Jason Rodriguez

Actually I think it's that SRW-1 on the camera that seals the deal for this thing in motion-picture film production for now. Everybody else has wires, etc. coming out the back, but the Panavision will be able to record 10-bit log RGB direct to tape at 880Mbit/s, which is 3:1 compression I believe (or something like that), and that's going to be very good quality, especially if it can handle the highlights well. I mean you shouldn't be able to see any compression artifacting at 3:1 on a first generation copy, especially if it's like digibeta. So much for Dalsa and the SGI computer they're going to be lugging around, or Arri and the three HD-SDI outputs you'll have to manage (unless you want their 150fps), unless Arri figures out something to get on-board recording that won't tether you to a bunch of wires. For right now I guess the game's Panavision's (oh and they have 50% more resolution to boot-12 Megapixels, that's KODAK's number for the resolution of 35mm film, so there shouldn't be any more complaining that film has "more resolution". Maybe more dynamic range, hopefully that's been fixed in the Panavision to comparable standards of film, but still, they'll be the king of resolution)

The long focal length sure will solve the DOF problems in 2/3" cameras :)

Well, my biggest question is what is being recorded to the HDCAM-SR tape format? Can HDCAM-SR record more than HD resolutions? And can it record multiple frame-rates? You have a 12 megapixel sensor in there, but especially at 50fps, where is all that information going? Is it being downsampled, or do they ever plan on including method where you can get all the information off that chip to a hard-drive, etc.? How good are their bayer demosaic algorithms, or again, are they planning on sampling the actual resolution to get a 'real' 3K? Also, how "raw" is the data coming off the camera onto tape? I know it's 10-bit log, but how much processing, matrix, sharpening, etc. is being applied to the image before it hits tape? Is it like the Viper, or is there a number of post-processing fuctions already done to the footage that would limit our control in post?

When do the NDA's come off and we can get some info. Hopefully not in Novemeber :unsure:. Cause I got some questions :)

Very Interesting and exciting! Some questions though (if they can be answered): 1) How does that 12 megapixels get recorded on to HDCAM-SR? Are they down-rezed to HD resolutions, or can HDCAM-SR support more than HD resolution? 2) Multiple frame rates are listed-is this accomplished in a similar manner to Panasonic's Varicam, or does the camera have to be turned on and off for the tape speed to be adjusted like the Sony F900? Can multiple frame-rates even be recorded to tape? 3) What's the dynamic range of this camera? Sounds like it can do quite a bit at RGB 10-bit log, but I'm still curious :-) 4) $$$$$-this thing sounds expensive! Either way, sounds very exciting, and it's nice to see everybody jumping into the HD fray with some cameras that actually make sense for film-making. ---------------------------------- Jason Rodriguez Post Production Artist Virginia Beach, VA

Hey Peter, After looking at Obin's pics, it seems like there's the potential for some really nice imagery, it's just that he keeps on overexposing everything, which makes a nice color-correction job much harder. Also I'm not to keen on the bayer converter that he's using, it has a lot of artifacting. With the overexposure thing, I'm not too sure he's maximizing the dynamic range of the camera. A similar comparison shot he did with the DVX100 looked absolutely horrible, major clipped highlights and background noise, so if his camera photos aren't looking so great, and a DVX100 looks totally unacceptable, then he might be shooting under real extenuating circumstances that nothing would look good in anyways. It's just real hard to tell right now as again, every image he's posting has hot-highlights in one form or another, even when he says that there's no overexposure in the original image. Overall the resolution looks okay, kind of like a soft 16mm camera stock from the early 80's or late 70's. That could be from the lens he's using. Color is off too, but again, that seems to be something with the color balance that I'm sure could be corrected, the RAW files he's been posting look green like Viper shots, and the green doesn't seem to removed or balanced as well as it should in some shots. Other than those shortcomings he does have my interest piqued a bit, although I still don't believe dragging a full PC around on set is very inducive to reliable and efficient film-making.

What gets me is everyone is yapping about this Summix camera being such "great quality". Has anybody seen the current Summix offerings?? They look horrible!!! Now unless they decide to use a different chip, like the new Altasens, then maybe they have a chance. But there's going to have to be a lot of internal electronics inside that camera to marry those three images (at 150Mpix/s for EACH chip!!) and then get them down a dual-link 4:4:4 HD-SDI pipe, and I don't think they're going to make those specs for $4K. Sure, they might make a camera for that much, but it isn't going to be 12-bit uncompressed RGB data, not unless they use a camera-link interface which isn't quite motion-picture friendly. Frankly I think this all looks great on paper, but when you really sit down and think about how much it's actually going to cost to get something PROFESSIONALLY useable, things get quite murky pricing-wise. And as Mitch pointed out, Mr J.'s setup is filled with many, many holes.

Yep, you hit the nail on the head. I really don't understand all the animosity towards the Kinetta by Jukuzami (and now I guess he's going by another name on the dv boards), when it's going to be a fabulously constructed direct-to-disk system. Frankly as of right now, unless the Aaton XTERA magically appears out of the middle of nowhere, the Kinetta will have this uncompressed direct-to-disk market totally wrapped up because it's going to be so stink'n easy to use. File managment, color corrector, HD-SDI/Dual-link HD-SDI/or uncompressed DPX output, metadata, etc., there's nothing you can simply pile together with off-the-shelf parts that's going to have this level of integration in it's price range (especially if it's around $40,000). Also if it costs that much, that means you'll be able to rent for at least $600-$700 a day w/o lens, I'm hoping more towards the $600 range. A full set of Zeiss primes is $300 per day, and with a three-day week you could be shooting with one of the best cameras out there for a little over $3000 per week. If it's a feature-length movie you wanna shoot, then you're looking at 3-4 weeks, and that'll run you around $12,000 in rental. There Mr. J, there's your stupid FEATURE FILM in the can for $12,000 (plus the additional expenses of hard-drives to store your 10-bit uncompressed DPX files, and assuming that you're not going to pay anybody), and with all the control that the Kinetta's going to give you, it'll look a whole lot better than your taped together mess with a dual opteron blow-dryer (talk about MOS) dragging behind you-plus, and this is nothing to sneeze at, you'll be getting more done in less time because the equipment will be that much easier to use.

Since when do I hate HD? For crying out loud when you hand me either a S16mm or Sony F900 camera, I'll pick the HD every time (nobody's been handing me 35mm yet, so I won't comment on that :))! I'm just saying that your cobbled together scheme isn't going to work right. You really haven't thought this through enough IMHO.

We don't feel like working around these deficiencies. BTW, what kind of lens are you going to use on your Imperix? A C-mount???!!! Are you going to compare a C-mount to an Zeiss prime? You're full of it, and I can't stand you constant drabbling on about "Prospect HD", etc. NOBODY IS GOING TO DRAG A COMPUTER AROUND BEHIND THEM IF THEY'RE SHOOTING A DOC OR A MOVIE ON LOCATION!!!! WHEN WILL YOU GET THAT??!! Have you even worked with Cameralink before? You control the camera through a serial interface-like a command prompt. Not easy. Yah, you'll need a stupid programmer for your stupid camera, and then guess what, you've just spent too much money And your stupid prospect HD compresses the heck out of the footage-go shoot on a Sony for crying out loud. BTW you can rent a very nice Sony package for $3,000 a week. This thing is going to cost you how much??? You can shoot a movie in three weeks. That's $9,000, and it's going to be much better quality than your hunk of junk. End of argument.

Mr. Juzukukamakazi, This isn't an unfriendly forum, I've known many of the people on this forum for many years from other mailing lists (which your posting would get you promptly kicked off of), and frankly we're not unfriendly. It's just that what you're talking about makes no sense in a PRODUCTION environment!!! I stress the word PRODUCTION. Yes, what you talk about might work on a fixed set, when mobility is not required, but frankly, you try dragging your contraptions around, and you're going to be in for a big surprise. And then you go around and slam stuff you don't even know about. Hey, I love HD. I typically shoot on Sony gear. Works great for me, especially when I apply custom gamma curves from the CvpFileEditor (which I think is an amazing piece of software, or at least ability of the camera). But there's a reason why expensive camcorders and expensive film is so popular-it works!! I know I WILL get my movie done, that things won't crash, data won't be lost, etc. Think of the extra cost as insurance. You want to experiement, fine, but I won't be your producer, and you might have a hard time finding funding from big investors for something that you've slapped together. Which may be fine with you, and why you need to do everything on the very cheap. Because frankly, $40,000 for a digital cinema camera at 1920x1080 up to 60fps is cheap!!! And no, the Kinetta isn't just hand-crank, although if you want that look, that's probably the best way to get it. It's called FLEXIBILITY and OPTIONS, somthing a lot of other camera manufacturers don't give you. So quit slamming what you don't know.

The imperix camera is $4,600. But I wouldn't call it a Kinetta killer. How in the world will you mange to store and keep track of hours worth of footage on hard-drives without any associated meta-data. Just because you have some RAW files on a disk for cheap doesn't mean that you're going to have fun posting them. You have not claimed any accurate way to do any match-back or anything with the terabytes of data you're planning to record. Frankly the Kinetta is the killer camera IMHO so far. It has built in color correction, up to dual-link HD-SDI 4:4:4 outputs, can archive to RAW, SD, HD, etc., tons of meta-data stored in the DPX files it outputs, real-time Bayer de-mosacing algorithms from high-speed FPGA's, 12-channels of 24/96 audio, and nice and light/portable to boot. Don't have to lug a computer around with me that might crash, etc (especially if it's windows based). I think you're living in a dream world here Mr. J. People are listening, in a few short months you'll have the Kinetta, the Dalsa, the Arri, etc. What more could you want? Easy to shoot, designed for a highly stressful production environment-I don't think you're thinking about production here, it seems as though all your solutions are only suitable for the lab. There's a reason why I spend the money on Sony gear. It works. It'll work in the rain, the cold, the heat, etc. I'll have a tape at the end that I know has my info on it (even it if it is compressed). When I adjust the settings on the camera, I know what I'm getting, I have an accurate preview on a monitor. I have accessability to the best lenses. There's not much guess work. Frankly what you propose is quite preposterous when you talking about thousands of dollars on the line for your little toy to totally screw up and flush your entire shoot. Cam Op/DP: "Mr. Juzkukumakukamkia, we're ready to shoot, is this the shot you want" Mr. J.: "Well, I don't know, I mean I can't really see. Wait, let me grab a frame on my PC back here and render out a RAW file to something I can see. Oh wait, Photoshop is now launching. Okay, no, that's not quite right, could we have it a little more to the left?" Cam Op/DP: "Sure, moved. Is that the shot?" Mr. J: "let me see, it'll take me just a minute." Actor: "It's hot out here, my make-up's dribbling down my face, you're not paying me enough to go through this h***" Mr. J: "Don't lose your motivation-think cool, calm . . . wait, Photoshop just crashed, ugh, I'm not sure if that's the shot-sure could use a monitor on set :huh:" Cam Op/DP: "The sun's going down, need to fire up the HMI's" Mr. J.: "Okay, when you're done with that we'll take a shot of the scene and be good to go" <15 minutes later> Actor: "I need my make-up redone, no shooting till that happens" Mr. J.: "He's almost done with the lights" Actor: "So how're we going to block this scene again? We've been 'almost ready to shoot' for the last half-hour" Mr. J.: "You walk over there, grab the door handle, open the door, think angry, you were too 'not angry' last time, I need more 'angry'" Actor: "I don't understand" 1st AD: "We need another hard-drive-I have no idea how to install one, Mr. Juzukamakazi, you'll have to put it in" <siren blasts from street> Police officer: "Who's in charge of this? Do you have a permit?" Everyone (point to Mr. Juzukamiaakiaiie): "HE IS!!!"

So Eric, where should I be looking for the announcement? And will this camera be available immediately (that's what it sounds like from your last post)?

Hey Eric, Is this a new digital camera you're talking about? And if so, is it still going to be vaporware for the next couple months or even years?

It'll hold 110 minutes per magazine at 1080/24p. That's a lot of storage, even with heavy "cinema verite" doc shooting that went all day you'd probably need two magazines at most (at least in my experience, that'd be about 4 hours of footage a day). Which brings up a good point here: 110 minutes of DPX files??!! How do we manage all that data? I'm not sure what he's going to embed in the headers of those DPX files, but there better be something there to manage all this stuff. I'm assuming that hard-drives would become like film-reels, and we'd need some sort of keykode-like system to track them. Oh BTW Phil, the CC inside the camera is going to operate on the files when you export the DPX files-the camera only stores RAW on it's hard-drives. So that 480GB of data will become around 1.3TB of DPX files at the color-correction setting that you'd set for them in the camera. I hope that Jeff enables some default dmin-dmax setting so that we don't have to best-light everything from the camera.

Hey Phil, The Kinetta's going to have HD-SDI outputs also (including dual-link 4:4:4), so you could be backing up to tape from your shoots-additionally there's a color-corrector built into the camera, so you could get a nice "best-light" onto tape, and then use the tape from there through post like you would with any film-to-tape workflow. For instance, it wouldn't be impossible to take the Kinetta, do some on-the-fly CC, dump that to an HDCAM deck, and then erase the magazine and go from there. The stuff you're dumping to HDCAM wouldn't need as heavy a grade as something shot in the camera, because again, you're doing a suitable best-light CC of the footage while you're dropping to tape. Now the HDCAM's become your new masters (and you don't need the most expensive F500 for this, you could use of the newer and much cheaper 2000 series decks, like a rental or something), and you'd only need to give them slight tweaks to get the look you want because the primary grading was done using the Kinetta's internal CC engine, which should be pretty good. Or, like Mitch said, get ready for some rendering as you make offline verisons of your footage for editing in FCP, and then go back to Nucoda, Shake, Lustre, Smoke, Combustion (the edit controller should make this interesting in Combustion) etc. and the original DPX files for the online conform.

Actually according to those who saw a new showing out in California of the StEM, one version off an answer print direct from the negative and the other version digitally projected (4K DI), the digital projection "won" out. Now of course getting digital projection as good and cost effective as that used to do these comparsions is not an easy feat, and that's why I see film projection being the norm for some time to come. But the days of the best of film projection beating out the best of digital projection I think are over.

Are these sensors fast enough though to support up to 60p at 1920x1080 or 2K resolutions? I think the Kodak DCS cameras look great, but their frame-rates are too slow to support a digital cinema camera-which is too bad-at 14 megapixels that would be one heck of a camera :)

For me it's Fuji Provia 100F and Velvia 50. While digital doesn't give the nice color "pop" that Velvia can deliver, I simply prefer the cleaner, sharper images. And yes, it may have to do with crappy scanning, but then again, I don't have the $$$ to get everything drum scanned. To each his own-if you like film, then like film, there's nothing wrong with that, but digital isn't a "poor man's art" medium either.

ugh, that's only 6 megapixels, the resolution of my D60. Try scanning that film in at say 11-14 megapixels and see what you get. Believe me, you'll get grain, and no, it won't be as smooth as a blown-up digital print-I've seen this with my eyes over and over again from very good photographers using the finest 35mm camera films available. The only area that 35mm still seems to have an edge is in black and white due to the color interpolation problems that digicams have to deal with when converting over to black and white (and isolating color channels for effect).

Okay, I'll take it that the 4x5 is better than a BetterLight, but I do think that grain, especially in color photography, plays an important part in apparent resolution. While the film may resolve more lines, the cleanness of the digital picture can give the illusion of having more resolution. And on the 1Ds compared to 35mm, I've seen examples from both, and the 35mm doesn't come close. Actually up to A3 (which is about the point where 35mm, unless shot with the best lenses and on a very steady tripod, falls apart too) the Canon 10D and D60 compared very favorably in both detail rendition and of course apparent grain. The 35mm may resolve a bit more detail, but the clean images of the D60/10D expose the true textures of the objects (low-contrast high-frequency detail that would normally be covered by film grain) and also give the illusion that the images are taken with a higher-format film. I've made darkroom prints, and I've done the digital darkroom workflow with the D60 (which is what I own). For color prints, I would put the D60/10D up to 35mm any day. Black and White is a different story (usually there's too much noise in the red channel for those nice dark skies, etc. that a red filter can give), but for color, I think the winner has become digital, at least in the 35mm departments.

For 35mm film, I think the argument is over-DSLR's win out by far, especially with the Canon 1Ds. Medium format is another story since it still posseses the attributes of very high quality and portability. Many medium format backs are very, very expensive (can easily be three times the amount of a DSLR), and most have to be tethered. Hence the reason that fashion isn't jumping on the digital bandwagon in force-yet. BTW, catalog/product photography is another area where digital has taken over, since with those items you can typically set up a nice still life and then use a BetterLight scanning back which can exceed large format in quality.

Is that a "for sure" thing, or are you just speculating that will be the case? And are these custom chips for Kinetta and Aaton, or something like the CMOS ProCam 3560 from Rockwell Scientific (if so, the ProCam is only 1920x1080, so that would be less resolution after bayer)? Either way, at 1920x1080 with a bayer sensor, the resolution should still be pretty good. The resolution in 16x9 is very close to the old Nikon D1, which was very good for a 3 megapixel camera in RAW mode. The JPEG conversion in the camera left something to be desired, but the RAW output had fairly impressive resolution. And yes, it's 3 megapixels, but that is in 3:2, once you crop for 16x9, it's only got about 4% more resolution, which is pretty negligable IMHO. So if it can achieve the resolution of the D1 or the Canon D30, then we're in pretty good shape. I think I'll bring an ISO 12233 res chart with me to NAB! :D

It's not the 120, AFAIK it's going to be the 1200A. You can find information about the 1200 on the Panasonic Japanese site, although again, I believe the 1200A, with the ability to input/output DVCProHD over firewire, will be the product released at NAB.

All these HD/SDI cards for $2K or whatever will soon become very unecessary unless of course you want to specifically output to a tape format. Just wait. Your ideas would have been nice last year or a year ago. After this year's NAB they won't be woth anything, unless of course you just like piling a bunch of junk together to make something yourself and not use products that would be much better and readily available on the market. So again, wait. Please quit posting about your Sony POV slap-together camera that's going to run you around $40-$50K when all is said and done, i.e., recorder, viewfinder, etc. It's just not going to be worth it, and the image quality is going to suck in comparison. Wait :)