S35 digi cinema camera for US$8000

[Mark Kenfield]

Love it Dan! THAT's a camera test :)

[Buba Kastorski]

that looks amazing,
plus anamorphic , men it's beautiful!
thank you for posting!

[Dan Hudgins]

Thanks for the complements, my Brother did most of the work on that one, building the "antimatter" reactor model and the other set parts, as well as playing the three "clones" that work at the reactor complex.

It was shot with the standard Panavision (tm) CinemaScope (tm) Cineon (tm) scanner resolution that is used in the Celco (tm) film recorder for making 35mm printing negatives from which release prints are made, 1828x1556 pixels for 2.35:1 aspect ratio.

1828x1556 is called 2K because in the scanner and film recorder used to output the DPX files are 2048x1556 pixels, the extra width is just black area that is used for the optical sound tracks, both digital and analog.

For making Blu-ray using the 1920x1440 shooting mode might avoid the horizontal expansion from 1828 to 1920 and make the images a bit sharper and have fewer re-size artifacts.

Normally if you are shooting for scope format, 2.35:1 or 2.39:1, you would shoot most of the footage using the camera's 2592x1104 resolution and just use the 1828x1556 mode for the anamorphic effect shots.

Outputting the 1828x1556 mode to 35mm film would avoid the horizontal expansion so might look a bit better on the movie screen.

==

Work is going forward for the KineRAW-S35 (tm) I've been getting test DNG frames to analyze and process the last few weeks, the noise levels at EI/ISO 800 on the S35 look maybe a bit lower than at EI/ISO 200 on the S8p, so that's good news for shooting with the S35 by available lighting.

The new second prototype of the KineRAW-S35 (tm) is being calibrated and adjusted now, shooting is planed as soon as some issues can be worked out and the monitor calibrated to light meter measurements of the actual EI/ISO to get best results at.

==

I got a 3.5mm f/2.4 Kowa megapixel lens, so I hope to shoot some hand held shots on the KineRAW-S8p (tm) with that when I get some free time and make a Vimeo reel to show what that looks like at various frame rates, the prototype can shoot 23.976/24/25 as well as 48 and 72fps and I have skip frame printing in my de-Bayer program. It can also shoot 59.94fps at 1280x720, 29.97fps at 1920x1080, and up to 220fps at windowed sensor area. It has various resolutions like 2400x1200 for 2:1 aspect ratio, 2228x1252 for 16:9 oversample, 2048x1152 for 2K 16:9 or 1.85:1 with a bit extra for the film frame lines not to show, 2048x1080 for DCP 2048x858 for 2.39:1 and 1998x1080 for 1.85:1 DCP for projection in digital movie theatres.

The production camera may have improvements that allow for better results as well, but that design revision may take place after the KineRAW-S35 (tm) is on sale in China in maybe not too much longer.

[Damian Heffernan]

my first and only question: when can I buy one? Seriously, it looks great and as long as they don't pull a Red on us and double the price it'll be great.

[Dan Hudgins]

I made some new photos of the KineRAW-S8p (tm) with different shooting configurations, with anamorphic lens and matte box, with follow focus gear on 12.5mm f/1.4 Fujinon 5MP lens and matte box with Mitchell follow focus, and using a 9.5-57mm f/1.6 reflex zoom that has optical view finder.

The color on the viewfinder looks better than how it shows up in the photos, its hard to take a photo of the LCD monitor and get the light on the subject the same contrast ratio and color balance, but to the eye the monitor image show more saturation and tonal range.

About when you can purchase one, email Kinefinity.com (sm) and tell them you have a serious interest unless they change the price etc. The more people that tell them they are interested the more they know about the interest.

The main question with the S8 is should they put the current design into limited production, or should they have more delays to make improvements?

The core of the camera has been working for more than a year, and they fixed some issues through firmware revisions, so its usable now I think for real filmmaking, a few minor changes would be good but it could be produced as is so far for people that are going to use it as intended. The proposed revisions would widen the market, but also maybe delay things for some time and possible inch the price up a bit?

I was all for producing the PREVIOUS version that had a sheet metal case, in place of the nice machined one this model has, so I think they could do both but they have their own ideas...

They are finishing up the KineRAW-S35 (tm) second prototype now, I have gotten some calibration DNG back and the ISO and tonal range and color look good, there are some issues with the OLPF selection.

Anyway, here are some photos, I hope to start shooting some hand held shots with the KineRAW-S8p (tm) soon, I purchased a 3.5mm f/2.4 Kowa megapixel HR lens, on the videwfinder it looks usable, I will have to shoot some tests because at 1920 wide on Vimeo its a challenge to be flawless, watch out for other camera makers only showing 1280x720 videos as there is a big leap from 1280 wide to 1920 wide in terms of de-Bayer artifacts showing up. I have some work to do on my up scaling features in my de-Bayer program, but if you stand back a 'safe distance' or transfer to 35mm print, they aren't as noticeable as putting ones noise on the 2K computer monitor etc.

[Damian Heffernan]

dropped them an email. I'll express as much interest as I can to get them inspired to start making them. I'll even shoot my next film on a prototype as I like the challenge (and makes a great story :))

[Buba Kastorski]

just my 2 cents, but I think guys should start making those in limited quantities with explanation that camera is in beta stage, learn from RED:)
it'll help them financially and they will get much better QA reports from actual users of the camera;
funny, but I use the same mike for the scratch sound on my scarlet :))

[Ken Diewert]

Hey Buba,

If you're still listening, how is that Scarlet working out for you? I'd like to get an objective opinion from someone who has a lot of experience with DSLR shooting and workflow.

[Buba Kastorski]

Originally Posted by Ken Diewert

Hey Buba,

If you're still listening, how is that Scarlet working out for you? I'd like to get an objective opinion from someone who has a lot of experience with DSLR shooting and workflow.

don't wanna hijack the thread, but,
it produces gorgeous, very high detail image, it's absolutely incomparable with any DSLR, although i will side-by-side it with 5DIII as soon as it'll arrive, dynamic range of Scarlet, even without HDR, is amazing, with HDR it's unbelievable, it is not run and gun camera, and it needs light,
there is no big difference in workflow for me as my main editor is Vegas, it takes native R3Ds, but of course real time full rez is not possible even on my ultra fast PC. I don't like cooling fan noise, although it's better than C300, I don't like crop thing - no in camera down sampling, and I'd love to have at least 96fps @ 4K, ,but i agree - Scarlet IS a gateway drug to Epic

[Dan Hudgins]

The goal of making the KineRAW (tm) cameras was to offer an alternative to the compressed camcorders that don't record all of the sensor data. If that matters to the filmmaker or not depends on what results he is looking for and what his end use is going to be.

With the end of 35mm film printing most if not all distribution is going to be on lossy compression, but there can still be advantages to shooting uncompressed and doing an uncompressed DI to avoid double compression losses.

Digital Cinema Cameras are meant for making movies for theatrical projection, and so HDSLR may not satisfy the filmmaker as well for that use as for youtube use etc.

If the camera gives the kind of images the filmmaker wants then in my mind that is the most important issue.

If you cannot afford any given high end option, then you have to look at what your options are like:

1) Shoot 35mm short ends, pay for processing and do your own film scans on a DIY scanner

2) Shoot with an HDSLR and do post processing to get what you can out of it

3) Shoot with a low cost Digital Cinema Camera and deal with CinemaDNG if you want to get all you can or use the Cineform (tm) workfow

4) Raise more money from investors and rent the high end equipment.

Which of those four options will put the best looking movie on the movie screen, and within that what are the factors that make the "best" part:

1) The look of the camera

2) The look you can get from the workflow

3) The money you have left over for actors, costumes, and locations, as well as catering etc.

4) What is the cost for post production using any of the camera choices

5) Are you going to 35mm release print or DCP projection, and can you book a DCP theater or a 35mm film theater in the target region.

6) How many setups you can get in a day, what shooting ratio can you afford media for.

Everything that goes into the making of the film impacts the audience reaction, so you need to work that balance out for yourself.

[Dan Hudgins]

I posted the fourth Vimeo video, D1, showing some hand held footage made with the KineRAW-S8p (tm), you can read my text on that video's page for more information about how it was done and the 1920x817 crop from 1920x1440 shooting mode used.

KineRAW-S8p (tm) handheld (1920x817) Kowa 3.5mm lens test reel D1 on Vimeo

[Dan Hudgins]

I got an email today from Kinefinity.com (tm) that their field tester using the second prototype of the KineRAW-S35 (tm) for field testing had made a MOV file of some footage he has shot to check out the monitoring LUT.

You may see some FPN in some shots, the monitoring LUT are still in development, and the FPN masking code used was part of the Cineform (tm) library codes as far as I can make out. I have been talking with them about the FPN masking development for the DNG workflow through my de-Bayer program (not used in this test footage, as it was shot Cineform (tm) recording mode).

The KineRAW-S35 (tm) can shoot:

1) DNG only.

2) Cineform (tm) only (requiring dark calibration before shooting).

3) Or Both DNG (CinemaDNG) and Cineform (tm) AT THE SAME TIME.

The advantage of the Both mode is that if there is a problem with the dark calibration for the wavelet compressed Cineforn (tm), as seems to happen with RED's (tm) cameras from time to time using their version of wavelet compression called REDCODE (tm), you have a fall back on the 100% sensor data in the CinemaDNG frames.

You can also use the Cineform (tm) compressed version as a proxy for fast editing and do you DI from the fully uncompressed CinemaDNG (tm) frames to get lossless data all the way to the movie screen if you make an IMAX (tm) print etc.



Quote: [

There are 720p H.264 mov for downloading:
final_422hq-QuickTime_H.264.rar????|115??|??|115,????|??????|????|????-???????

There are some Cineform RAW footages for downloading:
Clip1: clip1.rar????|115??|??|115,????|??????|????|????-???????
Clip2: clip2.rar????|115??|??|115,????|??????|????|????-???????
Clip3: clip3.rar????|115??|??|115,????|??????|????|????-???????

The Cineform (tm) player is here,

Cineform « Neo Player Download

]


You can open the rar with the free program 7-Zip (tm).

The MOV is at least double compressed since the camera original was Cineform (tm) compressed, as the people testing in China seem to mostly be interested in Cineform (tm) workflow for the present. There is also a version of the MOV on youku but I do not recommend looking at it since it shows ghastly compression losses. Just download the MOV and look at it 1:1 pixel (not resized to fill your screen) to avoid aliasing from the viewers resizing the images.

==

I'm continuing to work on the 4:3 black and white oversample lens test video for the KineRAW-S8p (tm) its mostly done I just have some more shots to process and to do the titles and final editing, so hopefully I can get that done in a couple of weeks. After that I have part of another color oversample video shot to finish showing the KineRAW-S8p (tm) 2.35, 2:1, and 16:9 oversample modes of the same subject.

I have a sample KineRAW-S35 (tm) here now, it came a few days ago, to use for a while perhaps to shoot calibration frames for making the monitoring LUT, as many such monitoring LUT are needed for the various K, ISO, and look type such as low contrast, normal, high contrast, FILMLOG, SOFTCLIP etc, it gets to be maybe 100 or so LUT I need to calibrate to be able to be downloaded by camera users to put into the camera via a USB memory stick drive. So I'm busy getting that on the way so people will have enough monitoring to use for the start of sales of the camera.

I have already made quite a few LUT from EI/ISO 80 to 5120 for Daylight and Florescent. For some reason they seem to not use Tungsten 3200K lights in China? So that was one reason that I was sent the camera, I have lights here, and there is no smog in San Francisco so the daylight should be more true to 5600K for the making of the calibration DNG frames.

At least in the above link to the MOV you can see the flesh colors may look better than in the first prototype video and there are no serious pink highlight issues, so the monitoring and color matching seem to be progressing on track. I don't know all the details of the workflow that was used, if that is important to you, you can write directly to Kinefinity.com (tm) and ask any questions you like about their MOV file and how it was made.

If you can't get the .rar file to unzip you need to re-download because sometimes files get corrupted on downloading. You need to click on the green button on the page that comes up for their download company, in Firefox if you check "always ask the folder to save to" in its options, a pop-up window will open on your PC and you can select the folder to save the rar file into. You cannot open the download twice without closing the windows it seems, but you can have Firefox download all four rar files at once if you have a high speed connection by selecting the green button that comes up on the Chinese page at those links above. If you have any problems try again or write to Kinefinity.com (tm) for help.

[Dan Hudgins]

Here are some photos of the first KineRAW-S35 (tm) [second prototype] demo video being made in China, see the link above for MOV and Cineform (tm) shots from this demo. [see the links to the rar files in my post above in this thread]

If you use a DI system you can ask them for the 3D-LUT used, they said they will post some on the same download site for people to try out.

When I know more about that link I may add it here.

The playback in Quicktime (tm) player of the Cineform (tm) clips may look green and washed out, that's because its playing at native sensor color balance maybe, I asked them about the issue of useing the 3D-LUT with Quicktime (tm), anyone know if there is a way to get Cineform (tm) to playback in Quicktime (tm) with the LUT applied?

They said to pass this information on:

Quote: [
When you post clips, you need to tell them that:
1. Lens: SONY 35mm and 80mm PL mount lens.
2. KineRAW-S35 Digital Cinema Camera, with KineMAG-64GB SSD.
3. Viewfinder is SONY CLM-V55.
4. Clips are Cineform encoded RAW files, it needs to download free Cineform decoder if not, as following link:Cineform « Neo Player Download
5. Attached are some photos onsite.

]

Quote: [They can just use the LUT in Speedgrade or Davinci.]

If you would like the full resolution version of those JPG you can email me or them, I reduced them and increased the compression so I could fit them into this post, the originals do not show aliasing and are about 4x the area.

[Damian Heffernan]

Here's the S35 at the BIRTV tradeshow in Beijing.

BIRTV - Kinefinity KineRAW S35 2K cine camera on Vimeo

DSLR News Shooter | BIRTV 2011 – China’s answer to Red? The Kinefinity KineRAW S35 digital cinema camera for US$8000

[Damian Heffernan]

HDMI and SDI on the back as well as 2 USB 3 ports and what looks like a network port.