When I returned from NAB, I wrote about the "Red One" camera and the SI-2K digital camera. Exactly 494 days from their original announcement of the "Red One" and "Mysterium" sensor, the folks at Red have shipped their first cameras to a few customers. The very first cameras shipped on August 31st, 2007. fxguide has some coverage of the haps with pictures. It is nothing short of astounding at how quickly Oakley's founder was able to engineer and produce a camera so remarkable in such a short period of time.
When any product is hyped as much as the Red camera, you never really know if it has any chance of living up to expectations. In order to meet their delivery date expectations, Red shipped the first cameras with only a portion of their final set of features enabled. Through free firmware updates over the coming months, they'll be able to bring the full list of features up to the specs they originally promised. The great thing about the company so far is that from outward appearances, they've been very transparent and forthcoming in dealing with their customers - even going so far as to ask for feedback about what features to keep in the camera.
So what are people saying about how the cameras perform? So far, a lot of people are practically falling over themselves to gush about how great the images are, and how fantastic the camera is. Score some points for the Red team. The only negatives I've seen relate to non-active features (such as no current functioning electronic viewfinder) and questions relating to overall dynamic range compared to Panavision's Genesis (which costs many times more - and is only available to RENT). Most of the good discussions are taking place on the Cinematographers Mailing List in the cml-2k-444 list (you need to be subscribed to read them).
It's probably a good time to point out that the workflow for a pure digital camera such as the Red One can be a pretty substantial departure from that of a video camera. The captured footage bears more of resemblance to the "RAW" mode stills of many digital SLR still cameras than the videotape of high-definition. Images have more color information and bits than can be displayed on any electronic display and so they have to be "adjusted" or managed using a Look-Up-Table (LUT) to be viewed properly. This is true both for what is seen on-set on monitors during production as well as before the footage can be used in post. It's very much like the telecine step for traditional film except it doesn't require a super-expensive suite of equipment to be transformed into something usable.
When a LUT is applied to footage, you are only seeing a representation of a selected set of the available information contained in the RAW image source. Much more akin to shooting on film, with RAW image acquisition, you have to be comfortable trusting in the expertise of the skilled technicians on set rather than the absolute certainty of knowing you're looking at what you're really getting. It can be freeing, but it also can be scary - depending on who's involved.
When digital cinematography started emerging with the first digital movie cameras, a new position was called for - the data wrangler / IT guy. Lots of productions are getting by without someone filling this role when shooting on a high-definition format such as HDCam. A Red One will be very difficult to operate without someone working on set to assist with the data/LUT management and display setup. The whole shoot could be severely compromised if the technician working to calibrate the displays and manage the data and LUTs doesn't have adequate experience.
With 50 cameras shipped from Red and in professional hands, they are still working through the bugs and enabling features as fast as they can. It's a good time here to talk about the lesser known SI-2K. Silicon Imaging's camera has been shipping since July '07. They continue to refine the workflow and interface for their camera and really have a great system.
Adding to their existing capabilities, SI announced at IBC that two of their SI-2k cameras can now be paired together to record stereo 3-D images. It's not clear what specific 3-D capabilities SI has instilled in their actual hardware or software. I can infer from their press release that their software will allow synchronized recording among multiple cameras, but do they have a mounting platform to physically put two SI-2k's with all the lenses and focus hardware in parallel - which would be required for 3-D?
The SI-2K and Red One continue to improve as they are bringing incredible capabilities into the hands of cash-strapped professionals. It's ironic that while these are superb tools at a price never imagine a decade ago, the complexity of working with them is increasing to that of tools costings many times more. To really push this new technology it's going to take a new breed of cinematographer who is willing to dig deeper into color management and digital issues than anything before.
The final question I've been wondering as a producer is what is a Red One or SI-2K going to cost in the near to medium timeframe? I've seen prices listed for a Red One for around $1k/day without lens. That would put a full usable camera package around $1,700 - $2,000/day. I'm expecting and hoping that as more cameras hit the market, the rental price drops to about half that. I have yet to see anyone renting an SI-2K - unfortunately. Does anyone reading this have access to one they'd want to rent? Comment or e-mail me...
Showing posts with label Silicon Imaging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Silicon Imaging. Show all posts
Friday, October 5, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
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!
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!
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