Engineer's Bench podcast - "Digital Cinema"

Hugh and I are joined by Deluxe Digital's CTO Laurence Claydon to talk DCI, DI, projectors and Dolby ATMOS. Find it on iTunes, vanilla RSS, YouTube or the show notes website.

Blackmagic's new digital 'cinema' camera

In the same way that the Red One seemed to break the mold of digital cinematography three years ago the interesting development at the moment is the Blackmagic camera shown at NAB this year. It has a 2.5k sensor and supposedly 13-stops of range (that's 78dBs if you're a video person!). Anyhow - I look forward to hearing from anyone who has used it in a non-Blackmagic funded film!

So - here is an article (admittedly from BM) that has some sample footage; 12-bit RAW DNG files (they are logarithmic - that's how you capture 13-stops of dynamic range in only 12-bits!). I downloaded a sequence and had a crack at grading a frame to what I thought looked nice (colourist friends may well disagree!);

The untouched frame;

What I think looks nice;

and some detail to see how much resolution is there;

Three films they messed up

I know you can never make a film that mirrors a book exactly - and in a sense why would you want to? They are different mediums but by converting a book to a screenplay there should be an expectation that you at least carry across some of the ideas and convictions of the original author.

• Starship Troopers was a book by Robert A. Heinlein which I devoured as a teenager and was very taken with some of the ideas - truly unique ideas (a bit like the first time you saw The Matrix?). However - seeing the film was a real let-down. It's what you'd have got if you gave a fifteen year-old $150 million to make a film.


• I, Robot by Isaac Asimov was another favourite from my teenage years - how did they manage to get it so wrong?


• A Clockwork Orange - as an undergraduate I found some of Burgess's ideas about language very compelling. Like Orwell he makes the point that because you essentially think in your mother tongue if you let your language degrade so does your power of thought. In the case of Orwell's 1984 the degradation of language is used for political control but in the case of Clockwork Orange it leads to moral decay.
  Now I know Kubrick is a genius and all but when I first saw this movie (knowing the book very well) I thought that he'd never actually read it - at best having read the O-Level notes or maybe a bloke in the pub had given him a half-cut summary. The sequence where Alex imagines himself as a Roman Centurion just made me think of glossy 70's pr0n and I found none of the subtleties or nuances of the book.