Ilmari Reitmaa

Reading up on Rollie Totheroh but coming across with material of any interest seems to be not too straightforward... Would anyone happen to know if he gets any mention in any Chaplin biography, or is there perhaps an AC back issue he has been featured in to any extent?

"What annoys me is that Spielberg is such an egomaniac these days that it has to be 'Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds. No, you puss-bag. It's H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, and it wouldn't kill you to put his f--king name on it."

I may be wrong on this one, but is there even an actual possessory credit for Spielberg somewhere ('Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds')? All I've seen is something along the lines of 'Cruise - Spielberg - War of the Worlds' which has, in my opinion, a subtly different tone.

Have a look at http://www.fogscreen.com/ Seems that they're also renting their fog displays, although they're based in Finland so that's likely a problem... Then there's http://www.io2technology.com/ with their Heliodisplay, though it seems to be a rather small screen.

This isn't HD per se, but thereabouts...

http://www.photonfocus.com/html/eng/cmos/linlog.php

http://www.photonfocus.com/upload/applicat...g_REV_1_1_e.pdf

Developed by Swiss CSEM (http://www.csem.ch/) and currently owned by Photonfocus, LinLog is a fairly recent CMOS imaging technology that provides high semi-linear dynamic range, significantly alleviating highlight clipping.

It may also be of interest to note that DALSA is licensing this technology (in their machine vision products).

According to kinetta.com it's now shipping: http://kinetta.com/download/files/K4K_Brochure.pdf

Also, some answers may be improved with some graphics or photos if I can think of what that might be...

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Although judging from the FAQ list there won't be all that many equations I still might suggest typesetting them with, say, TeX or something similar and embedding them into the text as GIFs (the result would look something like this). ASCII equations tend to be particularly illegible... I'll be happy to volunteer to do them if needed.

Come to think of it, having done a fair amount of typesetting and graphic design in my time, I could typeset the whole FAQ, once completed, as a nice PDF document for printing. How about it?

ARRI shift & tilt bellows system: http://www.arri.de/prod/cam/shift_tilt_sys...tilt_system.htm

ARRI slant focus lenses: http://www.arri.de/prod/cam/tfocus.htm

Panavision slant focus lenses: http://www.panavision.com/product_detail.p...c49,c50,c87,c94

Can we buy ? or it is discontinued

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As far as I know the Glasstron is discontinued though stock items may be available. For an alternative, have a look at these: http://www.i-glassesstore.com/iglasses-video-hr.html and http://www.i-glassesstore.com/ig-hrvpro.html.

Oh, and also might recommend reading/subscribing to the American Cinematographer magazine http://www.theasc.com/magazine/index.htm.

Are there good books on cinematography in general that you'd recommend?

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Here's a compilation: http://www.cinematography.com/shop/books.asp

I certainly wasn't making that point.

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Sorry, didn't mean that to come out that way, I wasn't calling you ignorant. Quoted you just to point out that there are those non-Vertigo zooms on Jaws.

I would have said, "Jaws" but you excluded it

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There are non-Vertigo zooms on Jaws as well.

Oh, Lawrence of Arabia, of course. Really, the notion that "zooms are only used in amateur products that cannot afford a dolly or jib" is simply ignorant.

Alot of 70's films have zooms...figure it was the all the rage back then.

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The Exorcist has a lot of zoom, and there's some in early Spielberg stuff like Duel which is a kind of a visual extravaganza anyway, Sugarland Express and Jaws... come to think of it, there's an occasional zoom in pretty much anything by Spielberg, up to stuff lensed by Kaminski at least.

Then there are Mike Nichols' films like The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge, and there were a couple quite bold zooms in Closer as well.

And there are calculators for this sort of conversion too.

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I find this one particularly handy: http://www.mat.uc.pt/~rps/photos/angles.html

I'm a little off-topic already, so I'll be just quick.

What I particularly miss are descriptions of the qualities of digital cinematography systems in terms comparable to film, like modulation transfers functions and such (or actual test footage). Not necessarily that they aren't available, but that they aren't common terminology in discussing such things, and I admit my own guilt here as well. Things like sensor resolution and image resolution tell very little, and to add confusion some people use the word 'resolution' in the sense of actual resolving power and some in the sense of pixel count. Go figure. Current digital cinematography terminology doesn't yet seem established enough not to give rise to all kinds of rhetorical gimmicks.

That said, I do tend to agree with Mr. Jacoby on the general proportion of facts and speculation here, and further hope that you will pardon my contributions to the speculation side.

'Nuff said on my part.

I have yet to see cinematography in any feature length film as good as this!

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Apart from the incessant camera movement and overall softness, resemblance to Robert Krasker's work on The Third Man is at times quite uncanny; hard light and cast shadows, not mentioning old city exteriors and withering leaves..

"Interpolation" EQUALS "guessing"

"guessing" DOES NOT EQUAL "high resolution"

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This is a bit of a generalization. Interpolation equals educated guessing; educated, because it relies on the assumption that the majority of screentime comprises of natural scenes, in the sense that we do not need to distinguish between different images of white noise or artificial patterns specifically designed to bring about the "worst guess" for some interpolation algorithm. Such image elements are rare enough in natural scenes that interpolation is able to reconstruct the image with sufficiently small error residual.

If it were that for an interpolated pixel the probability distribution over the available RGB values was uniform, interpolation would indeed equal "guessing" and as such would be an illegitimate method of improving resolving power, but as it happens, in practice this never is so. In natural scenes the RGB values of interpolated pixels strongly depend on those of the surrounding pixels, therefore making it possible to extract information by interpolation. Note that interpolation is not a case of generating information that wasn't there, it's a case of not throwing away information that, for all practical purposes, is there. Color filter array is a form of fixed compression rate lossy compression, interpolation being the decompression method. Consequences of this can be seen e.g. with low-light images containing noise, for which color interpolation will produce larger error residual, as would any fixed compression ratio lossy compression scheme (or equivalently, smaller compression ratio with fixed error residual).

At any rate, resolution (in the sense of pixel count) is a secondary concern, provided that it is sufficiently high (which, arguably, 1920 x 1080 isn't for cinematic purposes). What is of concern is the ability to capture visual information, preferably close enough to the amount processed by the human visual system. This is why interpolating from higher resolution image down to a 1920 x 1080 will yield, dare I say, better image quality than direct 1920 x 1080 acquisition. Simple resolution analysis can be misleading.

Film does not guess....

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Agree. Also agree that the amount of visual information captured by film is higher than that of any 1920 x 1080 4:4:4 system. Just for the record.

As for the non-alternating RGB pattern, my take on it would be that an alternating pattern isn't necessary because the optical low-pass filter (supposing Genesis is utilizing one) will remove all aliasing artifacts before any color filtration even takes place; furthermore a non-alternating RGB pattern makes it possible to use a low-pass filter that vertically convolutes adjacent pixels, instead of having to convolute every second pixel, yielding higher vertical resolving power.

I admit the difference it not that big but a standard is still a standard.

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Yes, quite agree with the wisdom there.

Is it not time for a 4096x2160 camera and not 3840x2160 to be in liine with DCI specifications. JVC started with 3840x2160 panels in their high resolution projector. They now have a 4096x2160 chip in line with DCI specifications.

 

I have read somewhere that JVC has a 4096x2160 camera coming is that true? If not is anyone doing 4096x2160.

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The DCI 4096 x 2160 specification is, I believe, a projection spec and as such meant to accommodate different formats with different aspect ratios. Nevertheless, despite that it says on the ISG www-site that the camera "[...] was designed to specifically meet the requirements for high resolution video capture as used in Digital Cinematography, [...]" it really is just a crude box with a lens mount and a high-resolution sensor, and as such inapplicable for any serious cinematography; I'd say it makes no difference whether it meets the DCI specs or not. However, technology-wise an interesting device still. Hearsay goes that once available the price would be something like $40 000.

As for 4k cameras, there are companies are working on prototypes (e.g. Olympus and NHK), but whether they'll be available any time soon, or at all, is another story.

As a distantly related sidenote, Sony will soon be releasing 4k projectors which Landmark Theatres are then planning to deploy.

For your information: http://www.isgchips.com/Templates/t_quadhdtv.htm

Sampling, say, 1620 vertical lines

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Horizontal! Horizontal! :rolleyes:

It's three RGB stripes wide by two photosites high per HD pixel, or 5760 x 1636 photosites on the chip for a scope image.  That gives them 1920 complete RGB sample sets across, by 1636 vertically.

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Ah, yes. Here's a thought (which perhaps you already pretty much implied there, I'm just thinking aloud here):

Sampling, say, 1620 vertical lines and then interpolating with an algorithm that would convert three uninterpolated lines into two interpolated ones (much the way that D-20 interpolates) would yield 2.37:1 aspect ratio and full 1920 x 1080 RGB data. Probably even without infringing any Thomson's Dynamic Pixel Management patents... B)

Now I'm really just going out on a limb here, but that would make some sense.

We'll be seeing them all in the same room at dinner in a couple weeks, it should be interesting.

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That's most interesting; if you could post your sentiments afterwards it would be greatly appreciated.

I found that the most important thing is the light-to-camera angle. Gells had no noticeable effect. Some of that has to do with the fogging solution you use.

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Light-to-camera angle is a significant factor in light shaft brightness and may play a role in take-to-take consistency as well. Fogging solution molecule size is the key factor; shoot a test with your solution(s). Should you need to move around in the set, I'd suggest placing your light source high enough, light shafts pointing steeply downwards, so that there is as little variance as possible in the light-to-camera angle.

Have a look at http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/atmos/blusky.html for an illustration of the phenomenon; smoke light shafts will be dominated by Mie scattering.