2k to 4k: There's something coming.

A few brave filmmakers have embarked on shooting their "film" using a memory camera such as the Panasonic P2 HVX-200 or the newer Silicon Imaging SI-2K, and they've tapped into the creative power that the new technology can bring while tasting the bitterness of Rolaids when their new toy does something unexpected. Welcome to today. No longer is it good enough to know where the record button is or how to adjust focus - filmmakers are also going to need to know how to manage data, build and use color lookup tables, pick lenses, and understand frame-rates and resolution.

I had been watching the Panasonic HVX-200 as a possibility for our next project, "Toast" to see if it would be the camera that we would end up using. It had a good high-definition video resolution and supported the all-important 24p film-like frame rate as well as some additional frame rates for slow-motion and accelerated motion effects. Best of all, it was affordable enough that any low-budget movie could just outright buy the camera - no rentals required. When the camera actually came out, reports of noisy low-light performance started to surface and a lot of people were not entirely comfortable shooting their movie to electronic memory which could be erased in seconds.

While these were not entirely devastating, other cameras have quickly come to market that diminish the low-cost and high-resolution attributes that made the HVX-200 so appealing to begin with. At the National Association of Broadcasters Convention (NAB) in April of 2006, Red - an upstart company created by Oakley sunglasses founder Jim Jannard became the talk of the show by announcing they would be creating and selling a 4K (that's the resolution of the image sensor - roughly equivalent to a 12-mega pixel DSLR still) camera for under $20,000. Red had no actual camera at the show, and in fact only had computer renderings of what this camera might one day look like. Industry insiders have a word for this kind of announcement - vaporware. In spite of all that, the announcement was so revolutionary, Red took deposits and booked many pre-orders for the camera.

Around the same time as the Red announcement at NAB, Silicon Imaging started shipping prototype units of their high-definition camera which ultimately became known as the SI-2k. The Red and Silicon Imaging cameras are exciting to filmmakers because they are the first affordable cinema-resolution digital cameras that can directly utilize film-style lenses and optics. Affordable in this case means at a price that can be practically purchased. The comparable high-end high-definition cameras offered by Sony and Panasonic retail for $70,000 and up. Panavision has an all-digital cinema camera called the Genesis which is so expensive it isn't even available for purchase and rents for around $20,000 a week.

Two weeks prior to this year's NAB, Red was contacted by Peter Jackson (director of King Kong and the Lord of the Rings trilogy) in New Zealand who expressed an interest in looking at the camera. Red's crew jumped at the chance and hopped on their plane (yes, they have their own Boeing jet) to meet Jackson in Wellington. When the Red crew arrived in Wellington, Jackson had planned a 2-day shoot of a World War I battle sequence with Red's only two prototype cameras - cutely named Boris and Natasha. Completed in under two weeks with a full music score and sound mix, the approximately 10-minute short was screened in 4K detail within a small "theater" enclosed in Red's booth. People were so hyped for the Red camera that some were willing to wait upwards of 3 hours in line to get their chance to see the short film and a couple prototype cameras.

In a humble booth off to the side, Silicon Imaging and Cineform were demonstrating the SI-2K camera. While Red still didn't even have a real fully working camera, SI's camera had been through many working refinements through actual use on productions over the past year. They were demonstrating a touch-screen LCD for control of the camera that was very slick. This was all part of "Silicon DVR" which divides the display into nine regions (imagine a tic-tac-toe pattern) which when touched in those places, brought up varying camera functions. SI has also partnered with professional color grading company IRIDAS to provide real-time non-destructive look-up tables (LUTs) for monitoring on set. There's a long demonstration video for how this works on SI's site. Basically it allows a Director of Photography to view footage during production with a color-correction applied while still recording the raw uncorrected footage. This kind of real-time full resolution on-set preview is not even possible with film - at all. It's one of the most exciting and immediate examples of where digital is becoming very powerful for filmmakers.

The data-rates necessary to record raw 2K or 4K imagery is extreme. With no compression, it would require approximately 350-400MBytes per second to record a 4K image at 24 frames per second. That's about 2/3 of the information contained on a standard audio CD recorded every second or around 21 Gigabytes of space for every minute of footage. To get around this massive need for raw data storage, both Red and Silicon Imaging put their raw footage through a wavelet-based compression codec.

Silicon Imaging is using Cineform's 2K RAW codec which crunches the information coming from the camera down to a much more manageable 20-30MB/second. The much smaller files still retain a "visually lossless" image. Because Cineform is a seperate company from SI and is focused exclusively on the image compression technology, it will hopefully mean wider industry support and adoption for post-production. Cineform is currently only officially supported on the PC with a Mac version in beta.

Red has opted to develop their own image compression codec which they have dubbed, Redcode RAW. The data rates for Red's codec I believe are comparable to that of Cineform, but it remains to be seen whether the image quality is as good at the same resolution as Cineform. They're also developing an application called Redcine that allows their Redcode RAW files to be converted into many industry acceptable file-types and formats. Apple announced native support for Redcode in Final Cut Pro at NAB, and has already shipped Final Cut Pro Studio 2.0 which contains that support.

Neither Cineform or Redcode are natively supported by the industry leading editing application - Avid. It means that in order to edit on an Avid, both types of footage will have to be rendered into a compatible format to import into Avid - a very time-consuming and tedious process.

As of today, Silicon Imaging's SI-2k camera still has not shipped a "production" model of the camera yet. They are slated to begin shipments at the end of this month or the first week in July. Shortly after NAB, Red announced an indefinite "engineering delay" on the progress of their camera and has yet to update the availability date for their "Red One" camera.

Because of their development lead and third-party support, Silicon Imaging's SI-2k is the likely candidate for us to shoot Toast. The cameras are somewhat less expensive, will probably be available in greater numbers for rental than Red One, and they have a lens/sensor only version of the camera called the "mini" which is very small.

Ultimately, we want to be able to capture the best image for the least money with the widest toolset available at the time we go into production. No final decisions will be made until we're officially in prep - a few weeks before production starts.

One thing is sure - with the latest crop of digital cameras, we will be able to shoot with cinema-style lenses, at a very high resolution for a better final movie than we could have delivered a year or two ago.

Stay tuned!