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MillimeterEditor's Notes
Sep 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Cynthia Wisehart
This issue represents a busy month in the field. For our cover story, Ellen Wolff went to the Sanctuary set in Vancouver, British Columbia, to see the new Red Digital Cinema Red One in action for the essentially all-greenscreen show. In her article, she details the pipeline; you can judge the results onscreen for yourself. As Red-shot projects increase, the format's technical and aesthetic viability will be subject to the same vagaries of craft as any other format. I guess that's a sign Red is growing up.
Millimeter also joined the broadcast media onsite for one of the year's bigger broadcast stories, embedding with NY1 and Denver CBS affiliate CBS4 (KCNC) for the Democratic National Convention (DNC). News media faced a historic challenge that week: moving from the Pepsi Center to Invesco Field in a matter of hours. The last time broadcasters had to service a two-venue convention was 48 years ago, when John Kennedy accepted his nomination at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Things have changed since then. Part of that is just scale: There were 15,000 media members. The presence of IT was unmistakable — IP feeds went head to head with satellite feeds, and the RF cloud could be felt 3 miles away. Tapeless workflows and laptop editing were hardly unusual (NY1 shot SD P2; KCNC was all XDCAM HD). You can see some of our exclusive pictures on p. 8. At digitalcontentproducer.com/cameras/revfeat/on_the_line, read about the challenges of the move and find a story on how the DNC committee used a miniature version of the NBC Olympics' Microsoft Silverlight infrastructure to broadcast themselves.
As we go to press, I also dropped by the Culver Studios lot. The first goal of the event there was to announce the latest break in the logjam of digital-cinema theaters. Sony's digital-cinema systems division (based around its 4K projectors and media block products) has signed deals with Fox, Paramount, and Sony Pictures. We saw some pretty pictures, though I do remain torn between 4K and 2K simply because for me, the bigger lamp on the 2K projector can offset the higher 4K resolution. (And both trump most film projection for me.)
Unless by film, you mean IMAX. Even upconverted, Eagle Eye looked pretty convincing to me at the Westfield Pavilion; the audio system certainly helped sell the images. It all points to the fact that the ante is permanently upped on theater-going experiences. Speaking of which, Sony also demo'd its single-lens 4K 3D projector this week (with a wonderfully over-the-top demo reel from RealD). I hate 3D (unless it's IMAX Solido), but it's not up to me.
Ironically, the week ended with news from the other end of the resolution spectrum: SMPTE will develop a mastering and packaging standard for broadband.
