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  • 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 :)

sony

Bruce, Because they have and use a 4k array for green, that maxes out their possible luma resolution at 4k. Because the array size is the target size they either have aliasing or lower resolution or both.

Say we had the same number of photosites arranged in a traditional array, it'd measure 5792 x 3258, and we'd expect to measure a luma resolution of 4500x2541, which is > 4k, enough we'd expect there to be negligible aliasing with good optical filtering.

By only producing 4k green and aiming for 4k green you open yourself up to either aliasing or softness or both. By aiming for 5.7k, you'll get a clean 4.5k with negligible aliasing. And that is the answer why traditional Bayer pattern and proper demosaic is the way to go.

Graeme
 
100% agree that a real debayer is better. Thing is: can Epic do a real full debayer, scale down to quad HD and output in realtime?

Graeme, if you were working for Sony and the boss said "I want a camera with 4K output for broadcast and we don't have time to build a custom ASIC supercomputer for the first generation", wouldn't you do something similar?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Make no mistake - Sony was once a very, very good company - they had excellence both in engineering and marketing. They Co-invented the CD with Philips. The format was very consumer friendly. They produced everything top notch - in its day the Sony DSR was the camera to buy if you could afford it. They made their mistakes along the way - Betamax was all but superior to VHS but it failed. Sony at one time cared very much for their customers - they took on the content providers in favor of home videotaping in the classic US Supreme court Betamax case. At the time, Sony's business strategy was to maintain leadership by technical innovation.

But over the years, leadership at Sony changed. It's marketing genius remained, but technical innovation failed. They no longer were just an electronics manufacturer - they went on a buying spree and then got into the content business by purchasing record labels, and movie studios - in business school they call this a stuck in middle strategy. They now became anti-consumer - they no longer stood by what they fought for in the United States Supreme Court - They developed SACD and Blu-ray of which you can't play an SACD on your PC and they force you to buy their equipment to author them - and Blu-ray it's a nightmare having to update your player after coming back from Blockbuster with the latest release. In the professional market, they've lost their focus.

They were an early leader in HD technologies. Eventually, each successive product was just an incremental upgrade to the prior generation. Their business strategy became that of milking an existing technology to the end - their cameras are crippled at 1080p output. Their marketing genius remained, allowing them to sell those products at highly inflated prices, while their competitors JVC and Panasonic began to make their technology ever more accessible through lower prices. And when RED came along, along came their rants - and they still have not acknowledged what RED has done. And despite all of this, Sony has had 4K projection for a while yet, and yet to have 4k aquisition with Red 4 years in. Sony still has a chance to bring a good product to market - but there would have to be a paradigm shift in their business model for them to succeed. RED is here, and it appears to be a case where when RED ships their IMAX resolution EPIC 645 Sony will just begin tinkering with 4k. By this time the industry will be heavily invested in RED MX technologies, and will see little incentive to move to Sony's offerings unless they can produce something that is competitive in terms of both price and features. Unlike Sony who has become stuck in the middle - hats of to Jim for defining their business model as the "High Resolution Business" and focusing on its core faithful - the professional market.
 
Bill Anderson said:
How does the diagonal pixel orientation of Q67 effect editing - projection?
Click to expand...

Probably not. It's an in-camera technique somewhat like Panasonic used in the HVX-200 to try and get more apparent resolution out of the sensor.
 
Robert P. Hogue said:
Probably not. It's an in-camera technique somewhat like Panasonic used in the HVX-200 to try and get more apparent resolution out of the sensor.
Click to expand...

Agreed. The end user won't be seeing diamond pixels. However, there could be effects on MTF, which will need to be measured.

Graeme
 
Seriously, this is Sony's 4K realtime broadcast solution... that can also be used for 4K cinema. It likely beats their own F35... and *might* beat Alexa and the current most well-known 4K camera - the original Red One. I can't see it beating Epic for cinema, either :) Latitude and resolution won't be fantastic. Unless they have the most unbelievably good RGB color filters or something and the colors are just out-of-this-world stunningly good?

Robert P. Hogue said:
RED is here, and it appears to be a case where when RED ships their IMAX resolution EPIC 645 Sony will just begin tinkering with 4k.
Click to expand...

Another way to look at it is that Sony will ship 4K their cameras in concert with the ability of consumers to actually view 4K. Although why they're taking so damn long about both is annoying I agree :P

Robert P. Hogue said:
By this time the industry will be heavily invested in RED MX technologies, and will see little incentive to move to Sony's offerings unless they can produce something that is competitive in terms of both price and features.
Click to expand...

Did you read my posts? Here's a feature: because of this sensor design everyone is mocking, Sony cams will likely output a live Quad HD feed while not chewing through batteries.

Can a Red MX based camera do that?

Robert P. Hogue said:
Unlike Sony who has become stuck in the middle - hats of to Jim for defining their business model as the "High Resolution Business" and focusing on its core faithful - the professional market.
Click to expand...

Red is focused on the professional filmmaker market, yes. Sony is focused on the professional broadcast market - eg the "middle" you were talking about, image-quality-wise.

Epic and Scarlet will likely change this with things like great realtime clean 1080p output, light weight, better ergonomics, electronic zooms, lower battery use etc - and Red will make greater inroads into live broadcast.

For 4K broadcast, I'm sure Red will at some point produce a brilliant bayer sensor oversampling live-4K-outputting camera that offers everything broadcast people want. I don't doubt they can do it!

Sony is trying to do 4K live broadcast RIGHT NOW though. Hence this full-of-compromises Q67 design. The fact is, though: it will work, using today's technology. And it might compete with the original Red, Alexa, F35 etc if repurposed as a 4K cinema camera.

Personally, broadcast stuff always bores the heck out of me. Plus for my uses it's way too expensive for the image quality you get. I don't mock it either, though.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Even if sony is right, the theatre going public would not notice on a standard theatre screen. I did not notice any apparent aliasing on any films shot on RED. Human vision has limits - and only if you fall below that limit do you notice anything. Colorwise, we can perceive just upwards of 10 million colors, and our vision has a dynamic range of roughly 21.5 stops of latitude at 20 years of age which decreases to 20 stops by age 40. EPIC HDR is already at 18+.
 
Wasn't there a scene in Rain Main where Dustin Hoffman's character starts freaking out coz he doesn't have enough chicken/fish fingers for dinner. He has half the number and so Tom Cruise's character comes along and cuts them in half to placate him. It's a funny scene and always got a good laugh.
 
Despite my tendency to go for the low hanging comedic fruits, Sony getting behind 4K is nothing to marginalized. While a ship the size of a supertanker might be hard to bring around for quick technological innovation, things move when it moves. With its acquisition, distribution, delivery, manufacturing, content production, etc. weight thrown behind the 4K format things will change rapidly. This should make people in the Red universe very happy and should be applauded.
 
Robert P. Hogue said:
and our vision has a dynamic range of roughly 21.5 stops of latitude at 20 years of age which decreases to 20 stops by age 40.
Click to expand...

Only if we allow adaption do we have such a good DR in our eyes. In a camera, that'd be like riding the iris.

Graeme
 
Sanjin Jukic said:
"A Streetcar Named 4K Desire" is slowly but surely filling with the following respectful competitors:

- RED will show fully working Epic 5K at NAB.
- Canon already showed 4K prototype camera in 2010.
- Sony just announced 4K acquisition system roadmap.
- Aaton should finally show fully working Penelope ∆ at NAB.

What about Arri?

I heard some of rumors from Germany/Bayern that Arri is working on 4K camera project code named

"Alexander The Great" and it should be 4K successor of Alexa.
Click to expand...

A 4k "Alexa II" would be the biggest non-surprise to me in years...
 
Graeme Nattress said:
Only if we allow adaption do we have such a good DR in our eyes. In a camera, that'd be like riding the iris.

Graeme
Click to expand...

Yes,
human eye DR without the pupil size change is 6.5 stop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_eye

So when you look on static image, without allowing your eyes wander around the pictures peripheral you can see only this, 6.5 stops of image DR.

Maybe watching IMAX on 180deg spherical screen will make use of higher DR achieved the way of pupil change.
 
Yes. it's all about the ability to map a wider input to a narrow output.

A 2 bit (line art) drawing could represent a desert scene interior and exterior, like the famous Ghost Town shot from the first Red Epic.
 
Just out of curiosity and a question to those who may actually know - what does an S35 6Kx3K CCD cost? They definitely kept hammering the CCD aspect, which at that size and those pixel counts makes me think this will definitely be a rental camera...
 
My bets are on the camera will have an MSRP matching a Rolls-Royce phantom for a basic kit consisting of the camera body, and whatever kludge Sony has for recording. Could buy an EPIC all pimpled out, and have enough money left over to buy a Maserati Quattorporte. Remember the Dalsa Origin - for insurance purposes for rental, the insurable value was $575,000.
 
I hate it when companies tell you "all you need is this" when they are quietly "working on that". And I'm not talking about Sony.

Jim
 
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