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Reader SurveyProduction and Post at NAB 2008
May 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By D. W. Leitner and Dan Ochiva
This year's show saw many advances in digital cinema and color-management technologies.
Red Digital Cinema 5K Epic
Photo: D. W. Leitner
Cameras
By D. W. Leitner
At this, the final NAB Show of the analog era (the NTSC shut-off is Feb. 17, 2009), issues surrounding “the fourth screen” took on new urgency, as a simultaneous Feb. 17 roll-out of mobile ATSC became an odds-on probability. (The fourth screen comprises mobile handheld devices including cell phones. The first three screens are cinema, TV, and Internet.) Fortunately for high-end production, anything that looks terrific on a 20ft. screen looks equally so on a credit-card-sized screen — just ask owners of certain recent Apple products.
Predictions at the show of $2 billion in new ad revenues by 2012 from free, over-the-air mobile TV should come as welcome news to the entire production and post community, talent included. (See more on mobile TV at NAB 2008)
At the same time, commercial digital cinema has finally sunk roots in the United States, due largely to industry-wide embrace of Hollywood's Digital Cinema Initiative standards for digital projection. According to NAB's weekend Digital Cinema Summit, 4,600 commercial digital screens have been built in the United States since the 2005 DCI roll-out, compared to 851 in all of Europe. Digital projection and HD camera advances have breathed new life into stereoscopic 3D as well: 18 3D features are set to hit theaters in the coming year. Large, packed rooms took in summit panels and demos on stereoscopic editing, production planning, post effects, and dimensionalization of 2D to 3D.
High-end cameras continued to set the pace of digital cinematography at NAB, with two accelerating trends: smaller/lighter — which plays directly into the hands of 3D production — and acceptance of lossless compression.
Aggressive newcomer Red Digital Cinema embodies both trends. Its groundbreaking 4K Red One has emerged from birth pangs to roil the waters of competitors both on price point (still $17,500) and CMOS sensor capabilities. (Steven Soderbergh's Che Guevara duology, The Argentine and Guerilla, which premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival, were shot with Red One — the first filmed in 2K with anamorphic lenses, the second flat in 4K.)
At NAB, Red unveiled its next masterstrokes: prototypes of a 2/3in. single-CMOS 3K Scarlet (3K for $3K) and a 5K Epic, half the size of the flagship 4K Red One. In a break with PL-mount lenses, the pistol-grip 3K Scarlet will feature a built-in zoom. It will record up to 100Mbps of RAW or RGB to dual CompactFlash cards using Redcode wavelet compression at frame rates up to 120fps. (Red One records at 36Mbps.) The 5K Epic, which retains the PL mount, will likewise generate 100Mbps of RAW or RGB. Both will be available by next NAB, per Red.
Vision Research and development partner Abel Cine Tech showed impressive progress in their 4K single-CMOS camera. The compact Phantom 65 (massive CMOS the size of a frame of 65mm negative) was shown with a wooden Aaton handgrip, Sony color HD viewfinder, Hasselblad lens mount, and a new Flash-memory 512GB Phantom CineMag that extends the Phantom 65's 4K recording capacity to 32 minutes of uncompressed RAW at 24fps (the camera is capable of 125fps at 4K).
Lying flat like a paperback novel, CineMag docks atop both the Phantom 65 and sibling Phantom HD (2K or 1920×1080), or, for downloading to hard disk, snaps into the new portable Vision CineStation, only slightly larger. CineStation is not a storage device per se, but rather connects to a laptop using Gigabit Ethernet to save CineMag's contents to disk, or to play back CineMag clips on a laptop screen, over dual HD-SDI ports, or as component video.
Vision also introduced a head-turner: Its new, 3.5lb. Miro camera could pass as a digital SLR. Nevertheless, it's a high-speed digital cinema camera with a larger-than-2/3in. CMOS sensor that captures uncompressed 800×600 RAW images to CompactFlash at up to 1265fps with 500 ASA-equivalent speed.
Miro uses C-mount lenses, which will open many doors to industrial and scientific imaging. But C-mount lenses have not kept up with the requirements of HD imaging. This has also proven to be a thorn in the side of Iconix, whose superb golf-ball-sized, progressive 1/3in. 3CCD C-mount cameras have attracted considerable interest over the past several NABs. So it came as significant news at NAB that Band Pro, the outfit that spurred Zeiss to create the DigiPrime series, has convinced Schneider to create a new series of HD-caliber C-mount lenses for Iconix. Rumor has it that Fujinon will also produce new HD C-mount lenses.
Iconix, for its part, demonstrated a new Studio2K version (2048×1080 pixels) of its HD-RH1 camera, along with a new HD-RH1F Digital I/O CCU with dual link for 4:4:4 RGB.
