Super 35 size me

Next month marks the debut of Sony’s first handheld Super 35mm model for professionals: the PMW-F3.  It’s also Sony’s first such camera with XDCAM EX recording and first with CMOS technology.  And the F3 starts at just $16,000 MSRP.  The new camera is beginning to make a name for itself after some sweet pre-production tests and first-on-the-block Vimeo posts.  In this article, we’ll take a look at the new camera’s Super 35mm image sensor, and see exactly what Sony means by “Super 35.” 

How about application parity between the Tangent Wave and Euphonix MC Color

When it comes to affordable hardware for post-production, “affordable” is often a relative term. What may be affordable for one is not necessarily affordable for another.  Sometimes there may be limited choices for a particular piece of hardware so the price point is the price point and there’s not much the purchaser can do about it. Color grading control surfaces are no different. While some applications like Apple Color and RedCine - X support both the Tangent Wave and Euphonix MC Color others, like DaVinci Resolve and The Foundry’s STORM, don’t. This article is a call for developers to support both.

What $300 Buys These Days

OK, folks, have a look at “Lazy Teenage Superheroes,” a funny, really watchable (and slightly NSFW for language) 13-minute riff on science fiction:

Google political move stifles web video distribution & complicates our workflow

In case you didn’t hear yet, Google recently announced the elimination of support for H.264 in HTML5 video in its popular Chrome web browser within the next few months, in favor of WebM (VP8) and Theora video códecs. Despite Google’s official justifications for the move in the name of openness, many analysts (including myself) see this as a political move against Apple, and even hypocritical since the Chrome browser has contained (and will continue to contain) an embedded Flash player. Our logical conclusion is that Google’s next step will be to drop support for H.264 in its Android operating system too. This happens after H.264 already has achieved support from Adobe, Apple, and even Microsoft. Up until now, Google’s Chrome browser has directly supported H.264 with HTML5’s video tag. Before this shocking below the belt punch, many content producers were well along the way of offering HTML5 video with H.264, playable as raw or automatic fallback to the same file embedded in Flash if the browser didn’t support it in HTML5, as I have covered in my seminars. However, as we see the writing on the wall, this will likely no longer be sufficient for the ever popular Android devices as they likely become updated to newer versions which would purposefully exclude H.264 playback, especially considering the poor Flash performance on most of the current Android devices that even support it at all. So within a short time, the preferred video códecs for Android devices will likely be WebM (VP8) or Theora, while for Apple iOS devices (AppleTV, iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch), it will remain to be H.264.

A Look Back on 2010

In this episode of the Terence and Philip Show – with able assistance from Secret HQ’s Greg Huson – take a look back on what changed in 2010 from our perspective.

There’s a lot in this show from Resolve to dissolve.

The LED Camera Light Shootout…

A guy named Frank Glencairn, whom I think is in England somewhere, has gone and done what we’ve all thought about: 

A shootout between five inexpensive LED sunguns.

(OK, so maybe the term “inexpensive” doesn’t quite stretch to cover the Litepanels LP Micro, but I digress.)

Resolution and screen size

The screen corners are rounded, the viewing distances are inexact and the angles aren’t accurate.  Still, this early SD versus HD diagram was prophetic.

I’m holding a Sony white paper on the proposed 1125/60 international HDTV standard for studio origination and program exchange.  You say that standard doesn’t sound familiar?  It was the forerunner of 1080/60i.  The white paper is dated April 1988 and it extols the virtues of future HDTV in terms of more scanning lines, better colorimetry and wider aspect ratio.  But the most striking graphic shows an HDTV screen with a whopping six times the area of a superimposed SDTV screen.  Why?  What, if anything about HDTV translates to a bigger screen?  And how closely do the televisions of today reflect the predictions of 22 years ago?

Wherefore 4:4:4?

This picture is worth at least a few words.

So much of the technical jargon around digital content creation is fraught with traps for the unwary.  As we’ve previously written, an image sensor “pixel” is not the same as a recorded “pixel” and nothing about a 2/3-inch type sensor actually measures 2/3 inch.  Another classic source of confusion is the seemingly innocuous ratio—such as 4:4:4—that expresses the digital sampling structure.

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