NAB 2013 Reflections

Lenses and Support

Anamorphics

Jon Fauer says that, historically, when 3D dies, there’s a resurgence of interest in anamorphic photography. Certainly that’s true this time ’round, and Cooke and Angénieux have been working together on new sets of anamorphic Cooke primes and Angénieux zooms.

 

These are all 2x lenses (with a 2x horizontal squeeze), so best suited for 4×3 cameras like Alexa Studio and the XT series. Angénieux says they’re considering a 1.3x set for 16×9 cams, too.  These lenses should be deliverable in the next 18 months.

Ikan monitors

Ikan haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory with their past monitor offerings; while the prices and feature sets have been very attractive, the image quality has often been, shall we say, a bit underwhelming. Imagine my surprise to see their NAB display of displays (grin), which had row upon row of really rather nice looking monitors showing really rather nice pictures on them… even when they weren’t precisely at eye level! IPS panels have a lot to do with this; they have very wide viewing angles.

Many of the small monitors sport cast aluminum cases, a step up from the flimsy plastic frames of Ikan’s earlier displays.

That $1299 D7w looks very attractive to my geeky, measurement-craving self, as does the D5w. Spend a bit more, and the things will even record h.264 video.

And for all the skeptics: yes, I see that no two monitors in my pictures show that scene with the same brightness, contrast, or color, grin. But these monitors were being poked, prodded, and frobbed by all and sundry, so I can’t say whether the inconsistencies were inbuilt or imposed.

CineGrip

Caleb Crosby has taken his black walnut CineGrip,  seen last year as “the Knucklebunny“, to the next level: wooden buttons.

Now, not only is the grip itself smooth, warm, and comfortable in your hand, the actuating switches positively beg to be felt, pressed, caressed… is it possible for a camera grip to be seductive? Is it even morally defensible?

CineGrips and SuperGrips are available preprogrammed to control FS100s, FS700s, F-series Sonys, REDs, or Alexas.

[Disclosure: I first knew Mr. Crosby had arrived at the CML Gathering where I took this picture when he pressed a plastic cup containing a dram of fine single malt into my hand. That I remember examining the CineGrip, but do not remember quite which whisky it was in the cup, probably means that I wasn’t unduly influenced by the latter in my evaluation of the former… or something… it’s hard to recall…]

Underwater FIZ / remote control

I saw this unique underwater FIZ (Focus-Iris-Zoom controller) / remote control as it  floated though the Sony booth, accompanied by its designers.

  

The steampunk aesthetic comes from the need to survive under pressure, and to resist the corrosive effects of seawater. Yet despite the ruggedization, this remote is compact, hand-sized, and very comfortable to hold and to operate—perhaps more so than any other FIZ controller I’ve used (granted, I was standing in the middle of the Sony booth and not on-set, and the target market for this controller is rather different from the folks using dry-land follow-focus rigs, so it’s not really a fair comparison). The designer is Val Ranetkins, a Canadian DP with over 25 years of underwater experience, and the founder of Amphibico, an underwater housing manufacturer.

As of NAB, this particular remote was a prototype, and production plans were unknown.

MōVi

Freefly Systems, maker of the CineStar octorotor camera-copter, showed off two variants of the MōVi rig. It’s basically the 3-axis digitally stabilized camera gimbal used in the CineStar… without the CineStar. Imagine an active stabilization system that does what a Steadicam does, without the drift and drunken horizons issues. Jon Fauer rather likes it, as does just about anyone who tries it.

 

Advantages: it’s lightweight; being dynamically stabilized it automatically accounts for wind forces and acceleration; it’s remotely controllable (instead of a hand on the support, it used a wireless controller); it doesn’t need the constant attention of an experienced Steadicam operator to keep it aimed correctly, so it’s something an untrained newbie should be able to fly successfully on a one-day rental; it is the absolute antithesis of shakycam!

Disadvantages: it’s not cheap (prices are said to be $7,500-$15,000), so it won’t be a cheap rental;  I’m skeptical about its ability to robustly tolerate the gear-for-hire lifestyle, so I’d expect it’ll come with an owner/operator, which will make it even less cheap to rent; it’s best suited for the lightweight cameras a ‘copter would tote, so don’t rush to buy one if your sole rig is a RED ONE with the 18-85mm… though the $15K MōVi will hoist a RED Epic with a light prime.

Odds ‘n’ Ends

Hexolux

LED production lighting from brand-new San Francisco company Hexolux:

    

Innovative, lightweight hexagonal housings allow interesting stacking options, like the plasma lights from Hive. Dimmable by f-stops; wireless and wired DMX control; reportedly very good 3200K light quality (CRI 98). Hexolux proudly show off their spectral measurements, and link to the AMPAS solid-state lighting tests as well as Art Adams’ comparisons (originally for PRG, now on the Cineo site), so they must feel pretty good about the character of the light.

Milsat Magazine

This was one of the more, erm, unexpected magazines I saw at the show:

Adorama raffles

Famed NYC and online camera-flogger Adorama had a medium-sized booth at the show. They held a raffle Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday at 5:00pm, giving away a BMD Cine Camera, a Sony PMW-200, and a Canon C100 over the three days. They drew a huge crowd:

I’m pretty sure their raffle process was flawed, as I didn’t win any of the cameras, darn it. [joke]

Panasonic and JVC: tablets and transmitters

You’ve probably heard about Panasonic Toughbooks: fully ruggedized Windows laptops. You might not have heard about the Toughpads: comparably bulletproof Android and Windows 8 tablets!

Panasonic had an amusing video showing the FZ-A1 being blasted with water jets and blowtorch flames, being bounced around in a hamster-wheel-like drum, and suffering other indignities that would trash lesser tablets. It’s pricey for a 10″ Android fondleslab (around $1600), but it has hardware encryption and other security measures, and it’ll handily outlive your other devices… and may outlive you.

Panasonic also displayed a Dejero Live+ portable ENG transmitter: it sends high-quality, low-latency H.264 video over bonded cellular links, WiFi, LTE, or whatever combination happens to be available. In this case, a Panasonic handheld (probably an HPX250 or 255; I didn’t check) is feeding it via HD-SDI. Lag time to the monitor was on the order of a second or two, and image was pretty much flawless (the Dejero’s screen shows a delay time of 1.5 seconds and a 3.7 Mbps data rate).

JVC had a somewhat more compact live transmission system: their flagship dual-codec ENG Handycam, the GY-HM650, has been upgraded to provide live streaming using a Verizon 4G LTE dongle, as shown in this JVC press image:

I watched a demo, with a JVC shooter walking around their booth during a preso, streaming low-bitrate video live and then FTPing a higher-quality version for later replay (in the demo, for replay a minute later). Seemed to work just fine.

RED

What NAB report is complete without a mention of RED theatrics? In this case, there quite literally was a theater: a clean-room-ish “operating theater” for swapping out RED EPIC M-X sensors for the new 6K, 15-stop DRAGON sensors… while you watch!

And it that wasn’t enough, Wednesday afternoon at closing time they flew an Epic-equipped 12-rotor ‘copter (dodecacopter?) in the booth:

All that theater obscured two really important bits of news:

1) The DRAGON sensor employs new color science:

“The new RED DRAGON™ sensor features our most advanced color science yet, taking advantage of vastly improved dynamic range and low-light capabilities. Skin tones are softer, primary colors are more vibrant, and subtle color variations are discernibly remarkable.”

RED sensors heretofore have a bit of a reputation for hard-to-grade images; getting good fleshtones can be tricky. With any luck, this new color science will make subtle color variations not only discernibly remarkable, but remarkably discernable (grin).

2) RED’s new Motion Mount incorporates Tessive’s Time Filter technology, and the Tessive Time Filter is no longer independently available. Did RED acquire Tessive? Neither company is saying, but henceforth the only way to get the Time Filter’s improved motion rendering and infinitely-variable ND filtration is to buy a Motion Mount.

The Motion Mount, available later this year for around $4500 if I recall correctly, puts the Time Filter where it belongs: behind the lens, incorporated directly into the camera and its control system. The Time Filter is a TLPF—temporal low-pass filter—doing for motion aliasing what an OLPF does for spatial aliasing. Goodbye nasty, hard-edged digital shuttering artifacts; goodbye backwards-spinning wagon wheels… if you’ve got an Epic with the Motion Mount.

A lot of folks have been saying that RED has had its day: with cameras like the Sony F5 and F55, the Canon C500, and the BMD 4K cine camera, there’s no longer any reason to stay with RED. If DRAGON’s color science really is improved, and once the Motion Mount ships, RED will be giving ’em reasons to think otherwise.

Beyond 4K: Super Hi-Vision

On the last day, I visited the NHK booth for this year’s Super Hi-Vision demo: 33 Megapixels, 7680×4320, with 22.2 channel audio.

There’s simply no point in trying to reproduce an 8K image in a 600-pixel-wide WordPress layout. I’ll just say that the demo I saw a few years back (the one with the JVC-built camera with eleventy-million SDI cables coming out the back) was an impressive science project: the images it showed were too contrasty, had blown highlights and crushed shadows and some distressing color fringing… but gosh, there were an awful lot of pixels onscreen. This year? We saw some freakin’ gorgeous images that just happened to have an awful lot of pixels. This year’s Super Hi-Vision wasn’t a science project any more, it was really good-looking television imagery… with 16 times the resolution of “full HD”.

Resolution that high is like 4K, only more so: it’s not just a question of not seeing a visible pixel grid, or of hitting the Carlton Bale distance. There’s more to human visual perception than first-order resolution limits; there’s a clarity, a limpid quality, that comes from high-res even on “too small” screens, especially on wide shots with gentle motion. If you haven’t already seen it, I highly recommend Mark Schubin’s February 2012 “Beyond HD” presentation; it’s that sense of “realness” Mark discusses that I’m referring to.

For me, the telling moment was in the Canon booth, standing several feet away from their small (32″?) prototype 4K monitor (well beyond the “Carlton Bale distance” even for full HD), when the scene cut from a closeup of a car on the Pacific Coast Highway to a wide shot… and yet every leaf on every tree still seemed to remain a real, distinct entity, instead of blending into a mass of undifferentiated greenness. Sorry, 4K deniers: there is a difference. And 8K? Well, you’ve got to see it…

As we came out of the Super Hi-Vision demo, David Leitner mentioned that with that much resolution, you could see everything you normally wouldn’t see (and might be better off not seeing), like the bored bystanders alongside the parade route at Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival, in a wide shot that took in the whole street; or the tics and expressions of annoyance on the faces of various members of the Royal Party as Queen Elizabeth formally opened the 2012 London Olympics. I noticed that even reasonably slow screen-crossing motions that would work in “mere HD” became objectionably blurry in 60P SHV. Of course, as we exited the theater, we walked right up to a 120p SHV demo; NHK is well aware that with increasing spatial resolution, you  need higher temporal resolution, too. While “plain old 60p” SHV is now possible with a lightweight, shoulder-mount Hitachi camera (using a fiber link to carry off its 24 Gbit/sec payload), the 120p prototype is still a rat’s nest of parallel data outputs…

So, to summarize the show: 4K isn’t coming, it’s here. And 8K is hot on its heels.

Even so, that little BMD Pocket Cine Camera is mighty attractive ($995!)… no, no, I already have a GH3, and I should just be happy with that… right?

Disclosures: I attended NAB 2013 on a press pass, which got me free admission to the show. Aside from that, no person or company gave me any special consideration in return for coverage, and there is no material connection between me and any of the companies mentioned in this article.

About the Author

Adam Wilt is a software developer, engineering consultant, and freelance film & video tech. He’s had small jobs on big productions (PA, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”, Dir. Robert Wise), big jobs on small productions (DP, “Maelstrom”, Dir. Rob Nilsson), and has worked camera, sound, vfx, and editing gigs on shorts, PSAs, docs, music vids, and indie features. He started his website on the DV format, www.adamwilt.com/DV.html, about the same time Chris Hurd created the XL1 Watchdog, and participated in DVInfo.net’s 2006 “Texas Shootout”. He has written for DV Magazine and ProVideoCoalition.com, taught courses at DV Expo, and given presentations at NAB, IBC, and Cine Gear Expo.  When he’s not doing contract engineering or working on apps like Cine Meter, he’s probably exploring new cameras, just because cameras are fun.