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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 :)

The Lessons of DALSA Digital Cinema

Gunleik Groven said:
And I guess Deanan could have filled us in with a few of the open spaces, if he wanted to.
I guess he doesn't/can't/won't, though :)

G
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Yeah, lots of holes to fill but no sense digging down 6 ft under.
 
True ;)
 
Yeah, that's a sad story. I'm curious where Dalsa stands in terms of their plants that made the pickups, and the patents they held on digital imaging.
 
I thought the Tech was supposed to go into the Penelope...

But it's running out of time by now, methinks, even though the Penelope looked like it could have been a great cam.

The article isn't very good at showing off "the lesson" though. From what is written, it is hard to understand why they didn't conquer the world...
And as a matter of fact - they didn't.
 
Marc Wielage said:
Yeah, that's a sad story. I'm curious where Dalsa stands in terms of their plants that made the pickups, and the patents they held on digital imaging.
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Dalsa isn't dead. They just stopped targeting the feature film market. So I assume they just shifted their patents and plants to manufacturing their non-cinema products.
 
What happened?

REDCODE RAW is what happened.

4K recording when from a drive array the size of a fridge to a CF card.

That is what happened to Dalsa (in the feature film market)

Sorry. I have to go off about how massive an invention .R3D is.
Without it we the cams are basically penelopes or Dalsas, fantastic imagers with no practical way to capture what it can see.

Even for RED, the camera's have sort of already come and gone but REDCODE RAW endures and gets better.

David
 
so Dalsa was before RED?

RAW is fine and dandy, that would kill anything but confused why this didn't get marketed well enough if the images were that stunning...

and wouldnt you make a camera that if it was going to be big, the maximum would be that of a 35mm camera or if you made a similar IMAX equivalent sensor then you would have it no bigger then an IMAX camera...

I know 4K isn't IMAX but as in, if they progressed the tech the same would apply to making it no larger then an IMAX camera...

Strange though, training and all, the workflow they surely would've made simple...and odd that an article would take a dig at REDs workflow, its not that complicated once you do it a few times...it seems pretty standard and easy
 
Imran Farouk said:
so Dalsa was before RED?

RAW is fine and dandy, that would kill anything but confused why this didn't get marketed well enough if the images were that stunning...

and wouldnt you make a camera that if it was going to be big, the maximum would be that of a 35mm camera or if you made a similar IMAX equivalent sensor then you would have it no bigger then an IMAX camera...

I know 4K isn't IMAX but as in, if they progressed the tech the same would apply to making it no larger then an IMAX camera...

Strange though, training and all, the workflow they surely would've made simple...and odd that an article would take a dig at REDs workflow, its not that complicated once you do it a few times...it seems pretty standard and easy
Click to expand...

The first 4K tests I saw way back when (presented by Rob Hummel, in fact) were mostly shot on the Dalsa Origin (plus a few scanned from 65mm - I remember shots from Baraka and The Sound of Music). I'm pretty sure it was before the RED One came out. The Dalsa footage looked really excellent even then, I remember being impressed by the dynamic range of the image. It was clear that at the time the weak link in terms of image quality was the 4K projectors, which couldn't handle blacks very well; everything was very milky.

As many have said, the real problem with the Origin was its size; it was utterly impractical for anything but certain types of studio-bound work. Also, I don't think too many people in the industry were sold on shooting digitally, and if so, they were going to tape, not files. I think Fincher's Zodiac was the first studio feature to go entirely tapeless, and if I recall correctly, his team was pretty much pioneering the tapeless workflow as they went along, much to the chagrin of the very nervous studio. Also, the cost of storage has certainly come down in the past 5 years. So a camera that shot uncompressed 4K DPX files was in many ways, I think, was way ahead of its time, but by the time Dalsa had started working on the size issue, RED had pretty much swept in and taken a lot of its potential market.
 
Graeme Nattress said:
We design and make our own.

Graeme
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So who has the recepie for the secret sauce and who bakes the wafers?

My guess as to how this all happened:

Jim has the general receipe
The 100 guys in white interprets his general taste commands and translates them to AD's
Then Deanan, Rob and Graeme (in turns) come in with their little secret spiceboxes and add flavour.
The 100 guys carefully start working the dough until Jim screams:
Enough Already!

Takes the dough and pours it into the flux capacitor cum fotosite cookingmachine and sets the heat to 11

The 100 guys wash their hands and tell Jim that he's on his own acting like this

While Jim lights his cigar, goes to the backroom to meet Graeme and Deanan and play poker till the bell rings.

Like the 1001 time the session was repeated, Jim struck gold by sitting just 45 seconds longer than he should at the pokertable, due to a gloriously fake hand, and the Mysterium X was alive and kicking.

Cheerfully he glued one of the freshly baked wafers in front of his oakly glasses and ran for his wife and plane to hit Fiji and have eternal fun while the 100 guys in white were left speachless and had to figure out a way to make the process repeatable and reliable.

This was back in 2008... Fall...

Now I have an Epic...
 
I think some Lessons we can learn from Dalsa are:

1. You can't trust shareholders or corporate goons to make decisions about what is needed for artists. Corporate Sheared off the Cinema Division because they needed to "trim the fat" to look good from an analyst's standpoint.
2. You can have a really nice product, and a really great team behind it - but creating and facilitating a technical ecosystem that can flourish amongst Luddites is VERY DIFFICULT. COUGH COUGH Prores 1080p very popular camera in our industry COUGH.

Those Leica / Dalsa Lenses are Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick.
 
Lesson from Dalsa: Make a product that people will buy at a price they can afford. Any lesson beyond that is window-dressing.

Graeme
 
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