Keith Walters

This extract from a document I wrote on CCTV cameras might help you to understand it a bit better: Imager size and choice of lens. The majority of domestic and industrial video cameras use one of two main sizes of imager. These are usually called the “One third inch” type and the “Quarter inch” type, and both are made in either B&W or colour versions. Other sizes are made, including larger “half inch” and “two-thirds-inch” types, but these are less common. The active image size of a nominal “third Inch” imager is actually 4.8 x 3.6mm, while that of a nominal “quarter inch” imager is 3.6 x 2.7mm. You may have realized that the diagonal of a quarter inch 4:3 aspect ratio imager calculates to 4.5mm, whereas a quarter of an inch is actually 6.5mm. This is because the measurement convention is a carryover from old-fashioned thermionic camera tubes, where the size referred not the actual image area but to the diameter of the glass tube. Generally, the diagonal measurement of the usable sensor area of a camera tube was about two-thirds the physical diameter. Modern lens sizing conventions. In the old days, CCTV cameras tended to have a quite short service life and were often replaced at frequent intervals. However the lenses did not usually wear out and, as good ones were expensive, normal practice was to fit the old lenses back onto new cameras with the same sized tubes. When CCD cameras became available, people naturally wished to continue with this practice but of course CCD cameras don’t have a “Tube”, so a range of CCDs was designed having pickup areas approximating the dimensions of the active pickup areas of common camera tube sizes. So, a “half inch” CCD sensor actually meant: “One that can use a lens designed for a ‘half inch’ camera tube.” That all made perfect sense at the time, but in more recent years the system has gone completely off the rails. First of all, while there are CCD and CMOS sensor sizes such as “third inch”, “quarter inch” and even “fifth inch” readily available, there have never actually been any “third inch”, “quarter inch” or “fifth inch” camera tubes! The smallest camera tubes ever made were “half inch”. What these figures are now supposed to mean is that the actual diagonal of the pickup area of the image sensor is two-thirds the quoted dimension. So, a “one third inch” CCD or CMOS sensor actually has an active sensor diagonal measurement of 0.33 x 2/3 = 0.2 inches (about 5mm). Even more bizarre is the current practice of quoting sensor sizes as nonsensical fractions such as “1/2.6 inch”. “1/2.6 inch” is actually intended to mean what it looks like it means: “1 inch ÷ 2.6” (= 0.385 inches). But the sensor diagonal size is only two-thirds this; about 0.25 inches or 6.5mm! Apart from the possible intention that “1/2.6 inch” sounds more impressive than “6.5mm”, it is hard to fathom the logic behind this system. The true sensor diagonal in mm can be calculated by dividing 16.9 by the “decimal-ized divisor”. So in the above example: 16.9 ÷ 2.6 = 6.5mm. 4/3 is the same as "1/0.75" and in that case the diagonal is 16.9 ÷ 0.75 = 22.6mm.

SUPER from eRightSoft is more or less a windows front-end for FFMPEG. It will convert just about anything to anything at any frame rate and resolution. It's also completely free, HOWEVER you can only get it from an insanely convoluted website that's full of misleading "Download Now" buttons, that are actually for other crap that you aren't interested in, and if you're not careful with what you click, will install unwanted toolbars and other rubbish. And no, you can't make a hyperlink to the actual SUPER download button when you eventually get to it, that still takes you back through the same "ski slope". Basically the first few times you find a button that is actually related to SUPER, it just takes you on to another SUPER brag screen full of more misleading links to dodgy sites. ___________________________________________________________________________ Edited to add: Hang on, maybe you can: Try this link: http://zlexopalvim.gotdns.org/GetFile5.php?SUPERsetup.exe It never used to work, but maybe they've changed it. It should just start downloading an exe file. ____________________________________________________________________________ Eventually, when you make it to the end, it does download normally. Just don't click anything that says "Advertisement"!! Some of the buttons have names that sound like "Super" but aren't... But I think the only people who persevere that far are the ones who have actually used it before and found it useful. I would have given up on it long time ago, except that it's the only product I know that can cope with some of the weirdo video formats that come out of domestic video cameras these days. The odd thing is, once you DO manage to get it installed, it works really well, and there's no sign of any software shenanigans running in the background. Its only other vice is that it wants to do an automatic update check each time you fire it up, and if it finds there is an update, your current version stops working until you upgrade. Which gets you back to square 1. There's no option to disable that, but even more bizarrely, they actually tell you how to prevent this, by setting the windows firewall to prevent SUPER automatically accessing the internet. Once you do that, it seems to run happily. To do that you have to add it to the windows firewall, then disable it, but they give you all the details of how to do that! What I'd suggest is that you load it on an old PC that you don't particularly care about or a virtual machine. Once you've got the installer file itself, you can freely use that on other machines. I've run it by a number of virus checkers, and sound nothing suspicious. Incidentally, if you ever do manage to get a Trojan accidentally installed, I can thoroughly recommend a program called unHackMe http://greatis.com/unhackme/ His website looks a trifle dodgy, but it's 100% genuine. The trial version is fully functional but the automated features only work for 30 days unless you upgrade. In most cases the free option will get you out of trouble, and I've used it quite a few times on various computers (including one of my own)

Why would you think you would need any different sort of cameras from what you would need for any other sort of production? I remember some posts here from some years back, from a guy who ran a studio that only produced Porn. It all sounded very matter-of-fact, really no different from shooting commercials. The amusing thing was, they'd just set up the studio with all-Red cameras. There was also a thread about it over on Reduser, which suddenly vanished like a popped soap bubble :rolleyes: I can't find that particular thread, but here's an interesting one from about 8 years ago on a similar topic: http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=32410

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/how-get-old-fashioned-light-bulb-glow-without-wasting-so-much-energy This idea has been around for a while, but this is the first time I've heard of anybody actually making it work. The basic principle is to use an IR-reflecting mirror around the lamp filament to "recycle" the invisible infrared and use it to further heat the filament, producing more visible light. Currently incandescents turn just 2% of their power input to visible light; they reckon they could get it up to about 40% which is considerably better than either fluorescent or LED lighting. Their prototype is about 6%, roughly on par with cheaper LED and fluorescents. Interesting times....

No, I know that as well. Funny, I've just now gotten back from a conversation with the Property Manager of the organization I now work for. A couple of years back, some executive who has now "left to pursue other interests" got a bee up his arse about changing all our stores' ageing fluorescent lights to new LED replacements. I would have just said get new tubes (about $2.15 in bulk for quite good ones) and starters, and you'll probably get another 15 years out of them, but no, he had to get these whizz-bang new LED "plug in" replacements, at about 6 times the cost. Apart from the fact that the imbecile electricians they hired completely ignored the instructions to check the ballasts to make sure they were the old-fashioned iron ballast type, thus seeing a goodly number of LED lights getting fried by high-frequency electronic ballasts, the reliability of the lights themselves was terrible ("made in Vietnam", what did you expect?), plus the colour rendering was all over the place. Therein lies the irony: In our head office where they did the initial "test" rollout, clearly they were supplied with a better grade of light, because if you take photos anywhere in there, the colour rendition is uniformly excellent. Go out to the warehouse it immediately varies between OK and Fugly. I'm actually experimenting with a prism assembly out of a pair of cheap binoculars to see if I can make some sort of "Spectrum analyzer" (in the original sense), which might serve to demonstrate exactly how shouse the CRI of a lot of light sources actually is... :rolleyes:

This is a cycle I've seen before , though. Some new "breakthrough" video format becomes flavor of the month, there's a brief surge in its popularity until enough people are brave enough to comment on the excessively diaphanous nature of the Emperor's new wardrobe, and everybody gradually drifts back to film. Every cycle, film loses a bit more ground it's true, but they still haven't managed to kill it off yet. The sad legacy is the sheer number of otherwise excellent TV shows that look positively putrid on a 40" + digital TV, even in standard definition. Meanwhile, lesser productions shot on 35mm scrub up extremely well with a re-scan and basic digital cleanup.

Maybe after the next two installments Disney will go back and re-boot the prequels :rolleyes: Just imagine; no video, no pointless Pod races, and no Jar Jar Binks.

"Behind the scenes on Black Swan" Once again I would like to remind our Northern Hemisphere readers that in Australia at least, Black Swans are pretty much the only sort you're going to see :rolleyes:

I used to think Directors' Viewfinders were the ultimate aide de masturbe but, you know, the customer is always right and so on. Then at Panavision Sydney in the early 1990s I made some VHS combo monitors with a built-in video masking facility so you could just show the part of the video tap image that was eventually going to appear on the screen. I was mainly asked to do this with the hope of discouraging people from plastering our monitors with gaffer tape, which often damaged the cabinets. Anyway, until then I'd never appreciated how much difference framing makes to cinematic storytelling. It's quite eerie to watch how the whole mood and meaning of a scene can be changed by simply removing parts of the background. I also added the ability to vary the masked off area brightness from black to white. The main reason for doing this was so that the boundaries of the frame on dark scenes could be more easily discerned, but it was astounding how different a scene looked depending on whether it appeared on a black or a white background. There's a lot more to shooting a scene than just focusing and pressing the stop/go button....

I wonder if the word "sperm" would get nixxed by iTunes's Nanny-ware. Some years ago I was looking to download Camille Saint-Saëns "Carnival of the Animals" from iTunes. All the different movements for the different animals were listed (tortoises, elephants etc) except for "Asses" (as in Donkeys) which had been asterisked-out!

Well, so much for the "death of film". I always expected film acquisition would take a long time to die, but I'm really surprised that projection prints are still available, contrary to what a lot of people insisted here and elsewhere a couple of years back. It's not just a case of: "Well, we already have the equipment" either; processing chains require a lot of expensive maintenance. Then again Polaroid still lives too :-)

So there must be some market for them still. I know there are afficionados for whome celluloid projection is still king, but I wouldn't have thought there would be enough of them to keep the line going.

All the Marvel Studios 3-D features are shot flat, with the 3-D effects computer-generated in Post. This means that everyday scenes that would shot "practically" using a 2 camera 3-D rig, are assembled from multiple greenscreens. That way the computers can individually tailor the depth of field of each element of the scene, which completely eliminates the "walking cardboard cutout" effect you get when the depth of field is out of kliter with the perspective. (As seen on "The Great Gatsby". But WHY 3-D for that movie anyway? Or WHY that movie period :P ) The biggest problem is the quality of both the 3-D glasses and the projectors themselves.

Where did they get the prints made? It requires a specialized processing line to make prints, completely different to the one that processes camera negative. While there is still a fair market for processing film, and so it's worth while maintaining at least a limited infrastructure, what supports the maintainance of a release print chain? With the virtual disappearance of film prints, there would seem even less reason to rush in to see the movie in the opening weeks, since digital versions don't develop scratches or otherwise wear out. I don't know what it's like in other countries, but here it only lakes a couple of weeks and you virtually have the cinema to yourself, off-peak :-)

Well it's the same old story; some imbecile in a business suit gets paid $50 million over four years to lose a company $5 billion dollars, and then finally gets given an obscene golden handshake just to get rid of him. Meanwhile the guy selling hot dogs on the sidewalk outside makes about $20,000 profit a year. So who's the more efficient businessman? Somehow in the public's perception the plus and minus signs get confused or erased. It's a bit like the Irish union Rep joke: "Well I've got good news and bad news. "The bad news is, we have to take a pay cut. "The GOOD news is, I managed to get it backdated...."

Ah well, this is the "Democratization of FIlm" that so many Red and DVX User Fanboys fought and died for :-)

Biafratography roolz!

No, you couldn't see anything on them; they just appeared as burned-out white rectangles. Well, trapeziums, (trapezia?) to be more precise :rolleyes: .

I was sort of under the impression that CMOS sensor image skew, (also known as "Jello-Cam" ) had been eliminated, at least in High End cameras. But I noticed on "The Martian" (mostly shot with Red cameras) some pretty severe skew artifacts on the set's LCD video screens when the spacecraft was getting trashed by the sandstorm. Would you expect to see the same result with an Alexa or F65? If nothing else, an LCD screen looks like a good test of skew performance, since it's nice and rectangular, and you know the aspect ratio.

Basically the same thing: My wife is a residential care worker and she wanted a "nurse's watch", the type with an upside-down display that pins to your shirt or blouse so you can see the time without needing to move your arm, and safely out of the way of water or other contamination. They were $24.95 in a local chemist's or $2.20 from China including postage! At that price, if you were concerned about contamination, you could just throw them away at the end of your shift. Anyway, when they saw it, the people she works for bought 50 as Christmas gifts for their staff, which were very well received. I got her 5, they all still work about 1 year on.

By Priime Quality I meant that they seem to be standard "off-the-shelf" products, such as would be used my manufacturers, not factory floor sweepings Well, they don't treat their workers terribly well I've spent more hours than I care to remember going over Third Party Ethical Compliance reports for Chinese Factories for my previous employer, and based on those, current generation Chinese workers seem to be working under a lot better conditions than our parents or grandparents did. In fact one of the reasons manufacturing is moving away from China to places like Vietnam is the increasing cost and scarcity of skilled labour. But certainly, the workers in the places where the work is going to don't have terribly good conditions. Probably the worst violations are in places like Bangladesh, where much of the World's clothing is now made, and ironically, they do a much better job of it than the average Chinese factory ever did. In fact, in China one of the biggest causes of audit failure is so-called "excessive working hours", where the reality is that workers want to work more overtime than local labour laws allow. The official government policy is that if you constantly need worker overitme, you should be hiring more workers. Also in western countries, it's seen as admirable that schoolkids get part-time jobs after school to earn some of their own money; in China that's not quite a criminal offense but is very much frowned upon.

I can't get over the service I've been getting buying electronic parts from China on eBay. Apart from the fact that they cost next to nothing (eg NE555 timer chips; $1.50 each locally or 50 for $3 including postage from China) they're always extremely well packed and usually get here within 10 days. Other ridiculous purchases: 2 Amp switchmode power supply modules: Input up to 37V, output 5 to 15 V adjustable; 10 for $7.20 including postage. Step-up converter modules: Input 5V to 15V output up to 40V; (perfect for USB powered gadgets) $1.39 each including postage 1,000 Surface Mount LEDs, 5 different colours, $6 including post. How the hell do they do it...? And before anybody asks, they're all prime quality merchandise.

"hopefully I'm not the only one enjoying these type of things :)" Certainly not! In the late 1990s a lot of perfectly good BVP-3s got pensioned off in favour of CCD Betacams. CCDs are certainly more reliable and will tolerate a lot more physical abuse than tube cameras, but in the early days the Saticon tubes had much better colour rendering. As long as they are set up correctly, there was really nothing wrong with the pictures they produced. I did some 16 x 9 modifications to BVP-3 and similar cameras (which you can't do with a CCD chip!), and people were always amazed at the picture quality. As in your case, the tape decks were normally beyond repair and so I used to hook up an S-Video connector, which is what most video cards have for a "high quality" connection. Many video cards allow 50 Megabit/sec DV recording, and with a reasonably large hard drive, a cheap laptop makes a pretty capable SD digital video recorder. Having said that, you really have to know what you're doing with a tube camera, in particular the tube registration setup is more art than science, and you'd need to find somebody experienced with this; not so easy to find these days. I'm not sure whether anybody makes USB video capture cards with component input, but clearly that would be a better option. Actually about the only useful things I salvaged from the tape decks were the special mulitpin connectors!

Assuming you're using a PC, the freeware video editor Avidemux allows you to save high quality frames as either JPEG or Bitmap http://sourceforge.net/projects/avidemux/ Edited to add: It looks like you're using a Mac; they do make a version of Avidemux for the Mac but apparently it doesn't install as easily as the PC version. Still, it's free! The older versions (Avidemux 2.5) also allowed you to mark a section of video and save it as a series of JPEG stills, but they discontimued that in the later versions. However I think you can still find version 2.5 on the Net. I have both versions installed. Avidemux is dead easy to use. You just open a video file with the standard "File-Open" menu or, just drag and drop the file across with the mouse. Your keyboard left and right arrows step through the individual frames; the up and down keys jump forward and back to the nearest I-frame (0.5 to 1 second depending on the video format). The "[" and "]" keys mark the edit start and finish points respectively, so for example, if you choose "save video", whatever frames are between the [ and ] markers is what is saved. To save a single frame: "File - Save as Image". Only one minor quirk; you have to actually add ".jpg" manually to the file name, it doesn't automatically add it, even though it says: "save as JPEG"! Avidemux allows simple lossless editing if you always do your cuts at the I-Frame points. (Lossless in this case means the digital data stream is cut and spliced without decoding it. This is particularly useful for cutting the ads out of digital TV recordings, since there is no quality loss and rendering is extremely fast). I've used it with 4K MPEG4 (so-called "Quad HD") from my Samsung Phone with no trouble. Avidemux is basically a windows front end for FFMPEG so it is a very versatile program.) Here's a screen shot; that's me on the right holding the plate :-) (From the Masterfoods 2006 "Squeezy Sauces" ad campaign).

"Producers can be incredible story tellers" Yeah, in the development process, but not necessarily in the final product, where it counts... "and risk takers....." and usually with somebody else's time, money and equipment... Above content generated by AutoCurmudgeon ™ for IPhone and Android