The first REAL digital cinema camera?
 

Even before the Viper has made it into regular production use, the Holy Grail of digital acquisition may be eclipsing it; or not. Guess we'll have to see when this baby premieres at NAB. Can't wait.

Check it out!

Wow, how about that... most interesting! I wish they had given their booth number for NAB; I couldn't find it on the website. This will definitely go on my "must see" list for NAB. Good find, Charles... I'm copying your post from the Film Look forum to the DV News forum. Yowza.

Must be special, I'm getting 500 and Server Too Busy errors.

Is this cross-posted?

<<<-- Originally posted by Robert Knecht Schmidt : Must be special, I'm getting 500 and Server Too Busy errors.

Is this cross-posted? -->>>

Ditto for me.

Ivan

Wow. That really looks awesome. A chip the size of 35mm film! Let's face it... it's only a matter of time before Digital replaces Film. Granted, we won't see anything of this magnitude in the XL2, but it's paving the way...

Just got in. The optical viewfinder will be a big hit with cinematographers, though I think its actual utility a bit dubious in the presence of a good video monitor. They also claim higher dynamic range, lower noise, and better sensitivity, but provide no white paper. 14 bits/channel means the camera will have ~14 stops of (luminance) exposure latitute, 254.6 dB quantization error SNR, and be able to output ~4.4 trillion colors. Will this be a three-chip camera or a yucky color filter array? Still only 60 fps max frame rate--you probably won't get much better slo mo out of this cam than a CineAlta. I wonder what they mean when they talk about "a traditional film camera feel." Does that mean the packaging has molding for the mags?

Here's to hoping the NAB demo includes an operational camera and not just a form factor mockup.

Hard to imagine that now, just a few short years after the first megapixel still camera came out, we can now see the advent of a camera that is basically capable of taking 60 8megapixel stills in one second. Just amazing.

Looks AMAZING... A few questions arise though...

1. where will it store these images on?

4046x2048
x5.25 -> (14 bits x 3 colors) / 8 bits per byte
x60
= 2,610,155,520

That is 2 GB per second... (uncompressed). If you
want to store this (compressed I assume) and want
to edit it you will need to have a massive system

(imagine 90 minutes uncompressed with this:
14,094,839,808,000 -> 14,1 TB of information.. WOW)

2. What type of compression and at what levels?

3. How many CCD's? They seem to be talking a lot in CCD
instead of CCD's....

Too bad they didn't put up a picture the machine recorded,
would have been awesome. Find it also a tad strange this
awesome camera (supposedly) just came falling down and
suprised everyone...

Guess we will have to wait and see.... Looking forward to it!

I'm predicting that when the "price" comes tumbling down, it'll crush all of us admirers looking up expectantly.

Robert:

<<The optical viewfinder will be a big hit with cinematographers, though I think its actual utility a bit dubious in the presence of a good video monitor.>>

An optical viewfinder allows the camera operator to do his job, which is to analyze everything in the frame. A while back I posted some incredibly long-winded list of duties in the operator position--maybe someone else can find that thread? Anyway, it's just not possible to do as good a job with a black and white CRT viewfinder (I won't even go into the color LCD as is found on stock on the XL1). Even a decent 7" onboard LCD provides nowhere near the information needed. A 14" broadcast monitor would rival an optical viewfinder, but where is that going to mount on the camera...? Really, it's not about vanity or tradition but all about catching the problems and improving the results before it commits to film/tape/digital media/oh boy, is it messy to talk about this stuff empirically...

Yes, I see what you're saying, Charles. Yet isn't the principal advantage of the optical viewfinder better gauging of focus? This doesn't help the operator much. If the operator's main task is composition, wouldn't he/she want to see the digital data stream (the image that's actually being recorded) rather than the approximation offered by the optical viewfinder?

Also, I'm not a cinematographer, but I've looked through a few Pana 35 finders on location and they tend to have optical defects--for example, some miniscule misalignment will cause one half or corner to be slightly out of focus, or there will be what looks like waterspotting or dirt, or so much light will be cut that the image looks darker than what the film is actually "seeing." Now for film cameras the video monitor tends to render an even further degraded image, but for CineAltas the monitor gives a nice clear picture, and it shows what you're actually putting down on tape. I'm guess I'm just a big fan of the monitor tent.

I think the post you are reffering to, Charles, is this one:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...ator#post30132

Definitely "wow". I'd like to see how that thing looks. Transferring the footage to film should definitely look better than Star Wars Episode 2, which was shot on a standard HD camera and then cropped to fit the aspect ratio. DLP projection in theaters isn't even as good as HD yet (!). But regardless this is a camera to watch for.

I do find it humorous that the web site for the camera says it is targeted at cinematographers, not broadcasts. Yet they will be at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters).

I guess soon we'll know if digital can _ever_ match 35mm.

Does anyone know what the resolution of 35mm would be in pixels? Does this camera ~(4k x 2k) match the resolution of 35mm?

Also I can't begin to imagine the processing and storage costs of such high resolution video, because to match film you'd have to not use a very high compression rate. Seems like it'd be at least a gig per minute. Wow.

When I was doing some research on a high res. digital still camera I found a statement in a European Photography magazine that you would need 24 mega-pixels to give the same resolution as 35mm film. So I am guessing they would need close to the same for this new “super” camera.

Alex