17 Dec 2006 Counter: 34,391
The BEEB say: "Film is Dead" In case you're wondering at our renewed level of activity on this site, it's mainly that some of us have time on our hands with the holiday season and all. Also, for a change there's actually something worth talking about:-)
Well anyway, you've probably heard that the BBC has recently announced that in a few years time they will not accept anything originated on 16mm film; everything will have to be orignated on HD. A certain tiresome little twat at PV London has been going on about this for some time. And the reason? Well it seems that some supposed boffin at the BEEB has declared that the new cheapo MPEG4 compression system they want to use, doesn't cope terribly well with the grain on film-originated material! (Strangely, nobody else seems to have this problem, and why noise on HD-originated footage won't have the same effect is not discussed!)
So basically, the BBC want to switch to a cheap-crap storage and distribution system and want video to match! Fantastic advertisement for HD guys.
But look, one of the posters at Cinematography.com tells it better than we do, so you can read all about it here Yeah, it's Cinematography.com, but they occasionally have some intelligent posts there (although admittedly most of those were placed by us:-)
13 Dec 2006 Counter: 34,376
So, who the fuck is Jeff Otto?! The Wiki-Wankers strike again! (Or: "Who writes this shit?!" #3)The Wikipedia is a bit like some families we know: a heady mixture of brilliance and cretinism. The "Digital Cinematography" section has been re-written so many times, it long since ceased being a joke, and moved into being a total embarrassment. Originally the Genesis section accurately conveyed the general industry opinion (by people who are actually INVOLVED in it at any rate) that while the pictures on Superman Returns were generally "good enough" for a dumbass disappointment of a film like that, they were still pretty ordinary, and hardly likely to set off a stampede toward all-digital film production.
But have a look at the latest bit of Wiki-revisionism! All this criticism has been swept aside now, because one fleabag on-line film critic on an Australian website we've never heard of: "praised the film's clean sharp look and bright colors, and found them fitting the subject."
ACTUALLY what he said was:
Superman Returns is beautifully shot by cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, who previously teamed with Singer on The Usual Suspects. Filmed on the new high definition standard, the pricey Panavision Genesis camera, the film has a clean sharp look to it with a bright color palette that fits the comic feel nicely.
OK, so there's one clown who obviously wouldn't know his ass from a sprocket hole; there are plenty of other reviewers who were nowhere near as charitable!
6 Dec2006 Counter: 34,353
Who writes this shit?!(2) Well hard on the heels of the item below we have this item from The Australian which, it may surprise you to know, is a national daily newspaper from Australia: Hi-tech show gets the film look (From The Australian - Media and Marketing)
Has there been a glitch in The Australian's electronic typesetting system that's somehow accidentally recycled a news item from 2000? Six years on, some fleabag outfit has come out of the woodwork with yet another whizz-bang suite of software that's allegedly going to give you quarter-million-dollar results for er, a quarter!
Screech...scrape...grunt...mmmff... (Sorry, we're just dragging out this same ol' same ol':-) If you can really do that, why are you f*cking around with a low-budget local TV series, when you could license your technology for an absolute fortune in the US. We get this same old shit over and over and over again: It's like someone saying they've developed this miracle drug that will cure all forms of cancer in all mammals, that's dirt cheap and has absolutely no side efects, but they're only planning to use it to cure their daughter's dog!
Interesting that they mention the problems of detail correction, particularly on older actors' faces. It looks like the solution proposed by HD's early champions, that in future, producers simply hire younger actors, doesn't seem to have been widely taken up by the industry generally! This is however the first time we've seen anybody mention the "flickering" effect, an artifact of shooting with progressive scan cameras. (Well, actually it's an artifact of the noise reduction schemes they use to try to pretend that video cameras aren't really noisy!) 24p does not look like 24fps film. It doesn't have the resolution or the exposure range. All of the nasties that have been a turn-off for producers of high-end programs are the consequence of trying to make a low-resolution image look like a high resolution one.
Don't get us wrong; we're all for anything that can get more out of any existing technology, but there has to be some plausible means to actually be able to do it!
4 Dec2006 Counter: 34,334
Who writes this shit?! Well, at least they're now admitting that a lot of Panavision's management decisions over the past decade have been something less than stellar, and that the company has been an economic basket case for at least as long: Camera Maker Sharpens its focus (From laTimes.com)
Edited to add: Aw Crap, that link makes you sign up before you can read the article. Well never mind, if you click
here or on the image just below you'll get the Google "News Search" page where we found the link, and clicking from there apparently lets you use Google's membership or something. Look for this story:
The article was written by a "Staff Writer" and it shows! We're sort of bemused by this statement: Over the years Panavision cameras have been used to film scores of movies, including "Lawrence of Arabia," "Saving Private Ryan" and "Memoirs of a Geisha." (Why those three in particular?)
Scores of movies?! Chrissake dude, for at least the last three decades, just about every US-made feature worthy of the name (and a lot more not:-) used Panavision cameras! OK not all movies did, but it's like that same ol' same ol' argument about shooting digitally to save on stock costs: by the time you've paid for everything else it takes to make a decent feature, whether you rent Arri cameras or pay extra for Panavision doesn't come to diddley-squat on the bottom line. And like it or not, people do like to have that "Cameras and Lenses by Panavision" thingy at the end of their credits. (If you're going to bring up the original Star Wars trilogy and Lord of the Rings, strictly speaking, we don't know if they really qualify as "US" productions.)
Some of other the statements made in the article are still the same old boiler-plate B.S. eg: Two years ago, Panavision introduced Genesis, a highly-acclaimed digital camera with film-like quality used in "Superman Returns" and Mel Gibson's upcoming "Apocalypto."
"Film-like"? What sort of film? We didn't realize there was such a thing as 1,000-line-horizontal-resolution 35mm film! (And that's all you get after the Optical low-pass filter has worked its
magic:-) We're not privy to Panavision's marketing strategy for this product of course, but all we know is that, except for some very limited and tightly controlled test footage, hardly anybody in the industry saw any film-out results from this camera until they bought a ticket and went to the cinema to see one of the new productions for themselves!
And the general verdict was that the pictures were at best, "very ordinary" and at times downright diabolical. Not that we expected much else; anybody who knew anything about video cameras would be hard-pressed to understand why this camera was going to work so much better than its predecessors. OK, it has the 35mm-like depth of field, and can take standard cine lenses, but to what purpose we're not sure, since the resolution of the Genesis is so low anyway.
Yeah, there was a flush of "me-too-ism" in the first year of the Genesis's release, but subsequent work seem to have mysteriously dried up since then. We're having great difficulty locating any other significant productions that are using the Gensesis, at any rate.
This bit is good: Still, as big a market share as Panavision has, Beitcher knows he can't dismiss competitors that aim to win over a customer base that is inherently demanding and finicky. Rivals include Germany's Arri Inc. and Dalsa Corp. of Canada, both of which have introduced digital cameras with film-like quality that compete with Panavision's Genesis.
Oh yeah, and which particular movies were shot with those?
We liked this bit as well: Panavision had been slow to roll out new products, as well as adapt to the changing digital market. Employee morale sank and the company's vaunted service began to slacken. Panavision's then-Chief Executive John Farrand, resigned in 2003 amid the turmoil.
Why would the staff particularly give a shit about all that? Morale was mostly low due to the antics of a certain playboy executive and his extravagant lifestyle which he tried to charge to the PV account, before laying off a few more minimum-wage staff! Farrand didn't resign; he was fired; they don't usually give multi-million dollar golden handshakes to people who resign!
So what's it all about? Well, we'd imagine that Ron is in a selling mood...Oh, sorry, no; he said he's not:-)
22 Nov 2006 Counter: 34,287
A "4K" CCD/CMOS sensor does not give you f*cking "4K" pictures! We're getting rather tired of this crap. A "4K" scan of a film negative MEANS that the image is broken up into four thousand or so individual horizontal segments, and EACH ONE is scanned by individual red, green and blue sensors.
A three-chip camera like the CineAlta has three separate CCD sensors, each of which has 1920 (ie "2K") x 1080 pixels. The incoming image is split into its red, green and blue components by a precision dichroic prism assembly, and so each of the 1920 x 1080 HD pixels is sampled as a true RGB signal, roughly equivalent to a 2K film scan.
Most digital still cameras use a "Bayer Pattern" which is an array of microscopic color filters printed onto the individual elements of the CCD (or CMOS) sensor. They are usually laid out in this pattern:
RGRGRGRGRGRGRGRGRGRG
GBGBGBGBGBGBGBGBGBGB
RGRGRGRGRGRGRGRGRGRG
GBGBGBGBGBGBGBGBGBGB
RGRGRGRGRGRGRGRGRGRG
GBGBGBGBGBGBGBGBGBGB
Most of the current crop of single-chip "digital cinematography" cameras use the same layout. If such a camera sensor is 4000 pixels across, the green is only sampled 2000 times, and the red and the blue 1000 times each. That is NOT the equivalent of a "4K" film scan; it's not even the equivalent of a 2K film scan! We don't give a flying f*ck what kind of vaporware algorithms the various manufacturers **CLAIM** to be developing to turn this into a "proper" 4K image: YOU CAN'T PUT BACK WHAT WASN'T THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE!
The best resolution you can possibly get with a Bayer filter is half the horizontal pixel count, and that's if you're shooting a scene that is entirely black and white. In the case of highly saturated colors such as you'd encounter with blue- or green-screen work, that will drop to one-quarter.
Yes, yes, you can successfully key off 4:2:2 video, but that's ONLY if it was derived from 4:4:4 RGB in the first place. The Luminance signal has to be derived from three full-bandwidth color signals: Half-assed "pretend" 4:2:2 from a Bayer sensor will not cut it!
And, no, Sony's engineers didn't use the RGB sampling scheme on Panavision's Genesis because they're idiots; they did it because they know that Bayer filtering only produces the illusion of high-resolution images! According to the likes of Dalsa, Red, Kinetta and various other hopefuls, Panavision could have called the Genesis a "6K" camera. Electronic matting systems unfortunately can tell the difference...
Giving credit where credit is due, Panavision is the only company producing a single-chip HD camera to have logged up any significant number of bums on seats with it, although what sort of deals were done appears to be a closely guarded secret! Flyboys is apparently a crap movie, and there doesn't appear to be too much else happening with it to date. Ah well, we told you so....
6 Nov 2006 Counter: 34,171
Hot off the Press: Panavision Enters Into Agreement to Acquire AFM Group (From EarthTimes.org)
We've been told that AFM are doing it hard due to the increasing proliferation of all-video productions that don't need as much light as film. Eh? When did that happen? Perhaps somebody has seen somebody coming:-) Ah well, they deserve each other...
2 Nov 2006 Counter: 34,152
PV hits Bollywood! Prasad Group launches Panavision India (From IndianTelevision.com).
Actually we'd been hearing rumors about this for a long time, and it's finally happened. Given the generally lukewarm reception HD film production has received thus far in the West, we can't help wondering if there might be a last-ditch scheme afoot to try to launch a "cradle to grave" digital acquisition infrastructure - shoot, edit and display - entirely digitally, but based entirely in India.
This would make a certain amount of sense, in that currently, a lot of Indian "theaters" consist of little more than a large-screen TV and a couple of VCRs! Currently the next available step up - 35mm projection - is out of the question in most cases, but the step to digital projection is rapidly becoming financially do-able. Where most westerners would see a digital cinema as a step down in quality, in India it might in many cases represent a major step upward. Again, making the release prints on film is a very expensive process, not just for the stock itself, but for the extreme attention to detail needed in a bulk processing plant. It can be absorbed in western countries with their relatively higher admission proces, but for a third-world country, an infrastructure based on some sort of videodisks would be far more manageable, and would also address the problem of multiple soundtracks for all the various dialects.
From the article:
Panavision is also dedicating an engineer with global experience on its equipment to provide complete support in India.
Unless we're seriously mistaken, that guy is Clive Teare, who was imported a couple of years back to work for Arri Sydney, and soon after mysteriously moved over to Panavision Sydney. (We haven't heard a peep about Arri Sydney for ages now; does anybody know what they're up to?)
More Fun on Cinematography.com! An unolicited and totally unbiased endorsement of the PV Genesis camera system from a certain Mr Jeff Allen:
"Flyboys" is due for UK release on boxing day 2006. The pictures look fantastic and all concerned were more than happy with the results. King Kanute could not hold back the tide and nor can anyone when it comes to digital acquisition. The BBC stated on their recent HD day that by 2010 they will not accept 16mm film for origination and by then 4K cameras with 35mm sensors will be more commonplace and be gradually replacing 35mm for origination. Thats not to say film is dead or that its not got a future it has but for the first time in 100 years it will have valid competition.
Mr Allen doesn't actually indicate his interest or mention what he does for a living on the Forum, but he is in fact (or maybe was) the MD of Panavision UK! We couldn't swear to it, but we think it was him who gave us the expression: "All Pan and no vision"! Perhaps he'd care to visit this link.
By the way, is the Genesis being used on any serious productions at the moment? We can't seem to find any!
2 Oct 2006 Counter: 34,012
PV on the march!
Check it out: Panavision Acquires Plus 8 Digital
What do we think? Dunno. We suppose one might reasonably ask: "Why are Plus8 so ready to sell?" I'm sure they thought they'd pulled off a real coup when the got the contract for Star Wars III, but the romance didn't last. Still, Panavision are at last showing some common sense; if you want to move into video rental, it sort of helps if you hire somebody who actually knows something about it! However knowing Panavision as we do, we can see Plus8's CEO Marker Karahadian's dental enamel coming in for a bit of a grinding, if he chooses to continue working under what passes for some of the managerial talent in that place! We hope he got a good price.
RED surges ahead
At the IBC show recently RED gave the first public demonstration of pictures from the new RED camera. They weren't all that bad, and they weren't all that good, but we suppose we should give them the benefit of the doubt since as yet they don't have an actual prototype to demonstrate; the images shown were recordings taken from a "breadboard" lash-up. We'll reserve judgement until we see an actual working camera.
We've heard rumors that RED have been threatening legal action against their detractors, which possibly explains why discussion of the RED has suddenly dried up on some forums. That sounds counter-productive to us, since if there's any truth to it everybody will know that the comments that are being published are not reliable.
Actually, given the technical caliber of some of the posters who have announced that they have put down their $1,000 deposit, we rather suspect that the statement: "Shot with a RED" is rapidly going to develop negative connotations, even if the camera gives first-class images!
25 July 2006 Counter: 33,593
Sort of interesting....
Panavision Inc. Announces Completion of Cash Merger (From Yahoo Finance)
Basically, the owners of the remaining 4% of stock (that is shares not held by Perelman through Mafco Holding), will have their PV shares compulsorily acquired for $8.50 each. Notices to this effect will be mailed July 28.
The stock market didn't waste any time: if you try to click on the PV Stock Market links in the Left-hand menu bar, you get this:
It really is the end of an era. What will happen now? Don't know. Don't care....
19 July 2006 Counter: 33,522
Going down for the second time....
The announcement below has prompted a brief flurry of correspondence, but we still rather think we've reached the end of a long road. Apparently there is a mood of quiet optimism through the lower echelons of Panavision, which suggests sweeping changes may be afoot, mostly involving a back-to-basics approach.
The final roundup on the Genesis features these embarrassing facts:
- Operationally, the camera isn't really any any improvement over the Panavised Cine Altas that preceded it.
- The image quality is a bit better, but still nowhere the quality of film. At best it still looks like a poor-ish 2K Digital Intermediate.
- Panavision had to foot the bill for a lot of Post-Production time, getting rid of vertical flaring. A really bad example mysteriously disappeared from the original trailer for "Click!"
- The column dropout problem was real, (looking like a fine mag scratch) and extra software had to be written to disguise this. More damning, nobody noticed it until the final projection prints were made! So much for the "instant replay" feature of HD origination....
- According to an interview with Bryan Singer anyway, the successful "yield" of the special 12 Megapixel imaging chips the Genesis uses was about 1 in 600! In other words, to get one that worked, they had to throw out about 600! In its present climate of restructuring, we don't think Sony are going to be in the mood to continue with this....
Basically, the Genesis was launched about three years ago, and has been readily available for some time for rental, but hardly anybody seems interested. Nobody is breaking their legs to make films with either Arri's D-20 or Dalsa'a origin either, yet the PV Cine Altas see plenty of work. What does that tell you?
15 July 2006 Counter: 33,455
The End of an Era.... Sigh.... after about five years operation and receiving thousands of e-mails, most supportive, others derogatory, and a few others downright idiotic and abusive, we've decided to wind down this operation. That is, the site will still be here, but nobody's going to be checking the mailbox or scanning the online news columns, at least not every day any more.
There are several reasons for this.
- One by one our contributors have slowly drifted away.
- Defying all the laws of physics, Panavision is still afloat despite the total failure of all its money-hemhorraging "bleeding edge" technologies to make the slightest impact on its bottom line, and shows every sign of continuing to remain so.
- After a three-year labor, (carried out behind the thickest of hospital curtains:-) the "birth" of the Genesis era was marked via three films: Scary Movie 4, Superman Returns and Click! All three had severe birth defects and are unlikely to spawn much repeat business. Everybody who will be making format decisions will have scrutinized these films thoroughly by now, none of them will have been terribly impressed — they'll all be saying: "OK, but ... why?. It's really just Star Wars II all over again.
- Panavision are now locked up tighter than a clam's ass with regard to press releases; about the only ones we get to read about now are about compulsory SEC filings.
- The people who really matter tend to contact us directly, and mostly don't want us to mention that they have. A lot of info we get is marked "Not For Publication" anyway and we tend to just use private emailing lists.
- The "other reason" we allude to in our "Woss all this?" section, has now come to fruition, so this website no longer serves quite as much purpose!
So, by all means come back from time to time; if anything particularly startling happens we'll post it here, but don't be surprised if months go by without anything new appearing.
13 July 2006 Counter: 33,404
Shot Down in flames! Just in is this terse e-mail from an anonymous sauce:
"I was there for the palm tree tropical island shot
It was indeed shot on genesis"
Oh...kay... We have a completely unsupported claim from a totally anonymous source, telling us that one digitally-captured scene at least came up OK. But if this is correct, the question then becomes: well why did the other 99% of the film look like crap?
Oddly enough, the quality of "Click!" on the other hand, was a lot better than we expected, although what the producer gained by using the Genesis is far from clear. (There seemed to be the same two hours of credits at the end:-)
9 July 2006 Counter: 33,371
Oh come on! It's rubbish!! Who the hell are all these clowns writing to tell us that Superman Returns is the finest piece of cinematography in mankind's history. The pictures are punk! OK, some of the scenes in the early part were pretty spectacular, but how much of that was CGI and how much was real was pretty hard to tell.
Some of film was OK, most of it was not. Sure there were some exciting Spider-Man like flying scenes where Supes whizzes up and down the sides of tall buildings in a single bound but most of the shots looked distressingly like an actor being suspended on thin wires from a crane! Ever seen a hummingbird guys? Greenscreen and steadicam next time eh?
Did anybody else notice that all the "Metropolis" outdoor scenes were shot on dull overcast days, a la Scary Movie 4? We don't think they deliberately shot on such days so much as only the shots that were shot under those conditions turned out to be useable. We strongly suspect that the final "Palm Tree Island" scene was done on film though, it just sticks out like the proverbial canine genitalia:-)
Mostly, there was virtually no shadow detail at all despite this being claimed as a major feature of Digital Origination, and the flesh tones were just plain poor.
So OK, they've made a movie. Not a particularly good movie, well, not for the budget they had at any rate. Three years of speculation and outright B.S. and this is the result. You guys at WB have rocks in your collective heads...
4 July 2006 Counter: 33,287
Superman Returns: Big Deal! OK we've all seen it now. The verdict? Well photography-wise, pretty much what we expected: it looks like a not-real-good 2K DI. For the most part the colors are OK, but it definitely looks more cartoonish than real. There is the usual "plastic-ey" rendition of flesh tones, characteristic of video cameras.
It's not all that bad, well for a low-budget flick it wouldn't be, pity this had such a huge budget! So the bottom line is nobody is going to get knocked down in the rush to shoot more features with the Genesis, at least on the strength of this film.
For Superman fans, see it; you'll like it. Superman does lots of Superman super deeds. For Kevin Spacey fans, avoid it: this film woefully underutilized Kevin Spacey's talents.
For movie goers who want to be entertained who are not Superman savvy: avoid. Apart from a couple of quite spectacular scenes (eg the exploding airliner) there's not a lot of visual excitement. There's little character development; little relationship development; no pathos; no drama; no tragedy; a little bit of comedy; and a few disconected touching moments. This movie is just ... uninteresting. And as someone else said: If you can believe a man can fly, you can also believe that Kate Bosworth could win a Pulitzer Prize!
The movie went out of its way to avoid being campy. (Campy is neither good, nor bad; it just appeals to some people, and annoys others.) There's a strong Jesus-Superman correleation theme in the movie, to the point of annoying. Yet it can be amusing too, if you think: "Hey, that makes sense. Superman is a comic book character. Jesus is a comic book character, too! Revelation!".
More blatant than the intentional Aslan-Jesus nuance in The Lion, the Witch, the Wardrobe, but not not as blatant as the Jesus-Jesus correlation in The Passion of the Christ.
The film would have been improved tremendously if, say, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman had a cameo. As is, it feels independent from the rest of the DC universe.
After a modest first day outing, it's not exactly breaking Box Office records, it looks more like a repeat of "Batman Begins". As we expected, once everybody saw the final results, discussion of the coming Digital "Revolution" in filmmaking mysteriously dried up. Heh heh heh...
1 July 2006 Counter: 33,240
Calm down, we haven't seen it yet! We've noticed a considerable influx in the number of visits to our site over the last few days. If you've come here to see what we have to say about Superman Returns, well, we haven't all seen it as yet! So far the response has been pretty much as expected, basically it mostly looks like somewhat ineptly shot 35mm film, run through a cheap 2K process; not all that bad, and not all that good. We're not going to bust our collective asses racing out to see it like we did for Scary Movie 4, because
- We already have a fair idea what it's going to look like and
- Unlike SM4, we have wives and assorted offspring who want to see it too:-)
But generally, from scanning the various cintemtography columns, as we predicted, the question is not so much "can they do it?", but "Why would you want to do it?!" Same shit, different can....
21 June 2006 Counter: 33,092
Hey, knock yourself out Ron!
More financial WTF? Perelman Raises Tender Offer for Panavision (From Bloomberg News)
We really don't understand this at all. Last time we looked there was a total of about 8 million or so PV shares in
total. Now the figure seems to have miraculously blossomed to 39,683,333 unless we completely misread the earlier
Financial reports, (which is entirely possible, but now all the relevant records have been conveniently erased
by the recent financial re-packaging:-).
At present, RP owns 97% of PV, Sony still owns 1.8% and other investors make up the remainder. Ron is now
apparently determined to acquire all of the PV stock, so he can return the company to "private" status (in other words, remove it from the Stock Exchange).
He has now upped that ante by a whopping 50 cents to $8.50! You're probably wondering why he doesn't just make a blanket offer of say $20 or so and be done with it. The problem with that is that once greedy investors get wind of
this they're going to start wondering just how high Ron is prepared to go and hold out for larger amounts. Since we're talking about nearly 2 million shares, that could add up to quite a tidy sum.
Quite why RP is using this approach instead of the good old-fashioned hostile takeover strategy, remains a mystery, as is what advantage he gains from going private anyway.
Of course escalating the share price does have the advantage of increasing the so-called "market capitalization," (that is the total number of shares multiplied by the last price paid per share, giving the ubiquitious "on paper" value so often flaunted) but does he actually think anybody is going to fall for it? (Plus he risks having his ass kicked by the S.E.C. and various other authorities, but we presume he's used to that:-)
14 June 2006 Counter: 32,953
Aw give us a break guys...
Well, after a prolonged drought of worthwhile news items, we get this gem from HollywoodReporter.com, simply titled:
Digital Cinematography.
What does it say? Well, not a lot actually; it's one of those splendid journalistic pieces that manages to make two or more contradicting points while at the same time carrying a comforting air of veracity to the layman! First of all we
had the reporter freely admitting that despite the hype, the first couple of attempts at HD blockbusters (SWII and SWIII) did not set any trends, and technologically, are regarded as a failures, at least as far as breaking any worthwhile new ground is concerned. But now this is set to change, although what they've done so differently this time round is not actually passed upon!
Then we have Newton Thomas Siegel (DOP of Superman Returns) admitting that they didn't really save any significant amount of money shooting digitally; that the desision was purely in the interests of achieving a "modern, painterly look"! Hmmm; getting our mid-life crisis out of the way early are we, Newt?
If he thinks a low-resolution limited-dynamic-range video image looks better than something shot on film, he's got rocks in his head, and that's it as far as we're concerned. The shorts we've seen so far look more like cartoons than live action, and if that's the look he wants, well we think his cinematic fan club will be holding its meetings in a phone booth for some time to come:-) Again the question: if producers of TV shows don't think video cameras are good enough, how does it follow that video cameras are now suddenly good enough for 50 foot screens?
Then we have PV's Bob Beitcher admitting that the average feature film might save around $400,000 shooting digitally, peanuts for the average budget. AND again, we don't particularly care what they try to tell the industry, you will NOT get a better picture from a television camera, no matter what imaginative new label you invent for it! So for a saving of a miserly 400 grand you get someting captured with all the limitations of the CCD sensor, with only 2K resolution at best, and that is ALL the resolution it's ever going to have! Exactly what is the POINT?!!
And even more interestingly, we have the darling of the "Film is Dead" set
Allen Daviau , who has shot numerous tests with digital cameras (including the Genecide) but has not yet made a digital feature, stating: "With a negative, you have the security of something that is stored on film. What we don't know - and won't know for some time - is how well the digital masters survive."
Finally we have this gem from Dion Beebe who has shot two digital features, Collateral and Miami Vice: "I think there are still issues with the (digital cameras' imaging) latitudes during daytime," says Beebe, who won an Academy Award for 2005's "Memoirs of a Geisha," which he shot on film. "But we made use of the amazing depth of field: You're seeing literally from 2 inches to infinity."
Er ... Dion ... mate.... Infinite depth of field? And that's ... good, is it? My er, Handycam has that; so does my door minder camera....
But anyway, as the article says, this Summer it's going to be crunch time for Digital Cinematography. More like a damp squelching sound from what we've seen thus far....
03 June 2006 Counter: 32,758
Funny, that.... We don't really regard the cinematography.com forum as a "serious" industry soapbox, (ie it's painfully obvious that the bulk of the people who post there have about as much connection with the film and TV industries as the readers of Playboy and the like have with real women:-), but we occasionally trawl out some useful bits of information.
What's always amused us has been the extravagant predictions made by these dreamers, about how the development of practical "Digital Cinematography" cameras is, by some unspecified mechanism, going to "parachute" them through some sort of "celluloid ceiling" and into the big time of feature film production.
Never mind that current model cameras don't come anywhere near equalling the performance of film, or that currently at least, Digital cameras are actually more expensive to rent than equivalent film models, or that acquisition costs only make up a trifling part of the production costs of most cinematic releases anyway.
We have always expressed the opinion that all this Digital Cinematography nonsense was just a smokescreen to stretch out the tenure of certain employees of certain companies for as long as possible, and that the charade would last right up to point where the general public (and industry generally) actually saw the results.
The pre-production hype for Star Wars II was in overdrive, but the actual on-screen result was quite poor, (although being Star Wars, that didn't seem
to matter, probably a smart marketing move). However there was very little follow-up work. Plus8Digital were similarly thrilled when they got the contract for SWIII with their new 950 cameras, but that hasn't led to any explosion in cinematic work either.
Now of course, the big buzz is/was the Genesis, but here's the thing; have a look at this (from the Cinematography.com forum index page) :
Notice that after years of feverish debate, new postings for these cameras all dried up rather abruptly. And what was the event that precipitated that? Why, the cinematic release of the first Genesis feature: Scary Movie 4 and extensive trailers for Click! People have now actually seen the pictures, and the mood has changed to "yeah right":-)
Note that nobody has had anything to say about the Kinetta for six months....
24 May 2006 Counter: 32,606
Seeing RED. We've recently received some more information on the RED HD camera project, and it's looking set to be a serious upset in the industry. Before we begin, though, we have to say we still take issue with some of the descriptions RED are offering.
First of all, they insist on referring to the sensor as a "4K" type. Now look: in normal industry parlance, "4K" means four thousand (or so) Red, Green and Blue pixels across the width of an image. That is, there are 12,000 pixels imaged, four thousand for each color.
RED don't actually say what sort of color separation system is used in their "Mysterium" sensor, but we presume it's a standard Bayer pattern. If that is the case, then it can only have a true resolution of about 2K. They are claiming it will have "4K 4:4:4" output (ie 4K Red, 4K Green and 4K Blue) which is ridiculous, the best it could hope to be is 2K 4:2:2. Not that there's anything to be particularly embarrassed about with that; it's still very good, and the availability of Cine type lenses will get the best out of the sensor.
It's also painfully obvious that this is not really a "bespoke" sensor made for them by an outside chip foundry, as the chip has a bog-standard 16 x 9 Widescreen TV aspect ratio. If they were really making a chip for a dedicated digital cinematography camera, it would surely have been 1.33:1 like Arri's D-20. (With a CMOS sensor, it's extremely easy to "mask off" unwanted pixels by simply not accessing them).
Still, it is theoretically possible to produce a relatively cheap "one-size-fits-all" TV camera using modern consumer-oriented signal processing microprocessors, and we suspect that this is what RED are really up to. That is, one inexpensive camera that can produce excellent HD and superior SD outputs, preferably in digital, analog component and straight composite if necessary. The sub-20K price tag sounds a trifle optimistic, but if he can capture a big enough market worlwide, the story will probably be very much like that of the IBM PC: one basic consumer design that gives formerly supercomputer performance.
Why are we so excited about this? Well it pretty much bears out what we always said would happen: Panavision have spent enormous amounts of time and money developing a new market, only to have it snatched away from them by some more tech-savvy upstart, a la the IBM PC. So if you want any technical help or advice Jim, just drop us a line. Ma-ha-ha-ha-haaaa.....!
Did somebody say Oakley's only proven product track record was sunglasses? Well, Nokia started out as a timber company....
4 May 2006 Counter: 32,406
Jim Jannard is for real? This Red camera business had all the hallmarks of another "Blue Sky" investment scam, where some shyster(s) has convinced some cashed-up but technically illiterate invsetor that they're onto something big, but that a couple of years more R&D and a couple of million dollars are going to be needed, with no absolute guarantee of success and so on.
The story nearly always the same: the designers refuse to divulge any details as to exactly how they're going to
achieve the miracle that has thus far defeated the mightiest technical minds inhabiting the largest corporations, playing the old "proprietary information" card, as if all you needed was just a "secret formula" that would be written down on a scrap of paper! And of course, they never actually achieve this, but they "earn" a nice living while going through the motions.
But there seems little doubt that Oakley Billionaire Jim Jannard is serious about this, claiming he'll be producing a "4K" (whatever that means) CMOS single-chip 35mm-sized sensor HDTV camera complete with a recording deck for under $20K.
Whilst we remain firmly in the "believe when we see it" camp, the ramifications of such a development would be mind-boggling to say the least. Not only would that completely nail all of Panavision's pathetic attempts to re-invent itself through their "development" of "Digital Cinematography, it would have major repercussions throughout the TV industry. Who would want to buy tarted-up ENG cameras from the likes of Sony et al when you could get something with twice the resolution and access to a vastly improved range of lenses, for less that 20 grand?!
Could it be done? Well thanks to semiconductor companies like Zoran, you can now buy fully-functional DVD players for under $30, about a 6,000% decrease since the first models came out! Theoretically, something similar could be done with HDTV cameras, but a staggering amoung of R&D was needed before the first "one chip DVD solution" rolled out of Zoran's labs. In that case the investment was worthwhile because the potential market was/is huge; whether the same would apply in this case is open to debate. We sure live in interesting times....
4 May 2006 Counter: 32,255
Runaway productions gone home to mother? We've heard from one of our correspondents in Australia that the boom in big-ticket US productions in recent years there is rapidly turning into a bust. The last big project made in Oz was Superman Returns and Fox Studios Sydney recently revealed that they have no firm bookings at all for 2006. Other prestigious studios are up for sale, and some other huge studio construction projects seem destined to forever remain a gleam in the architects' eye!
The CEO of Arri Australia must be mutting (to misquote Lloyd Bridges in the movie Airplane): "I sure picked a lousy year to start up renting!" Well, that's what you get for not hiring the right people; all that chicken blood and pins in voodoo dolls is obviously working:-)
3 May 2006 Counter: 32,237
More Financial WTF? Now this is interesting. If you click on the "PV Share Price" link over on the left-hand menu bar, you now get redirected to a different page where Panavision have been given a new Ticker Symbol: "PVIS.PK".
So? Well apparently once that happens, all of the company's previous performance figures are conveniently erased, in particular the five year share price chart and its embarrassing all-time low of $1.25!
So now, all any potential investor would see was that PV's share price is almost $8 (which is simply what the last person paid for PV shares, which could be any number from 1 to 8,000!) and since at present the chart only goes back 5 days, there would be nothing at all to indicate what a crap investment it would be. One, two, three: Hmmmmmmmm......?
2 May 2006 Counter: 32,213
The Murdoch MVW8000 "8K Digital Cinematography Camera"
An 8K electronic camera? Sounds too good to be true? Yeah, well it is, it's just a spoof thread on Cinematography.com:
The Murdoch VW8000.
The challenge is: What has RED actually done, that these guys haven't? If RED can be believed, 300 people have forked over $1,000 as a down payment on what is still pretty much vaporware!
Click! Genesis rollout #2. And the pictures are worse than those of Scary Movie 4. They seem to have gone to very little trouble to avoid vertical smearing, which is painfully obvious on some scenes. WTF is going on here? And the same old question: who's going to pay top dollar rental for such bargain-basement picture quality?
Meanwhile, we also hear that Sony have a new 2/3" CineAlta in the works, same ol' same ol' 3-CCD with a prism block etc. Obviously they didn't think much of the Genesis either.
Share Price upWe don't really understand the press release below (April 23); it sounds like RP is going to compulsorily acquire the remaining 6% or so of PV that he doesn't already own, for a flat $8 a share, yet later reports say the shares have surged to $7.70 or so. So does this mean he can't actually acquire them compulsorily? (It seems plain enough that that was what he was going to do).
25 April 2006 Counter: 32,084
The Red has feet of clay... And electronics and the rest of its workings too, it seems! So NAB is here and the long-awaited "Red" Digital cinematography camera is on display. Well, not quite; but they do have a very nice clay model! And a place where you can leave a $1,000 deposit which will get you a place in the queue, for whenever the cameras become available!
Sounds crazy? Well we thought so! But apparently it's OK, the guy behind this owns Oakley Sunglasses, so they know all about precision optics and so on:-) Well that's all right then! By the way, can we interest you in this lovely bridge? Stunning NY location; real 1880s charm, recently refurbished...
24 April 2006 Counter: 32,052
Red, red wine..... We can't believe the level of excitement that's being generated by the alleged "Red" Digital Cinematography camera, considering that all anybody's ever seen is a partially-completed website and a lot of extravagant press releases. The HD for Indies
website seems to have a lot more to say than Red themselves! Frankly, we find the projected pricing structure just a tad optimistic! $17 grand for the camera itself? A thousand bucks for a 60 minute HD recording pack....?! Under $5,000 for a "cinema quality" lens? Er, yeah...right....
23 April 2006 Counter: 32,030
E.U.? ...ewww... For most of the last century the US has sporadically come to considerable grief at the hands of various Eurotrash busy-bodies of one stripe or another:-) Now another crisis looms: as of July 1 all electronic equipment sold or rented in the E.U. needs to have E.U. certification, mostly for electromagnetic interference supression. We've heard that getting the required certification can sometimes cost more than the actual R&D!
You may have noticed that all the Arri stuff that has come out in the last few years is bristling with ferrite sleeves and other anti-EMI devices; now you know why. How are they going to solve this problem? Insiders say this is causing an inordinate amount of indigestion at WH.
Hmmm.... RP bundles up all of PV's debt into one tidy package, just before a large amount of excrement seems set to hit a certain global air circulation device, consisting of the above situation, and the other 99.9999999999% of the Earth's population actually eyeballing the output of of the Genesis for the first time!
Do we smell a sale in the fresh spring air?
Whoa!!!! WTF?! STOP THAT
#@??!!*#@!! PRESS!!
We only just got done putting in the above posting, when we received an e-mail drawing our attention to this filing to SEC:
(Edited slightly for clarity)
M&F Proposal. On April 20, 2006, MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings Inc. ("M&F") delivered a letter to the Board of Directors of Panavision Inc. proposing a transaction whereby PX Holding, an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of M&F, or an affiliate thereof, would acquire all publicly held shares of the Company's common stock, par value $0.01 per share (the "Common Stock"), including the shares held by Sony Electronics Inc., at a price of $8.00 per share in cash.
The letter also indicated that M&F believed that, prior to entering into a definitive agreement for the Proposed Transaction, the Company should terminate the registration of the Common Stock under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. M&F, the sole stockholder of which is Ronald O. Perelman (Co-Chairman of the Company's Board of Directors), owns approximately 96.3% of the Common Stock through PX Holding. The Board of Directors has formed a special committee of independent directors to consider the Proposed Transaction and to negotiate with M&F.
Deregistration of the Company's Common Stock. On April 21, 2006, the Company filed a Form 15 with the Securities and Exchange Commission seeking to deregister the Common Stock under the Exchange Act. In accordance with Exchange Act rules, the Company's obligation to file Exchange Act reports was suspended immediately upon the filing of the Form 15, and registration is expected to terminate effective within 90 days thereafter. The Company was eligible to deregister by filing a Form 15 because it has fewer than 300 holders of record of its Common Stock (as determined under applicable SEC rules). The deregistration was approved by the Company's Board of Directors.
As a result of the filing of the Form 15, the Common Stock will no longer be traded on the OTC Bulletin Board. The Company anticipates that the Common Stock will be quoted on the Pink Sheets, although the Company can give no assurances that brokers will continue to make a market in the Common Stock. (The Pink Sheets is a provider of pricing and financial information for the over-the-counter (OTC) securities markets. It is a centralized quotation service that collects and publishes market maker quotes for OTC securities in real time).
Postponement of Annual Meeting of Stockholders. In light of the Proposed Transaction, the Board of Directors has determined to postpone the Company's annual meeting of stockholders.
So what does it all mean? Dunno. We no longer have our tame stockbrokers to help us out here, but it sounds like ROP is on the move! Watch this space....
22 April 2006 Counter: 32,007
Three years later, and whaddya get?
A thousand days older and deeper in debt! We've been having a jolly old time reading through our old e-mails, cackling at the boundless optimism showed by certain PV stalwarts about the Genesis, before the wraps came off it. We never realized how many e-mails we received from the indefatigable "Mr NFP"; we're thinking of packaging them as a e-mail "boxed set" and presenting them to him!
He never writes to us any more, so it probably won't matter if quote a short excerpt from one of his e-mails dated July 22 2003! Note that his spelling and grammar have been rigorously "groomed" to remove any liklihood of anyone recognizing his writing style. (Not that there's anything terribly wrong with the way he writes, but he does have a distinctive style:-)
I am sending you this information for no other reason than to put the point across that, while PV has in the past been a little mis-directed (to say the least:-), something IS in the final stages of R&D that should give you something positive to say; yes, miracles do happen!
The key words for this new addition to Panavision's inventory are: "New Generation". Now I don't have enough information to go into the specifics of this new piece of equipment(and probably wouldn't comment anyway), but let's just say that PV's decision to allow its employees back into your site again from their work PCs is for a very good reason.
I know this is the proverbial carrot routine and all that, but from what I heard first hand, this is going to prove wrong everything you've ever said about a certain shooting format.
No, this isn't me doing a nah-nah-ne-ah-nah at you, this is a middle-of-the road opinion on something that I'm pretty sure WILL change your tune at least a little, and no, you haven't heard it all before! Well, not this one anyway.
Er...yeah....I think we HAVE heard it all before....
Nearly three years later, what have we got? See the problem for us was always that, first, it was absurd to claim that the CineAltas were really seen as a viable alternative to 35mm (or even 16mm) film, since the vast majority of film producers "voted with their feet" on this issue. Something vastly better was going to be required to turn this around, and we could see no reason at all why the Genesis was going to be it.
The logic of the situation was farcical: If Sony had really produced some dazzling new technology that could do half of what they claimed, they sure as hell wouldn't be wasting it on a fleabag outfit like Panavision! There's certainly no equivalent product in the pipeline from Sony!
The whole thing is just a sideshow, Bob!
21 April 2006 Counter: 32,007
Curiouser and curiouser.... Now that more and more industry people have had a real opportunity to actually see a real-world demonstration of what the Genesis can('t) do, more and more interesting information is starting to leak past the various NDAs. (NDA = "Non Disclosure Agreement" - those generally legally meaningless bits of paper you sign, promising not to air the production company's dirty laundry in public afterwards. Like; all those names you see at the end of a film have probably signed one, and you're going to track down the source of the leak? Ri-i-i-i-ght....:-)
First of all, it appears that a significant amount of the intitial "Superman Returns" footage suffered from pixel dropouts, which weren't noticed until quite a bit later, because they had only viewed the footage on a small screen.
Fortunately for them, if they were using uncompressed 4:4:4 RGB recording, it wouldn't be too big a job to fix that in post. If there was any sort of compression used it would have been a very different story!
We've also been told that there were only ever 28 Genesis cameras made, and two of these have been damaged beyond repair, leaving 26. But it also appears that Sony have abandoned production of the special 12 megapixel CCD chips used, and no longer support the special software that makes the 950 chassis work with the single-chip sensor. Considering that Sony are in the process of shedding 8,000 jobs worldwide, we can understand this action, but where does this leave the Genesis project? Where do they go for spares - Dalsa?
We've always been suspicious that the Genesis imaging chip was really designed for something else, otherwise, why would you use a 12M chip to give you a 6M output, when a "native" 6M chip would have given better performance?
There have also been serious complaints that Panavision initially posted misleading information about the size and weight of the camera, implying that it was a lot more steadicam-friendly than it really is.
In general though, most of the comment has been about the indifferent image quality seen on Scary Movie 4! It's an interesting observation that, even if someone eventually manages to produce proper "4K" cameras, that is, a 35mm-film-width sensor that really has 4,000 individual Red, Green amd Blue pixels across its width, (and probably more importantly, a workable storage system for all that data), while that will produce resolution more like that of 35mm film, that doesn't particualrly help the fools who originated on 2K!
And this is really the bottom line; as scanning technology progresses, we're able to extract more and more image data from decades-old film stocks, that simply wasn't accessible when the film was shot.
On the other hand, when you shoot on 2K digital, it's always going to be ***2K digital***; period; end-of-story; that's IT! No Goddam "algorithm" is ever going to be able to put back what wasn't there in the first place! Considering even over a lifetime, how few opportunities even respected producers are realistically going to be offered to produce a proper feature film, would they really want their efforts to be forever frozen in the 1920 x 1080 digital format?
Think about it guys; people could be watching your film, thousands, or even millions of years from now; shouldn't you be giving it the best possible start in life? No, your original negative may not be here in a thousand years' time, but a copy of the data on it may well be. And in any copying process, the general rule is: "Downhill all the way...." So, don't you think you ought to start off on as high a hill as possible?
19 April 2006 Counter: 31,973
Oho! The plot sickens.... Well that explains that; the reason the opening scenes of Scary Movie 4 were "indistinguishable from film" was they were shot on film! But why? Well, no credible explanation seems forthcoming, but it's a mite suspicious that they chose to use film for the opening scenes. What? Did they think that that was as much of the crap story as the critics would be able to stand?!
But, check this out:
Panavision Enters Into $345 Million Senior Secured Credit Facility (From Yahoo! Finance).
The press release is light on details, but big-time financiers Credit Suisse are involved.
We could be wrong, but it sort of looks like Ron P has somehow finagled a way to get back the $200 million or so he's poured into Panavision in recent years. Needless to say, the "success" of the Genesis®, is prominently mentioned, but
it's intriguing that this press release almost perfectly coincides with the first real opportunity that the vast majority of people in the industry have had to see what the Genesis can (and more to the point, can't), do!
So we can't help wondering what sort of a Pig-in-a-Poke these financiers have been sold! Is this the CineAlta deja-vu all over again....?
But as we've said numerous times, even if the Genesis turned out to be twice as good as they claimed it was, how exactly will that help PV's financial position?
18 April 2006 Counter: 31,953
At last! Genesis Footage! Well it's only been two years or so, but now a few of us have finally seen some "serious" Genesis footage, viz Scary Movie 4!
How does it look? Well, we must admit the color is quite a bit better than we'd expected, better than what we saw on the last two Star Wars films anyway. We remain a bit suspicious about the opening scenes; they look too good for a video camera! The quality was certainly not maintained throughout the rest of the picture at any rate!
Virtually all the exterior shots were done on dull, overcast days, so the alleged dynamic range of the Genesis wasn't given much of a workout.
Overall, to us it looked pretty much like a Super-16 blowup. We saw distinct evidence of vertical smearing on one candlelit scene, although most viewers probably wouldn't have noticed that.
So OK, it works, but it produces pretty ordinary-looking images. The trouble is, a Genesis package would be far and away the most expensive repast on the Panavision menu, but who in their right mind going to pay top dollar for such ho-hum images? (We would love to find out what daily rate all these Bozo's paid for the privelege:-)
Technically, we stand by our earlier opinion; that, like the CineAlta, the Genesis is really a not-terribly-good answer to a largely non-existent problem...
Arri Oz moves into new premises We've also received a one-line email from somebody in Australia giving us a link to the Arri Germany website, announcing that their Australian operation has moved into brand-new premises:
ARRI Rental · Australia. Other than that, we haven't really heard anything about them for ages.
11 April 2006 Counter: 31,847
No, this is not a joke.... We've heard from a couple of our intrepid supporters, in flagrant defiance of Warner Bros NDA pressure and all, that there were a lot of problems with line and column dropouts with the Genesis's on Superman Returns. The problem was described as: "Like a mag scratch through the entire negative". Nobody knew if the problem was due to the sensor or the recording system.
Both situations sound bizarre. If was in the camera, surely they would have seen it while they were shooting, and if it was the recorders, well they aren't too different to what has been used before without apparent problems. In any event, digital VTRs don't record data in any sort of linear fashion, so it's unlikely that they could be responsible.
Our opinion has always been that while the Genesis may indeed work in the sense that it will produce watchable pictures, from a purely commercial viewpoint we can't what the point of using it actually is! However this is entirely out of left field. Anybody else know anything?
