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Filed under: 3D •Cameras •compression •Distribution •Hardware •Post Production •

HPA Tech Retreat 2010 - Day 1

Demo Room Demos

One of the treats of the Tech Retreat is the Demo Room: stuff from the labs of various companies, not necessarily yet (or ever) ready to be turned into products. Here’s some of what I saw…

ARRI Alexa digital cine camera.

The Alexa was here, and making pictures. The EVF wasn’t working yet and many functions hadn’t been implemented, but light went in the front and HD-SDI came out the back.

How about that see-through gearhead the Alexa was sitting on?

I don’t think the see-through gearhead is something you’ll find in the ARRI catalog.

I put the Alexa on my shoulder; it is contoured to rest on the shoulder and sits quite comfortably. The camera itself weighs about 12 pounds.

Dialing in a sensitivity: nominal rating is ISO 800.

Setup controls are on the right side of the camera, where an AC / DIT can get to them without disturbing the operator. A more limited set of controls is present on the operator’s side, too.

The base-level EVF. The two buttons are ZOOM and EXP.

Alexa will be offered in electronic and optical viewfinding models. This Alexa had a nonworking mockup of the electronic finder.

ARRI Relativity grain removal on a Super16mm frame.

Relativity is ARRI’s software suite for de-graining, re-graining, frame rate conversion, etc. It runs in real time or near real time (depending on the number of things it’s asked to do) using a GPU-accelerated Windows PC.

Canon video-capable DSLRs: Rebel T2i; 7D; 1D.

Canon had their HDSLRs present, including the just-announced Rebel T21 (a.k.a. EOS 550D). Same 1.6x sized sensor as in the 7D, but not exactly the same sensor; the T2i’s may be just a bit noisier in low light. Shipping soon, probably within a month.

The 1/3” 3-chip camcorder with the new 50Mbit/sec 4:2:2 codec was at HDExpo, alas.

Panasonic stereo camcorder and 3D field monitor.

This $21,000 camcorder is already up to about 300 pre-orders, and it won’t ship until the fall. It’s essentially two HMC40s in one body: 3-CMOS, 1/4” full-res 1920x1080 sensors, mated with a new stereo lens rig.

The 3D field monitors use passive 3D glasses, and will be around $8000-$9000 when they ship.

A jury-rigged remote control for the prototype camera.

The final camera will have a more elegant controller; the headline news here is that convergence will be tweakable independently of focus.

This binocular lens is the key element: lots of patent-pending effort has gone into making it work.

Panasonic’s Jan Crittenden Livingston, whose baby this is (in the US market at least), says it’ll be as big as the HVX200 was in its day. I disagreed; I think this’ll be bigger. It’s the first practical 3D camcorder; it doesn’t require a three-man crew, an oversize tripod, and two of everything to make it work. A single operator can shoot this camera, even handheld… and it can go mobile, recording 24 Mbit/sec AVCHD on SDHC cards or it can feed full uncompressed dual-channel HD out via two HD-SDI cables for external recording.

Across the hall, Gary Demos of Image Essence showed playback of wide-dynamic-range images using his new hybrid, floating-point wavelet/sinc codec. DCI StEM material was encoded at about 57 Mbit/sec; other clips ran the gamut from about 47 Mbit/sec up to 67 Mbit/sec if I recall correctly. Clips decoded in realtime on an Intel CPU running Linux to 16-bit RGB values, and output through a DVS Centaurus board to a Sony XBR8 and an HP Dreamcolor display in parallel, with synchronous audio.

The pix looked fine; no clipping, artifacting, ringing, blocking, banding, or other nastiness visible—so there’s not really any image I can show. It was just DPX-quality playback at Canon 5D data rates… ho, hum… (grin).

Exciting times. More tomorrow…

More:

Tech Retreat Day 2.

Tech Retreat Day 3.

Tech Retreat Day 4.

Other Tech Retreat coverage.

Demo room demo descriptions.

16 CFR Part 255 Disclosure

I attended the HPA Tech Retreat on a press pass, which saved me the registration fee. I paid for my own transport, meals, and hotel. The past two years I paid full price for attending the Tech Retreat (it hadn’t occurred to me to ask for a press pass); I feel it was money well spent.

No material connection exists between myself and the Hollywood Post Alliance; aside from the press pass, HPA has not influenced me with any compensation to encourage favorable coverage.

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Hi Adam

Thank you so much for this! Your posts are great. I read your stuff since http://www.adamwilt.com days!

Ivan

Posted by Ivan Oliveira  on  02/18  at  04:15 AM

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