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MillimeterWow. What a show.
May 3, 2006 5:37 PM, Dan Ochiva & D.W. Leitner
NAB 2006 that is. While I've heard complaints that there just weren’t enough big, breakthrough items, I'll have to nay-say that.
Just yesterday, I was lucky to be part of a spirited, two-hour dissection with the top reporters, cinematographers, and others that DCP took to the show. That's right, time for the annual Pick Hits awards.
While I thought I had seen the most relevant gear, I came out of that discussion with a brighter burning idea of just what was new, important, and worth more than the usual "that's cool" nod you'll find from anyone who spent hours trudging back and forth throughout the cavernous Las Vegas convention center.
(For those planning on attending next year's show, just remember two words: good shoes. The whole LVCC is somewhere over 3,000,000 square feet, while you can take the monorail one stop to reach from our hotel--the Hilton, which is actually attached to the convention center--just to get to the multiple football field-sized, dual-level South Hall, where most of the newer companies hold forth.)
Well, there was one big breakthrough item at the show--or rather a breakthrough rumor--that cascaded around the floor, causing long lines of eager eyes wanting to see the...the no show RED ONE camera system, the one you might have heard about, and how it would spell the end to every other camera system out there.
Whether it was the best told tale of the show or not, you'll be able to judge better after reading a selected excerpt from one of D.W. Leitner's usual sharp blog reports, delivered with the satirical panache he can summon when necessary to counter the hot-air hype that ballooned over the show floor.
(To get more of our day-to-day show floor blogging--and some of the most relevant podcasts you'll find anywhere--be sure to check us out online.)
So here's a teaser, a fun nugget crafted in D.W. Leitner's inimitable style, one which builds out of decades of his experience as a director, DP, designer of telecine installations, and film critic extraordinaire. Want more? You'll have to read the June issue of Digital Content Producer to get more of the sharpest writing around.
NAB, the “National Association of Boys.” I heard that at a ProMax Systems gathering, where the guy on stage was tossing ProMax T-shirts to eager audience members, preferably those blonde and female he announced with self-irony. Of course only a few in the audience fit this description. Perhaps that’s why he asked if Adam Wilt were in the audience. He was, duly received and donned his free T-shirt, and curtsied. Boys will be boys. Adam will be Adam.
A far cry from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when companies (particularly European) at NAB or the SMPTE Equipment Exhibition featured at their video camera demonstrations tableau vivants of lissome “Indian” babes in buckskin posed in front of a teepee. It’s gratifying how NAB has evolved away from dimwitted chauvinism and towards inclusiveness.
What also brings testosterone to mind is a series of encounters on the show floor today while seeking out new HD and digital cinema camera designs.
On the humble Heathkit end of the scale—sorry for the dated reference, you kids look it up at Wikipedia—are a couple of nice guys from Troy, N.Y. (near Albany), who debuted the prototype of their Silicon Imaging SI-1920HDVR, basically a Windows XP computer hacked into a black-anodized box shaped like a camera. (Whiff of geek testosterone in that camera name.)
At the camera’s front is a sensor module containing a 2/3in. CMOS Altasens sensor. (Failure of delivery of which has bedeviled Kinetta, Ikegami, and JVC for two years now.) On the side opposite the operator is affixed a full-sized brick battery, protruding like a cancerous growth. Perhaps not Steadicam-friendly. Along with a full-sized PC fan. This thing consumes 70 watts!
At the back are connector’s you’d find at the back of any Dell tower. On the operator’s side is… well, nothing. One of the Silicon Imaging guys told me they’d learned from several visitors that the camera might need a viewfinder, that the 7in. LCD touchscreen attached to the top with a short Israeli arm might not be enough. (Omitting a viewfinder could only happen in an era of consumer camcorders!)
Other SI-1920HDVR features include choice of C or PL lens mounts, Cineform’s wavelet codec for compression, and hot-swappable 120GB notebook hard drives for 2 hours of recording. Frame rates include 1080/24p and 720/24p. Priced $20K, available September.
Clearly this camera is a work-in-progress, so it was gratifying to see that it actually produced images. Of what quality, however, I couldn’t tell from an LCD touchscreen full of fingerprints.
That wasn’t an issue at Filmlight’s modest stand in South Hall, where 4K scenes shot with Dalsa’s Origin (Cooke S4 primes) were projected in stunning 4K clarity on a Sony 4K SXRD projector.
There, Filmlight went and made my day. It demo’d realtime 4K color grading using its version of power windows with Baselight 8. Let me repeat: full 4K! Simply outstanding. My eyes stood up, saluted, and said “thank you.”
Apologies to Dirty Harry and also Sam Peckinpah: The Origin’s demo clips were from a spaghetti western scene of a cowboy being bull-whipped in the street, then repeatedly shot in the back point-black by his tormentors. Looped over and over. Like sex, violence like this is rare these days at NAB, largely sublimated by that lower expression of testosterone: swagger.
And there’s no more blustery show at NAB than the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company circus tent in South Hall, where celebrity barkers like Ted Schilowitz of Aja Video Systems and Frederic Haubrick of Lumiere Media stand at the door and praise the merits of the upcoming RED ONE camera. Look inside and you’ll find even the estimable Stuart English, former Panasonic VP of marketing, busily touting. All in bright red shirts, of course.
For those of you who have somehow missed this development, California gazillionaire Jim Jennard (made a fortune off pricey, high-tech Oakley sunglasses, owns a film/video camera collection in the thousands) has launched Red One with unusual fanfare, including slick website (www.red.com), glossy brochures, and growing bandwidth on websites and Internet mail lists devoted to digital cinematography.
“We decided to skip several generations of evolution,” boasts Jennard. Indeed he’s promising a digital cinematography camera like no other, with a 12-megapixel, Super 35-sized CMOS sensor called “Mysterium,” designed and fabricated by Red and capable (it’s claimed) of 4K, 2K, down to 720p. With frame rates of 1-60 and a new wavelet codec called, what else? Red. Plus a Red-Drive and Red-Flash for capture and a Red-designed series of new PL-mount lenses.
What does $17,500 for the basic camera (promised early 2007) get you? Something The Terminator would dream up. With help from Matthew Barney. My words can’t do it justice. Go to SU1401 in South Upper Hall and see for yourself. There you’ll find a constant milling about of cinematographers and filmmakers, debating whether something that’s too good to be true can indeed be true. A working prototype is promised by year’s end.
That’s right. So far it’s protohype, not prototype. Although by day’s end, over 200 people had handed over credit cards and plunked down $1000 deposits.
What does a gazillionaire need seed money for?
This takes balls.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
