An Epic Change

There aren't many times that I'm astonished, but this is one of them. The web-things are all vibrating because James Cameron has just (who knows when "just" was – recently at least) bought 50 Red Epic cameras. Wow, that's true conceptual art. Can you imagine what that really looks like. 50 boxes of $58,000 cameras sitting all in a row. Amazing as a concept, what would it be in reality?

(OK, it's true that Peter Jackson bought 30 Red Epics to shoot the Hobbit with, but maybe both of these together is even more impressive. What do you think?)

So much for the hype and yelling, what's it really mean? Well first it's a validation of the Red concept and the Epic format in particular. This is a camera that shoots 5120x2700 for a 5K format. That's 6 times the area of an HD camera. On top of that the camera body (just the body, so you can triple that for the full effect) weighs 5 pounds. The lens will probably weigh more than the camera. Talk about freedom of movement. And it's got 13 stops of exposure.

OK, just before we hyper-ventilate what's the point? It's the business model guys, it's all new. It's also the workflow, not that it's that new, but that he's committed to it in a really big way. It's the future of making (big) films. It's the future period. Film is dead, tape is dead. Really.

This is real trickle down technology. Ronald Reagan was an economic fool, with the highest deficit, at the time, ever (only supplanted by George W. Bush thanks to years of an unfunded war) and Reagan's trickle down economics was just voodoo (the rich kept all the money). Later Reagan actually raised taxes to try and get out of it – even he knew it was a disaster. However, now, this kind of technology/business trickle down (which actually does benefit all of us by permeating the work process) will change the business landscape of filmmaking at the high end and cascade down the food chain to even our level.

We can also see how this all plays out as a workflow. We shoot at really high resolutions – all digital – edit high (isn't that what the new Final Cut Pro and Thunderbolt really mean – really high data rates, meaning large files, meaning large frame sizes), compress it all down and distribute at smaller resolutions (meaning HD – isn't it amazing that small size now means HD). On the distribution (selling side) we're now looking at radically many different sizes and ways to sell, rent, give away the work. Work high, sell low – but often. Kind of an odd mantra, but there it is. It's seldom you get to stare the future in the face, but here it is.

Oh, look, they've got the rods! I knew I needed the rods.

gunther (4)

Convergence: the great transformation

I talk a lot about Red camera and our relentless move into the newest future on the block – electron cinematography.  It used to be that convergence was thought of as the merging of your television with your computer, so in the end you had no television but your computer thought it was one. Yes, that's happening, but on the viewing end. It's what's happening at the other end of the media chain that's the big news – shooting and editing. Photography and video are fusing together, first in the physical form of DSLR cameras that shoot in high-definition video. 

Now my little Lumix still camera has always shot video and not too badly at that. My daughter bought one first and I was really surprised by the quality of the video and bought one for me too. OK, hers is sexier than mine and to be honest my wife bought it for trips and I just carry it and use it more. It's nice to have a camera small enough to always have it in your pocket. 

In the old days when I shot on film I always had a half-frame 35mm camera in my pocket. When I first arrived at Hampshire back in the 70's you could always tell who was a Hampshire student on the bus because they carried a camera and most likely a half-frame. The most popular one was a Bell&Howell with a wind-up spring drive. They had a nice wrist strap so you could have it in your hand all the time ready to shoot. That was the whole point of half-frame cameras – you could get 72 exposures on a single roll of 35mm film. Yep, we all shot a lot of film then and I still have all of that film. It's archival. Where will all of your digital images be forty years from now? One year from now?

An even further aside – an old girlfriend though I was a really interesting guy because I carried a hand gun. She was disappointed when she found out it was just a half-frame camera. No, it didn't last. It's hard to measure up to that kind of image when I'm just a normal guy after all.

But the big difference between the Lumix family of cameras and the new DLSR HD video cameras is that they shoot full frame HD (1920 x 1080) and you get all the controls of a still camera at the same time. Are they ready for prime-time? No, not yet, but they're moving along quickly and there's a big market for them. Red camera cancelled its models last year and did a remake on them because of this trend. Now theirs shoots stills also, but they've moved way beyond HD and work in the 2K to 8K image size range. They even have a 28K camera in the works, though I have no idea what you could do with that after you shoot images the size of a house.

But that's the trend, the fusion of still photo controls and sensibility, with the philosophy of film, in the body of a video camera. You end up in Final Cut Pro cutting your video that looks like film shot with a photo camera. That's real convergence. So what we see for the future is we're going to work like we've always wanted to, but at much higher resolutions in the field and in the edit room and then distribute on some kind of Blu-Ray disk format. Remember what Steve Jobs said about Blu-Ray – it's a big box of pain (or was it hurt)(turns out it was a bag, not a box). So we have still yet another frontier to cross before all of this is settled in and we're back to working in a way we will call usual.

gunther

Red Camera – Red-Dot: Backing Into the Future

Hi, we're the people who run the media labs in the basement of the Hampshire College library. You seldom see us, in fact you may never have been in the labs at all, so you'll really never have seen us. That's too bad. We're here to help Hampshire students using media find their way. We don't care what your concentration is. We don't care what you're making. We don't even charge you a lab fee. We only want you to be able to do your work (it's all about the work) – and maybe push you a little in a couple of directions you might not have though of, but in the end we'll back off and let you do your thing.

I'm back to trying out working in this form of communication, not just as a blog, but specifically using Google's Blogger software. Our "official" Hampshire web pages have languished a little due to the fact the the web application, Red-Dot, hasn't been the easiest software to run. In fact we gave up on it over the summer and haven't been back since. I've found that it's not unusual for "enterprise" software to be intrinsically hard to use and I have the option that it all basically sucks. While that may seem a little harsh my normal day is spent using some of the best software in the world so it's hard to come down to the level of corporate enterprise software that has a bad time built into it. Life's too short to use lame software.

So what's the point of all of this? I'm trying to show you what we have to offer, what my thinking is, where we're going and also let you talk back and tell me if I'm wrong about stuff and find out what you're thinking about too.

So what's hot currently? Well, the running joke has been our raffle on when the first Hampshire student will shoot a Division III project using a Red Camera – a year from now, two years? It turns out it's this semester – it's now. Some joke huh? That's what we're experiencing. The realities are appearing faster than our theorizing, faster than what we would expect in this ongoing transition from older forms into the no-tape, ultra-high-definition, progressive, 24 fps, electron cinematography world. Yes, the world of media is stranger than we know, but maybe you are too.

gunther