-merger-plans-1191387 Wonder what happened there.

https://youtu.be/oM_22ouQL60

It was the classic case of the Tail Trying To Wag The Dog™. With virtually every other camera format you'd just shoot and present your files to the production house. You didn't have waste time trying to establish whether your editor-of-choice (or purveyor of facilities for same) could be arsed installing the Red bloatware on their systems, or updating their existing editing software for the benefit of a clientele who probably couldn't afford them anyway, and/or were potentially more trouble than they were worth. This was particularly so a decade ago when the necessary download bandwidth and hard drive real estate were considerably more costly than they are now. I suppose the main reason Red started encrypting the R3D files was that FFMPEG conversion spat out what was actually there, rather than letting Red's proprietary "Turd Polishing"™ software get its hands on it :rolleyes:

I seem to remember Ronald Perelman spouting much the same Gung-Ho financial-speak over 20 years ago. In the end, after spending frightening amounts of his own money clearing absurd levels of Bond debt, Panavision was seized from him by the banks and he was left holding an empty bag. “Advancements in technology and the emergence of streaming have fundamentally changed how consumers watch and discover content. This is driving significant growth in the market for production and post-production services. This secular trend creates a tremendous opportunity for Panavision to leverage its leading technology and pursue opportunistic acquisitions to grow in a manner that is agnostic to the content creator and distribution channel.” Most of that is quite correct, but I don't think Panavision have any particular expertise in that area, that's the problem

There are a few experimental prism 3-CMOS 8K cameras kicking around from Hitachi and a couple of others, but details are extremely scarce. It's the same issue: There are plenty of single-chip designs around, but only 3-chip cameras can deliver the short image latency needed for live broadcasts. I really don't think over the air broadcasting is ever going to be up to the task though. It's more likely to be delivered by 5G wireless.

Yes, I know all that. Long before there were even silicon sensors, there were camera tubes filled with colour stripe filters to make "single tube" colour cameras. However, it wasn't until well into the 21st century that portable computing technology got both powerful and cheap enough to handle all the processing required to get your "very decent image" Before that, single-sensor colour cameras were always the "poor relation." The only reason for developing high quality Bayer sensors for "digital cinematography" was simply that it allowed cinematographers to use the same lenses as they had been used to using for 35mm film cameras, since making a 3-Chip 35mm-sized prism colour separation system was not practical. I just thought it's ironic that after all that "prism-is-dead" waffle from the desperate-and-clueless wannabe element, for 2K cameras, Sony have still seen fit to use 3-chip prism optics for their 4K cameras. Maybe, just maybe, Sony know a bit more about it than they do..... "Pretty sure a lot /all ? of sports is broadcast 4K in Japan now.." Pretty sure you're wrong. There has been some 4K, but from what I can glean from Japanese news sources, it hasn't exactly set the world on fire. One major problem is that most everybody in Japan who wanted an HDTV has now got one, and is seeing little reason to upgrade to a 4K model. Plus a lot of the TVs with 4K panels don't actually have tuners that can receive the 4K broadcasts. But anyway, my question has been answered more-or-less. 4K OB systems are available, but it would appear that by the time it hits the customer's 4K screen, it's going to be something rather less than that.

Interesting that they're still prism 3-chip systems for 4K despite all the hoo-ha about single-chip sensors and the years of various clueless "theories" (from the Red-eratti in particular) about why the silly broadcast camera manufacturers still use that system :rolleyes: The simple answer is that the dichroic prism separation system yields Red, Green and Blue images ready for transmission with minimal processing, and minimal latency, which is vital for live sporting events. (With the average single-chip 4K camera, the commentators would have to sit in a soundproofed tent in the Video Village, only commenting on what they see on the screen....) And when you look at all the trouble people go to to get accurate focus on just 2K for feature film production, what's operator focus-on-the-fly going to look like on a huge 4K screen? Plus, there is vastly more to an Outside Broadcast than just the cameras; is all the other equipment 4K capable? This all sounds like B.S. to me, rather like 3-D TV actually....

There were a couple of articles in The Australian this morning about Foxtel's new 4K cable service. The first one was about live coverage of the Bathurst 1000 (car race). They invited reader comments, but when I tried to ask where they were getting the cameras from and how exactly is the operator going to go about focussing a high speed event like that and so on, comments were abruptly closed! Now there is another, similar item about them televising Australian Rules football (AFL) in 4K. Is that actually being done anywhere else? And if so, do viewers actually get 4K in their homes? The only "broadcast" 4K cameras I can find don't look very capable. Is live 4K actually a thing?

In my day, they used to turn up in running shoes without any socks. I remember one early 80s hippy outfit (financed by the head honcho's mother) where they kept bringing back various pieces of studio equipment claiming they was faulty, but we could never find anything wrong with any of them. Turned out his Jennifer Juniper girlfriend had become concerned about the effect all these "electrics" might be having on his Aura, and so their production studio was draped with crystals and negative ion generators. The electrostatic charge from those was what was buggering up the equipment :rolleyes:

The "Secret Sauce" that separates the ManCam from the FanBoyCam is the dyes used to make the Bayer Mask. If you don't get that right, no amount of wishful thinking, Digital Jiggery-Pokery or color pseudo-science "afterburning" is ever going to fix it. (The same thing applies to colour film, which is one reason why there were so few successful manufacturers of that). Arri got it right, and they're not about to share the recipe. Get over it.

The only real way to do this would be to have say, 16 rectangular evenly illuminated LED modules, with individually adjusted power levels so that each one was twice as bright as say the one to the left of it, and half as bright as the one to the right . In practice that would mean that in theory, if the brightest LED was drawing 1 Amp, the dimmest one would be drawing about 15 microamps, but it could never produce an accurate output at that tiny a current. I did do some preliminary experiments with the above some years back, but the results tended to tell camera owners what they didn't want to hear, so I promptly lost my access to high-end cameras. With the much better and cheaper white LED modules available these days, I may revisit this subject.

I've never found a "24 fps" consumer camera that actually produces 24.00 fps, it's always 23.98. I suspect it's simply because 23.98 isn't going to mean anything to the average punter. Some HD TVs can handle true 24.00fps, but most are only comfortable with 23.98, which is what comes out of Blu-Ray players offering "24fps" Then again, manufacturers seem to have no problem using incomprehensible lens sizes such as 1/2.6" :D

OH!! I see! It's got two separate image sensors; one for closeup, one for telephoto. Well isn't that a thing; that's EXACTLY what I suggested to them about 4 years ago! Did I get a response? Nope. Did I get my inbox flooded with Samsung Spam? Absolutely. I actually showed them a picture of a Sharp Video 8 analog camcorder which had a similar system. If you knew what you were doing (a stretch for most camera users I know) flicking between wide and zoomed telephoto in shot could produce amazingly professional results. In wide mode it also had a superimposed rectangle that showed you the image area that would be switched to when you flicked to zoom. Since a zoom isn't practical on a phone, my suggestion was that having two or more sensors with different focal lengths would be the next best thing.

I could be wrong but this might be the product that finally: • Democratizes the film-making process • Puts penniless and completely talentless, clueless and illiterate wannabes on the same playing field as wealthy, accomplished, capable and resourceful producers who have made multiple 9 digit blockbusters • Smashes through the celluloid ceiling. By some oversight, Samsung don't actually say any of that, but they damn well should! :rolleyes: http://www.samsung.com/au/smartphones/galaxy-s9/camera/?cid=au_email_star_pre1a_superp_022018_cta2&SAMID=0x97D3194D56CB08C4CF93C109E053B964294D6BC6AD594A516FBF998B1A04FBCD&sap-outbound-id=177B25A8C7D1DA2661680C337BF6FE692CD286C6 For that "Big Screen" (6.2 inch!) experience. Our category-defining Dual Aperture lens adapts like the human eye. It's able to automatically switch between various lighting conditions with ease—making your photos look great whether it's bright or dark, day or night.* * Dual Aperture supports F1.5 and F2.4 modes. Installed on the rear camera (S9)/rear wide camera (S9+). ??Does that mean what it looks like it means? A one-stop iris? How does that help....? Well anyway, I can't wait for the S11 to come out; by that time the S9 will have had all the inevitable bugs ironed out, and will be priced to sell :) They don't say much about how it goes making phone calls though....