Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Every once in awhile...

Well im not on board yet Jim but i am still chasing after the bus like a crazy honey badger...hope to be at NAB
 
Jannard said:
Optical finder? We offered that and no one placed an order. BTW... how do you see in the dark with those things?

Jim
Click to expand...

Jim, for some reason I have no recall of hearing or seeing an optical finder being offered... What did it cost?

How do you see in the dark with that??? The same as your sensor, just add light! Of course if you could miniaturize your laser projector to have a 4k viewfinder, I think I would finally be happy to give up an optical path.

All I can say is Apple is doing amazing things with limiting power draw on their custom IC's and getting all that stuff to fit in such a nice package. After you play with an iphone 5 you have admire it for the crazy amount of work that went into making it a working piece of art. Well the good news is battery life can only get better with new firmware.

I was wondering if RED thought of adding a feature I have in my HD Monitor Pro software... The idea is you can load a still frame with alpha to be over laid on the live camera image. This would allow you to comp effect shots in camera and see how the live footage mixes with the CG still. Then having a control to set the opacity from 0-100. Maybe you can add that feature to the wish list?
 
Cost likely would be a factor in people not requesting optical finders. Good optics don't come cheaply. Film-camera DoPs wanting optical finders may have come along later in the evolutionary course of this camera family. Younger adopters of the family have grown up with electronic finders and have learned to live with them. They might have all manner of grief operating with an optical finder. Optical finders are nice to have and use. Whether the cost-benefit exists is moot with electronic finders improving.

I understand that the uptake of the P+S Technik SI2K optical viewfinders was so low that P+S sold them down to below cost price to move them. Like a lot of things for budget film-makers, the priority comes down to what is the most needed/least unaffordable of all the items on the wish list.

Apple have the economies of scale in their favour in building custom ICs affordably and profitably. If you applied the same notion to this family of cameras, would there be enough lenses left in the world for all of them.

Pre-visualising aganst a background plate is part of the feature set on SI2K from back in DVR 1 as far as I can recall. I just assumed it would be in the RED camera family line-up. The data handling demands of 2K are one thing, 5K and more is another. Now that it has been raised, my guess is that it will if enough people have wanted the feature versus more others wanting something else and gaining priority in the R and D endeavour.

Coming from a generation when HF communications radio tranceivers were the size of larger domestic microwave ovens and put out about 12 watts on a good day, the current crop of digital cinema cameras of all persuasions are something of a minor miracle that they can work at all. Making coloured moving pictures out of electricity? What a stupid notion? It can never be done. The Dick Tracy wristwatch radio was deemed an impossibility in the day. Now we have audio bugs a fraction of the size. Bionic ear - done. Bionic eye - well on its way. We live in remarkable times. I just hope we the human collective don't wreck the place before we can see more amazing things evolve at the same exponential pace that the last century brought forth.
 
Tom Lowe said:
:yesnod: http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
Click to expand...
I was at the opening of the movie on Kurtzweil, I enjoyed it a lot ( if you pre-order the new book now, you also get a t-shirt and a digital copy of the movie ... perty good deal). Lot of the movie is Kurtzweils motivations, since the RED management kind of thinks "Kurtzweilish" ... it would be interesting to know what is their core motivation?

I btw will be down at NASA next to Kurtzweils building Monday, doing some graph theory code reviews, if someone wants to have coffee.
 
Back to optical VFs for a second. Final word. I promise.

I think this is asked only because it was asked before... and before that. It is a historical thing... maybe?

Film guys like Don Burgess and Wolski have switched to RED. They ask for a lot of stuff. So does Fincher... every other day. But an optical finder is not one of them. It has never come up. Actually... no DP shooting a studio movie on RED has ever asked for it. Ever.

EVFs and LCDs see into the dark. OVFs do not. Focus pullers don't look into an OVF.

You may as well ask us to make sure you can shoot film on a RED camera as an option... :-)

Jim
 
Optical finders will be gone soon, even on digital photographic cameras, Canon was the last big manufacturer starting to offer a mirrorless camera with a large sensor.
We'll soon see the traditional SLR construction on it's way out. I like to focus in near dark on an electronic VF, when I can hardly see a thing on an optical one.

I was trained on ARRI cameras with optical viewfinders – the rotating angled mirror was a truly remarkable construction. But do I want to go back? Definitely not!
One example: We needed to make the image look its worst in the viewfinder when trying to sync a TV on those in order to get rid of the dark bar on film. How sick is that?

Oh, and did I read lightfield somewhere?
 
Jannard said:
You may as well ask us to make sure you can shoot film on a RED camera as an option... :-)
Click to expand...

Couple years back or so Aaton guys talked about the Delta being a "digital mag" attached to Penelope body, so in theory one could switch between film and digital on set. Now, apparently, they've abandoned that concept, though I can guess why.
 
The only reason I see a optical viewfinder is good for is to see the full image at maximum sharpness.
Todays EVF are simply too low in resolution to keep everything sharp IF looking through them when trying to manage sharpness. This would be true in a typical one-man setup, such as broadcasting, documentary or low budget crews.
EVFs are sharp when zooming in, but that is not very helpful when trying to manage framing. Its always a compromise.

On a feature film set, with AC and the chance to repeat everything if required when sharpness was off, and where one can measure the points before, well, ACs handle the situation with lots of experience. Further they do mistakes sometimes too, but the production environment allows for near perfection.

So I see a real need for a true 4K EVF at some point. In the meantime a true FullHD 1080p viewfinder would already be a huge step forward.

Years ago when OLED came up I read that the developers said it can only create small pixels, but unlikely full size TVs. They said it would be easy to make a 2K screen at thumbnail size, but hard to make a TV at 40".
Apparently nobody ever managed to produce the 2K screen at thumbnail size. I don't know why, but demand is there...

The same with 300dpi quality FullHD+ or 4K digital picture frames. OK, the iPad3 comes close, but is WAY to expensive for that use.

Hey Jim, what about a 4K Stereo VR display, going back to your Oakley glasses background this would be a way to go...!

Axel
 
The trick is to get EVFs better. Not go back to OVFs.

Jim
 
Jannard said:
The trick is to get EVFs better. Not go back to OVFs.

Jim
Click to expand...

If you ever shot documentary footage on film in dark areas with no image contrast in the frame whatsoever and you had to use WA lenses wide open and you had no AC to pull focus, you would have wished for just any EVF at this moment, leave alone peaking or magnification.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top