kodaks stock plunges 50% in the last month!!!

[Stephen Gentle]

20 years ago State-of-The-Art broadcast camcorders used 640 x 480 2/3" CCDs - 0.64K imaging

10 years ago, after a protracted technological shit-fight, State-of-The-Art broadcast camcorders appeared using 1920 x 1080 2/3" CCDs - 1.9K imaging

Currently, the highest resolution portable camera in regular use is the RED One, which (opinions vary) give something approaching the equivalent of 3K imaging.

Why do you give a lowest estimate for RED ONE, but for the other cameras you assume that they capture a perfect 100% of the resolution of their target format? Even with 3 sensors, you don't capture 100% of the resolution that's there. The way I see it is that RED outputs an image that is 4K without any kind of upscaling or pixel shifting, so it's 4K camera.

Also, since 1K generally means 1024 pixels, 1080p would come out to be 1.875K and 640 pixels would be 0.625K.

 

[Andy Taplin]

Based on Q3 Earnings report, seems Kodak's only profitable business is ink-jet printers.

Maybe that's because they give NASA too good a deal on the sensors!

 

[Wesley Scoggins]

20 years ago State-of-The-Art broadcast camcorders used 640 x 480 2/3" CCDs - 0.64K imaging

10 years ago, after a protracted technological shit-fight, State-of-The-Art broadcast camcorders appeared using 1920 x 1080 2/3" CCDs - 1.9K imaging

Currently, the highest resolution portable camera in regular use is the RED One, which (opinions vary) give something approaching the equivalent of 3K imaging.

Not exactly a mind-blowing increase in performance to show for 2 decades work. A 20-year-old SP Betacam camorder is still quite a useable device for low-end work, it's only real issue is that it doesn't do widescreen. 10 year old F900s are still in regular use.

So, how did you figure the next 20 years is going to give us "200K+"

Well the thing is that you're forgetting to tack on prices for this equipment.

Not to mention sizes, weight, and ease of use. Not to mention the size and costs of editing equipment for those rigs.

We now live in an age with HD cameras that fit into the palm of your hand and cost only a few hundred dollars, and can be edited on a laptop costing under a $1000. (Where as 20 years ago, SD cameras were 10 pounds, fit on your shoulder, and could only be edited by specially trained people on machines the size of a refrigerator).

Where NOW HD cameras are so small and light that they can be mounted on guns and helmets, and have been utilized for professional film productions.

It's astounding to me that we live in an age where cameras that you can get for under a thousand dollars can currently fit in your pocket, and look better than a $50,000 professional camera from 20 years ago.

But I am more concerned with more recent developments, rather than slow "snowballing" that has been happening over the last 20 years. In just 5 years we've gone from a 4K rig for under $25,000 being a vaporware scam, to it being used on some of the biggest films of the year, and Red revealing plans for a 28K camera.

Comparing the developments over the last 20 years, while ignoring the explosion in development over the last 5 is deceptive, because it takes things for the "critical mass" to be reached in processor speeds and sensor technology for the pieces to all come together for Red. Development isn't linear, and is largely fed by market forces.

There is currently a market demand for consumer 4K cameras, that didn't exist 5 years ago, because there wasn't any. Red created a market that didn't even exist just a few years ago.

People are getting hungrier for better and better looking video in smaller and smaller devices. We're seeing HD video and 10MP stills being developed for implementation into cellphones.

Sensors get better and better with every generation of development, and CPU speeds continue to speed forward. At current rates of increase (rather than the rates of increase of the 80's and 90's), I think if anything it's an underestimate to suggest 200K resolutions being possible 20 years from now.

 

[Dan Hudgins]

Dust mitigation.

Dust mitigation.

The tide has turned, I cannot see why any low budget filmmaker would shoot color negative and have to deal with dust mitigation when new true RAW recording Digital Cinema cameras are going to be on the market in the next year or two.

It is not so much what little quality you loose from going from film scan to Bayer sensor data, what you gain in shooting ratio and lack of Dust mitigation make such a huge improvement in the end result that it is a day and night difference.

People with large budgets can pay for labs to do their dust mitigation for them, but that cost is over $100,000 extra that could be spent on sets and costumes to gain a multi fold return later.

It makes me very sad that all the equipment we collected over the last 35+ years is going to be "crab weights", but the reason we got it in the first place is that film has been on the way out for a long time and will continue to fade into the sunset faster and faster. We put for the most part all of our free money and then some into being able to produce films for projection, but in a few years there will be NO 35mm projectors to show them on, so what a waste of time it has all been. I am sad that my Brother would not see the wall coming we about to slam into, not that I have not been telling him this would happen for years. When RED site was first up I told him to sell all the cameras and put in a reservation, his responce was that "this digital thing is just a gimmick that will pass", he could just not let go of the idea that this time it was true and film was going to be gone, kaput!

 

[Stephen Williams]

We now live in an age with HD cameras that fit into the palm of your hand and cost only a few hundred dollars, and can be edited on a laptop costing under a $1000. (Where as 20 years ago, SD cameras were 10 pounds, fit on your shoulder, and could only be edited by specially trained people on machines the size of a refrigerator).

.

Hi,

I always liked the images from Ikegami cameras of that generation, The images took a big hit with CCD's.
I think you will find Betacam decks were in use 20 years ago, not that big.

Stephen

 

[David M]

Why do you give a lowest estimate for RED ONE, but for the other cameras you assume that they capture a perfect 100% of the resolution of their target format? Even with 3 sensors, you don't capture 100% of the resolution that's there. The way I see it is that RED outputs an image that is 4K without any kind of upscaling or pixel shifting, so it's 4K camera.

That queston has been answered so many times, I'm worried another post about it will cause the Internet to collapse into a black hole :beatdeadhorse5:

But both Messrs Jannard and Nattress have stated the useable resolution is 3.1K or thereabouts, but then Jim is always saying "they don't know what they're doing" so maybe you have a point.

Also, since 1K generally means 1024 pixels, 1080p would come out to be 1.875K and 640 pixels would be 0.625K.

OK so have it your way. 0.625K to 4K is a 6.4:1 improvement over 20 years. 4K to 200K (200K+!) would a 50:1 improvement over 20 years. Apart from a few percent less risk of major sphincter damage when pulling the modified figures out of one's ass, I am not sure what your point is.

I find this whole thread rather sad.

Jim and his crew have pulled off an amazing technological feat, which can stand on it's own without all this sycophantic embroidery from people who REALLY DO NOT know what they are babbling about.

Geoff Boyle is absolutely right. Slowly and sometimed painfully but surely the RED has gained Industry acceptance; this is not helped at all by clueless loose-cannon Fanboys taking pot-shots at everything that moves and can even vaguely be imagined as an "enemy of RED"

 

[Wesley Scoggins]

But both Messrs Jannard and Nattress have stated the useable resolution is 3.1K or thereabouts, but then Jim is always saying "they don't know what they're doing" so maybe you have a point.

Well I have read on the low end, 3.2K, and on the high end 3.6K, I don't recall seeing 3.1K quoted.

OK so have it your way. 0.625K to 4K is a 6.4:1 improvement over 20 years. 4K to 200K (200K+!) would a 50:1 improvement over 20 years. Apart from a few percent less risk of major sphincter damage when pulling the modified figures out of one's ass, I am not sure what your point is.

Well I am approaching this from the perspective of the law of accelerating returns, as we make new sensors, we learn how to make future sensors better, while at the same time faster processing capabilities and new technologies will constantly be adding to the capabilities of new camera systems.

Not to mention that you're just stopping at Red's current line-up, if you look at the Epic-617, and it being released by 2011, then the jump between .625 and 28K in 20 years is a significantly larger one.

As far as raw resolution is concerned though, the jump from 640*480, to 4520*2540, is closer to a 40 times jump, as Red's resolution is around 12 megapixels, and 640*480 is about 300,000 or .3 megapixels.

SD to 4K is more properly a 37x increase, while SD to 28K is going to be closer to a 850x increase. 28K to around 200K is only going to be a 76x increase. If we're to assume a similar 850x increase in the next 20 or so years like from SD to 28K (which will be available in the next few years according to Red), it'd be logical to conclude something closer to a 200,000K camera, rather than my "paltry" 200K.

Of course, I think that both estimates are wildly optimistic, because i'm wildly optimistic. I just don't know if i'm THAT wild yet.

Regardless, I have serious doubts that any camera system 20 years hench will be getting it's full resolution from JUST it's sensors, it'll be a more scalable thing, without a real "set" resolution.

 

[David M]

As far as raw resolution is concerned though, the jump from 640*480, to 4520*2540, is closer to a 40 times jump, as Red's resolution is around 12 megapixels, and 640*480 is about 300,000 or .3 megapixels.

You're making the common mistake of confusing resolution with pixel count.
Going from 1K to 2K gives you twice the resolution, but it also requires four times the pixel count since you need twice as many pixels horizontally and vertically. So to be able to resolve twice as many lines per millimeter, you need four times as many pixels on the sensor.

Hence to go from "4K" to "200K" you would actually need 50 x 50 = 2,500 times the pixel count or 2,500 x 12,000,000 = 30,000,000,000. There's no way you could do that with a 35mm or any other practical-sized sized sensor as the photocells would be much smaller than the wavelength of light.

On another thread some clown talked about "30+ stops of dynamic range". Unless you wanted to take movies of atomic bombs going off, I am not sure what would be the use of that either:biggrin:

 

[Wesley Scoggins]

Well there are ways to get higher resolution from a camera system than just what it's sensor is capable of.

You could do rapid scanning of a scene, basically if you did something like Gigapan, where you take a picture of a small segment, then combine them in a larger mosaic, you could make an image that is far higher than it's source sensor.

Have an array of 10 megapixel sensors, all with adjustable mirrors and lenses, that are constantly bouncing around and capturing useful data. Kind of your own video Gigapan array, only instead of one camera being slide around and adjusted by a machine, it's an array of sensors bouncing around on the front of your camera, constantly scanning the scene and creating video mosaics.

Then there are all sort of "super-resolution" processing techniques that can be utilized in the video, where it takes data from multiple frames to squeeze even more resolution out of the video than the unaltered video had.

And that is just stuff that we're thinking of NOW, utilizing technology that we currently have. Like I have said previous, I think 20 years from now, our cameras will be so "smart" as to be able to understand on a conscious level what is in front of them, and being able to understand what all of the elements are that it's capturing.

I love these kind of discussions, so don't take my wildly optimistic speculation as my belief that this is definitely what'll happen. It's more of my BELIEF in what'll happen.

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=35223 - This was a pretty fun thread where some other Redusers jumped in one where they thought technology will be in 20-30 years, thought you might like to check it out.

 

[Dan Hudgins]

Lens flare

Lens flare

On another thread some clown talked about "30+ stops of dynamic range". Unless you wanted to take movies of atomic bombs going off,

Because of lens flare you cannot get 30+ stops linear.

I have processed film in special ways to get wide dynamic range, it helps give some detail at both ends but you need an S curve or the mid tones look to flat.

Your eye has not air spaces, it is just one air to optic surface, if you do the same in a camera you can get the same range as your eye.

As for Kodak and the future of film, just about everything needed is here to replace it.

If RED made a three chip camera you could get better color, and with the new sensors being 14bit that is close. If you make an 8 sensor camera you could match film in dynamic range and color quality. They won't do it because its not an issue any longer, people who pay for seats do not care about film quality any longer. If they did movies would be shot in 65/70mm, but a movie made on SD-DV will earn a bigger return, or so it seems...

==

In the City the Castro is showing "Digital 3D" and is closed a few days a week sometimes now. Most of the other places that were showing old film prints are closed, so there are few screens to show an indy film on any longer, and the few places are about to go down as well.

I was at a lecture and Francis Ford Coppola was saying that he is having a hard time finding places to show HIS films and few people are going to see them. George Lucas who was on the Castro stage with him and other American Zoetrope founders, has said that we was not going to shoot film any longer. Coppola shoots HD now, not 35mm.

 

[donatello b]

BOTTOM line
1997 kodak stock = $90.00
2009 kodak stock now = $3.50

if you bought when it hit $2.01 in Mar 09 then you're doing pretty good today ... if you bought in the $10-90 range then one might think it's a POS.
perhaps the persons that are out $$ will find comfort in knowing film print stock will be in theaters for the next X years ...