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MillimeterHD Share
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva
Market growth for highest-resolution cameras.
Thomson Grass Valley Viper FilmStream
High-end digital video camera systems are, by all accounts, still a small percentage of the overall feature-film production market. There are still improvements in film camera technology coming, while new generations of film stock — such as the Kodak Vision3 series — keep 35mm film the top choice of most productions.
It's often smaller productions that benefit by going digital, targeting one or another special features a digital camera might offer — such as good low-light sensitivity or an improved post workflow.
Matt Farnsworth, who shot film for his feature Iowa, recently decided upon the Thomson Grass Valley Viper FilmStream to shoot Sibling, a small, independent production. His DP, Aaron Medick, worked with postproduction supervisor Dave Satin (of New York-based post facility Mega Playground) to create a series of lookup tables in order to create a specifically defined look for each period in the characters' lives. The LUTs, which could be referred to while on set, enabled the film's colorist to quickly set up the specific color tones during post.
Flexibility came from shooting in FilmStream mode, with uncorrected 4:4:4 RGB CCD data recorded onto Sony's HDCAM SR; the 10-bit log data requires color correction in post.
For Peter Mavromates, postproduction supervisor on two of David Fincher's most recent films, the Viper offers better post workflow, helped by an innovation created by storage manufacturer S.two. “The most significant improvement in digital workflow between Zodiac and [The Curious Case of Benjamin Button] is the realtime ingest for Final Cut Pro,” Mavromates says. “On Zodiac, we needed to load the DPX files and then render the edit media [DVCPRO HD]. Also, we needed to post-sync the audio. For Button, S.two developed a realtime batch digitize that allows us to ingest DVCPRO HD in realtime with audio. The irony of this is that, as processing speeds continue to increase, we will likely migrate back to rendering once it can be done in faster than realtime. After that, it will be drag and drop, and then, we will eventually cut in uncompressed HD.”
Dalsa Origin and Evolution
For Rob Hummel, the past 18 months as president of Dalsa Digital Cinema was an eye-opening experience. Hummel had built a reputation for straightforwardness and an uncompromising push for researching and deploying the highest-resolution technology when in charge of Warner Bros.' digital restoration lab, but he says he spent his first year at Dalsa “cleaning up a lot of surprises.” “Folks at Dalsa thought that no one would notice [some minor quirk], or they would say, ‘Isn't this something you'd see in a film camera?’ and I would end up saying, ‘Yes, someone will notice,’ and, ‘No, you don't see that on film cameras — we have to fix it,’” he says.
Hummel says the Canadian company has now “turned a corner,” solving issues from specular highlights generating “a ton of magenta” coming off the imager (tweaking an algorithm solved that) to “fixing up anything that remains” with Evolution, the smaller-sized version of the original Origin that, at press time, was in the final stages of completion.
Dalsa finally has projects to talk about, Hummel says, beyond the standard commercials and music videos. Actor LeVar Burton, for example, recently used the Origin on Reach for Me. “I wanted the first feature film done with the system to be something like a remake of My Dinner with Andre, and not as principal camera on a $200 million production,” Hummel says.
Burton, who didn't have the budget to shoot in 35mm, was skeptical at first. “When we showed him test images from it, he went cuckoo for it, and thought it looked like 65mm,” Hummel says.
The Origin recently did make a major feature-film debut, with eight of the digital cameras synced together for a complex effects shot on the new James Bond production Quantum of Solace. Dalsa worked with MovieTech, its new European partner, which has a facility at the storied Pinewood Studios in England, where the Bond film was shot.
At the 2008 NAB Show, expect to see demos of a Flash RAM magazine that will capture 20 minutes of 4K imagery. With the solid-state storage, the cameras will be able to run at higher frame rates. Turns out that current hard-disk recording systems choke at the high data rates, Hummel says.
With most of the technical problems solved for both camera systems, Hummel says he thinks Dalsa's new challenge is to try to convince people that “it's worth the struggle to use the larger Origin camera until the smaller camera becomes available,” he says. “Let's be clear — the Origin is slightly smaller than a city bus, and that's a problem.
“People have been very excited about the images but couldn't see using that size of a camera, so we're going full tilt to get the Evolution out. That's why everyone gets so excited about the Red; it's the compact size of that 4K camera system. We feel with the expertise that Dalsa has, people will see that we deliver some pretty spectacular image quality, with a frame transfer shutter that yields many fewer artifacts than you can see with some other digital camera systems.”
Working with the Arriflex D-20
Productions employing the Arriflex D-20 have garnered awards over the past year. In January, the American Society of Cinematographers gave Ben Nott, ASC, an award for his cinematography on the TNT miniseries The Company. The DP — who, prior to the show, had only worked with film — says it was a smooth transition working with the D-20 because there's a “very film-camera feel” to the system. “It has the same familiar form as all the other film cameras in the Arri family,” says Nott, who also enjoyed working with the camera's optical viewfinder. “I've worked with other digital cameras, and I have to say, looking at an electronic viewfinder does not compare to the optical finder offered by the D-20.”
Sam Nicholson, visual effects supervisor at Stargate Digital, used the D-20 to capture all greenscreen effects shots for the “Battleground” episode of Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King. Last fall, the Academy of Television & Sciences gave an award to that show for visual effects for a miniseries, movie, or special.
“When possible, we use the D-20 almost exclusively on all blue and greenscreen work,” says Nicholson, who says the blue channel is “so solid” that it gives superior keys compared to film stocks or other digital cameras. Nicholson says that blue has traditionally been the grainy channel in film and telecine transfers, but it's “extremely quiet” in the D-20.
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.