Rai & Markus' "Drake" HD camera

[Rai Orz]

Short news about DRAKE:

Timeline for presentation the whole system will be the 12.14.2004.

[Nick V. Bicanic]

I've been following this thread (and obin's) on and off since they started (mostly lurking) and it prompted us to move towards productising a high speed digital HD solution.

A number of HD projects (full length feature films low, medium and high budget) that shoot in our area all have to hire film equipment to shoot off-speed stuff (usually meaning more than 60fps)...

so we decided to help build something that does exactly that...

I am as keen as many others to see the "drake" (cool name btw) - I love the idea of people building high end stuff like this themselves.

Our aim is to satisfy a niche for people who shoot HD quality stuff but we want to intercut it with Varicam/F900/Viper footage - rather than shooting the whole thing on the one camera - since I'm sceptical as to how "production-friendly" shooting everything digitally would be - in my experience a lot of the people on the scene (sound/post/video/camera op etc etc) are fairly old school and don't find it that easy to adjust to new stuff...

I have started another thread with some samples of our stuff...I apologise for posting to this one aswell - I just figured it was a worthwhile subject matter to add to the debate.

nick

[Wayne Morellini]

<<<-- Originally posted by Rai Orz : Short news about DRAKE:

Timeline for presentation the whole system will be the 12.14.2004. -->>>

Yes...


Nick, good on you, their have been people complaining about his lack for a while.


About workflow on one camera, If it's low budget and the old timers have trouble adjusting, why not try to give a good young timer a break (with a bit of sup of course).

[Nick V. Bicanic]

I'm a young timer myself - if you look me up on imdb you'll see there's like 2 and a half credits only - so yeah I don't have any issues with people learning new skills...I just figure that the large part of the "market" - meaning people who would pay good cash to rent this stuff (the higher budget the better) are still using old school crew...

Nick

[Juan M. M. Fiebelkorn]

Yes, Nick you are on the right path.
Cine people hate video most of the times, and this doesn't apply only to the "oldies"......
Guys, think about it this way: Cine workflow has being working with not so big variations for more than a century..
More than a hundred years of experience all over the world would be difficult to defeat with a whole new way of doing things...
If it werent this way cars would be very different from what we have right now, isn't it?

[Nick V. Bicanic]

I look forward to the color camera tests (coming 2nd week december) - we will also be doing some matching tests all the way through to 35mm filmout with multiple film stocks...

will post all the results here...

Nick

[Wayne Morellini]

A totally new way would overwhelm the traditionalist within a decade or so, as younger, or wiser heads, stampede to use it. Of course nobody here has a totally new way here yet. We still have a lense system to a projection plane on a tripod dolly etc, recording to a new media. Backend we have more progress, but still a series of images sliced together, even big movies are using digitsed frames on a NLE now. So all they are doing is moving their skills to the topend of the industry. This is only another opinion of course. One thing somebody once told me about computers, is that people resist cahnge until the benefits are approximately 10 times more, then they suddenly swap over. So basically, if we can make he benefis 10 times more (financially, stress, marketing (like 3D animation does) etc, we can get the sudden rush.

Cars are radically different from the first cars, they just don't fly, run or hop ;)

[Nick V. Bicanic]

which I totally didn't mean to...
but there's a cool book called Digital illusion (by Dodsworth) that I read a while back...

It talks about the dreaded "interactive entertainment" and what that implies for mass spaces (i.e. cinemas and amusement parks)

I actually think some of that stuff is totally legit - and am happy to be on the tech end moving into old-school cinema territory as opposed to the other way around...since that method is nearly impossible (resisting change is endemic to it - in my case - and many others on this board - wayne I assume included - we embrace it)

so long as we don't lose track of story we're doing and will win in the long run...

my car doesn't fly at all - but it does crush other things with it's 33inch wheels (and 9 inch suspension lift)

nick

[Rai Orz]

Cars and cameras. Its nice to read...
The point is what Juan said: Cine people hate video..., and this doesnt apply only to the "oldies"..... I hate it too.
And cars? I, for my person, love olditimer. I hate new cars (new cars = video?)... But i love the new ARRI D20 and i love DRAKE too.
I like to talk about those stuff, but please, please not here.

1000fps, yes we also made tests with differnt high speed sensors, with little bit less fps, but with full 1280x720.
Nick, your clips look also like made with the MICRON CMOS Sensor MT9M413.
If everyone need high speed, Drake have a changeble camerahead, so its ready for differnt camera heads. Its only a question of $$$.

BTW. Look at the german WEINBERGER speed camera
http://www.cine-speedcam.com/

or a "low cost" camera (Low cost with "")
http://www.baslerweb.com/produkte/produkte_en_212.php

[John Nagle]

Rai,

About how much is the Basler you posted the link to?

[Nick V. Bicanic]

the basler I think I saw somewhere for a few thousand bucks - but then you have to get a cameralink interface to external PC which is a bit of extra hassle...

we considered going that route but then we decided the better way would be to focus on the high-speed stuff...

Rai it's not the MT9M412 - that sensor maxes out at 500fps - the B&W model we were testing can do 1000fps full sensor - the color will be able to do that too (obviously increasing in fps as you lower the frame size)

The actual sensor is bigger (both physically and in pixel size) to the Weinberger link you posted....(those Germans always getting the head start - Vorsprung durch Technik etc etc - ha ha)
Cool link though.

The weinberger guys obviously have a developed product (though I don't know exactly how much use it is getting - will ask bandpro) - so our solution will end up as something like that (but with any luck at all - better and cheaper to use)

Nick

[Wayne Morellini]

<<<-- Originally posted by Rai Orz : Cars and cameras. Its nice to read...
The point is what Juan said: Cine people hate video..., and this doesnt apply only to the "oldies"..... I hate it too.
And cars? I, for my person, love olditimer. I hate new cars (new cars = video?)... But i love the new ARRI D20 and i love DRAKE too.
I like to talk about those stuff, but please, please not here. -->>>

I can look for a Model T Ford for you, if you like ;)
(Give me a fully insured GT40, Lotus 7, Esprit. Elise, anyday rather than a Hyundia 2 door, actually a Ferrari wouldn't be to bad either).

I think the real trick is to get the balance right, of operation, workflow, and look/results. See nobody really wants to see a control that they don't use, they don't even really want to bother about a control that they sometimes use, or even worse "might use someday". So what you do is have different configurations, you set the default simple Cinema configuration at manufacture, and a number of others. Now, if somebody wants more advanced features then they can change the default to an advanced configuration, one for Cinema, one for hispeed, one for Eng etc, or they can play around and setup their own, turning off features they don't want. So a cinema person might only ever use a cinema configuration (maybe a advanced cinema too). But if your a person that switches between very different jobs, you can swap between different advanced configurations suitable for the job, and so forth. In effect keeping the functionality and controls tight for what you want. For Cinema people that means that they only have to worry about selecting a simple or complex configuration. (Please note: if I have any exclusive Intellectural Property rights here I reserve them, other wise I make this a general public statement so nobody else can take a valid patent out on it (slight issue with patent laws, ask patent attourney).

Now Nick, you are fortunate with the High speed stuff because it is such an special effect. After recent films like the the Matrix etc, people are so dazzeled by the effect that they accept the optical mismatch between the high speed camera and the main camera as part of the effect. So this makes it easy, they might even accept discoloured, contrasty, burned out SD raw upscaled as part of the coolness of the effect (720p preffered in 1080+ film). This means a lot less effort has to be put in to choosing chips etc.

[Nick V. Bicanic]

<<<-- Originally posted by Wayne Morellini : they accept the optical mismatch between the high speed camera and the main camera as part of the effect. So this makes it easy, they might even accept discoloured, contrasty, burned out SD raw upscaled as part of the coolness of the effect (720p preffered in 1080+ film). This means a lot less effort has to be put in to choosing chips etc. -->>>

I agree that sometimes the effect overshadows the quality - I saw Blade 3 yesterday (Vancouver crew screening - not because I was crew but a friend gave me a ticket) - and some of the slomo stuff in that was fairly grainy but by the time you add the sound effects (which of course are often albeit absurdly - NOT slowed down) then the magic is complete...

Regardless to all this - I am definitely excited to see the drake and look forward to the official website becoming available (including rental rates etc once that gets running)

Nick

[Markus Rupprecht]

Yesterday we had a meeting at Swiss Effects in Zurich and will hold a 35mm print in our hands by next week. Their high end Quantel Digital Intermidiate equipment made a unbelievable 1080p uprez. We compared it to other 1080p material and to scanned 35mm material on class 1 screens... I think we did a good job. Colors are low, as we know, pushing the capabilities of the grading system to the hard limits, but being still within what is doable.
Buttom Line: IBIS5-A can be turned into a digital cinema camera. Future Chips will perform better, but today this Chip can do the job in a affordable way. In the end it counts what the 35mm print looks like and we recieved two thumbs up from the high end pro's at Swiss Effects.
(Check our their page at www.swisseffects.ch)

To everybody from Germany or at least central europe:
On december 10. we will introduce our drake system to the public at a filmmaker congress in Halle (near Leipzig). Check out their webpage for details (in german)

http://www.filmnachwuchs.net/

We will show our baby with a decent beamer in live operation and also show the color graded material and will show up with the team to answer questions and give everybody the opportunity to try the camera out.

For everybody who can't come we will shoot a video about the event.

By the way, we think about showing up at Sundance in January. We check if we can organize and afford it. If yes this would be a opportunity for the U.S. folks to dance with a drake. We'll see.

Greets
Markus

[Eric Bilodeau]

Hi guys,

I have been following the thread for some time now and I just feel like joining :)

I fail to understand what the fuss about 720p versus 1080p is all about. 720p produces incredible images, I saw varicam prints that blew me away, to me, it is more than sufficient. Also, it uses much less bandwidth, witch is a very important advantage. 8bit is more likely the problem to me, 10 bits uses 1.25 times the space of 8 bits but offers 4 times the number of image increments, it is very relevant. On the other hand, I must say that every other project (other than Drake) is behind if we look at workflow and results, I followed Obin's work and it is good for stills, but far from a good moving images solution for the moment. The images from the Drake system speak for themselves, no need to argue about it, they have a working camera and nobody else on this forum has shown any other convincing arguments that they have. I am sure that, in a few years, 1080p will be within our grasp (to a workable level that is) but I want a camera now, not in 3 years and certainly not too pricey either.

My point is that the IBIS5-A can be used for indies with incredible results and it is available here and now at a resolution we can afford to work with. I must congradulate the Drake team on their incredible achievement.