Digital Cinematography

Welcome to the first blog post for Tapeless Video.

This is an exciting time for Digital Cinematography. Over the last couple of years RED Digital Cinema has proven that an independent company can do what has never been done before - compete with the well established mega-sized companies. Soon they'll be coming out with the much anticipated Scarlet and Epic cameras.

But this is just the beginning of independent digital cinema camera production. RED has shown that it is possible, and thus has paved the way for others to do the same. An upstart company in Valencia, Spain, called Cineraw, is about to unleash Sparta. And if that's not enough, another company out of Greece is coming out sometime soon with Drama. (there's no website yet for this camera, but you can find some very educational posts here by the producer of this camera.) Both these cameras are very similar in that they both use 2/3 inch CCDs, and record 1920x1080. Sparta will record to the ProRes 4:4:4 format, whereas Drama will be uncompressed.

You may be wondering, what's so great about 2./3 inch and 2k when RED's sensors start at that, and go quite a bit bigger, with much more resolution. It may sound like they're going backwards, but not when you consider that one will be uncompressed, and the other will be ProRes. Also, if 2/3 inch and 2k were too small, then why did Michael Mann choose the Sony F23 to shoot Public Enemies? That camera is 2/3 at 2k, and he said that "the F23 was extremely sharp, probably a bit sharper than film itself". I think you need to take into account the law of diminishing return. In other words, what is the highest resolution you can see on a screen? Also, more resolution on a chip means smaller pixels which means less light gathered at low light levels.

But in any case, each camera has its strengths and weaknesses. I love the RED cameras, but I think and hope Sparta and Drama will also find their niche in the world of digital cinematography. But if you look over the horizon a little bit further, there is something new called open source cinema.