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MillimeterThe Looming 4:4:4 World
Jan 10, 2006 4:40 PM
In the upcoming January issue of Millimeter, contributing editor D.W. Leitner files a report on the “One World on HD” Media Forum, which was held at BandPro Film and Digital in Burbank in December. Following is an excerpt of that article, which focuses on the HD industry’s ongoing movement toward the uncompressed 4:4:4 (RGB) format. See the January issue of Millimeter for more details on the event.
At “One World on HD,” representatives of BandPro, Sony, and Zeiss repeatedly emphasized that uncompressed 4:4:4 (RGB) is superior to 4:2:2 or compressed HDCAM, particularly where digital cinema or complex effects are concerned. They suggested that with improved availability of Sony’s portable HDCAM SR VTR the SRW-1 and SRPC-1 HD digital processor, capture in the field of 4:4:4 from Sony’s F950 CineAlta camera is now within reach of anyone.
This is the HD camera-recorder combo critical to George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith, Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, and Michael Mann’s upcoming Miami Vice. So the consensus during the forum was that 4:4:4 recording will rapidly eclipse the others, at least at the high end.
Kornelius Mueller of Zeiss, for instance, described a lightning-fast two-year development cycle for DigiPrimes at the urging of BandPro, as compared to the typical 10-year cycle for a new series of film primes. Indeed, Zeiss and BandPro have forged such close ties recently that BandPro even put up development funds for the creation of Zeiss’ DigiPrimes.
New items shown or announced at the event included a working Zeiss 3.9 DigiWide lens; an upcoming Zeiss DigiZoom 17mm-112mm T1.9 (a working prototype will be shown at NAB); and Sony’s update to the venerable HDW-F900, the F900R, which is expected to be available at NAB. Basically, the system is unchanged, but mounted in a smaller HDW 750 chassis with optional boards for slow shutter, time-lapse, and variable frame fate recording. Also on display: a curious MPEG-4 application demonstrated by Marker Karahadian of Plus8 Digital, Burbank, which permitted the viewing of dailies via a compact flash memory card on a Treo 650 device.
--D.W. Leitner
